Nuclear Holocausts: Atomic War in Fiction
Nuclear Holocausts Bibliography: L
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Table of Contents
La Tourette, Aileen. Cry Wolf. London: Virago, 1986.
After a long nuclear winter, the whole Earth is devastated, and the climate
permanently warmed. The only flower left is the daisy. The woman who founded the
new society and its religion decides to tell her followers the true story of the
past before she dies, which she has, until now, concealed. It transpires that
one of her listeners had a mother who was killed at the Greenham Common women's
anti-nuclear encampment during an alert. She tells how the women, despairing of
conventional methods of protest, decided to become modern Scheherazades,
infiltrating the missile command bunkers and beguiling the soldiers there with
tales designed to prevent them from launching their weapons on the appointed
day. Their plot is foiled, and war breaks out after all. The women then become
involved with a group of strangely mutated children who are the result of a
genetic experiment. At the end of the novel, the climate changes again, with
the return of snow to the Earth symbolizing rebirth and healing. Ponderous
whimsy.
Laidlaw, Marc. Dad's Nuke . New York: Donald I. Fine, 1985. London: Gollancz, 1986.
A satirical fantasy about an artificial city in which neighbors arm themselves against each other with powerful weapons. At the end of the novel a home-made nuclear weapon is set off.
Lamm, Richard D. "Excerpt from A History of the Twentieth Century" By Cornelius Barnes, Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 2010. In Earl W. Foell and Richard A. Nenneman, eds. How Peace Came to the World. Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1986.
An entry in a contest sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor
explaining how world peace could be established, written by the governor of
Colorado. A computer malfunction accidentally begins a nuclear war between India
and Pakistan, causing a mild three-year-long nuclear winter and damage to the
ozone layer. In revulsion, the nations of the world abandon war and enter an
era of peace.
Lange, Oliver [pseud.]. Vandenberg. New York: Stein & Day, 197l. New York: Bantam:
1972. London: Peter Davies, 197l. London: Panther, 1980.
Russia conquers
and occupies the United States using a mystery weapon, and takes over much of
the rest of the world as well. Britain has been subdued "after a brief
thermonuclear flurry"--the only reference to nuclear weapons actually
having been used. Remarkable for its understated tone, the novel assumes that
most Americans are cowardly, passive conformists who will adjust rapidly to a
less than savage occupation, and it mocks hippies, militant blacks, and
survivalists alike. It consists of the story of a misfit American who rebels,
resists brainwashing, escapes from prison, and returns to blast open the walls of his former place of confinement.
Langford, David. "Notes for a Newer Testament." In Janet Morris, ed. Afterwar. New York: Baen, 1985.
Long after the Fall, the human lifespan averages thirty-five. Cancer and plague are common. Pillaging hordes of barbarians roam the landscape. A group of them finds an old cruise missile, but when they attempt to move it an orbiting satellite detects th e motion and blasts it with a beam.
Lanham, Edwin. The Clock at 8:16. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1970.
A young medic on leave from the Vietnam War falls in love with the sister
of a Japanese man with whom he has been corresponding. Because the siblings are
both Hibakusha--atomic bomb victims (the brother is terribly
disfigured)--Hiroshima stands between them. The differences which separate
Americans and Japanese are sensitively handled, but they are overcome by love.
The novel ends with the death of the American in combat. A superior treatment
of the theme of Edita Morris's novels.
Lanier, Sterling E. Hiero's Journey. Radnor, Pa.: Chilton, 1973.
Sequel: The Unforsaken Hiero.
Five thousand years after the atomic war, the world is still semibarbaric,
but the destruction of civilization is somewhat compensated for by the
proliferation of magic. The setting is used primarily to justify a Tolkienesque
quest story involving telepathy. Since pure evil forces have evolved in the
transformed world, all ambiguity is removed from killing. A monster is
destroyed by causing an intact missile to self-destruct. Hiero remarks,
"What a race of men! After five thousand years their death still works!"
___ . The
Unforsaken Hiero. New York: Del Rey, 1983.
Sequel to Hiero's Journey.
Hiero battles the vile Unclean
Masters with the aid of mutated cat-people, gigantic intelligent beavers, and a
wise old snail. The possibility of a further sequel is strongly implied.
Lansdale, Joe R. "Tight Little Stitches in a Dead Man's Back." In John Macloy, ed. Nukes: Four Horror Writers on the Ultimate Horror. Baltimore: Macloy, 1986.
The narrator, who worked at a missile base, atones for his responsibility
in creating the holocaust which killed his daughter as his wife tattoos a
mushroom cloud with the girl's face in it on his back. He remembers the horrors
experienced by those who lived in a deep shelter for twenty years. They live in
a lighthouse by a dried-up ocean where mutated whales walk across the sea floor.
Carnivorous rose vines kill the wife, and the narrator plans to use the same
vines to commit suicide.
Laski,
Marghanita. The Offshore Island: A Play in Three Acts. London: Cresset, 1959. London: Mayfair, 1961.
Ten
years after a nuclear war began an isolated family consisting of a mother and
her teenaged son and daughter survive in a tiny uncontaminated pocket of land
in England. They have only one family as neighbors, the man of which comes over
frequently to make love with the mother. She has become pregnant three times
and miscarried, presumably because of radiation exposure. Pigs are constantly
being born with three heads. The daughter yearns to make love, and is ready to
sleep even with her brother, but he rejects the idea. At the end of Act I,
American soldiers arrive and inform them that most of Europe is radioactive and
that they are among rare survivors referred to as "CPs"--Contaminated
Persons. They also tell the family that the war is still going on, and that the
U.S. and USSR were careful to use only conventional weapons on each other,
reserving atomic weapons for the smaller countries. During a truce, a Russian
party on a similar search expedition arrives, and the two commanding officers
muse over how the isolated survivors they discover want to be left alone in
peace when they discover what the outside world is like. Finally, it is
revealed that the family is to be evacuated to labor camps in the U.S. and
sterilized; their farm will be bombed into uselessness to prevent it falling
into enemy hands. Just before they are ready to depart, the son, trying to
conceal the existence of his mother's lover, implies that he has been making
love with her himself. The outraged American officer kills him, and the mother
and daughter elect to stay and die under the bomb about to hit their farm
rather than to accept the degraded form of exile they are offered. Unusual in
its strongly pacifist views, the story was aired in a shortened version by BBC
radio. According to the author, it was written in 1954.
Laumer, Keith. Bolo:
The Annals of the Dinochrome Brigade. New
York: Berkley/Putnam, 1976. New York: Berkley, 1984.
Consists of seven
linked stories only two of which involve nuclear weapons. Stories like these
which glorify military virtues seldom involve nuclear weapons, perhaps because
atomic weaponry is too overwhelmingly powerful to suit the desired human scale.
See Leonard G. Heldreth, "In Search of the Ultimate Weapon: The Fighting
Machine in Science Fiction Novels and Films," in Thomas P. Dunn and
Richard D. Erlich, eds. The Mechanical God: Machines in Science
Fiction (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1982).
"Field Test." Astounding March 1976.
Bazooka-like nuclear weapons are used in a war in
which a Bolo fighting machine sacrifices itself heroically "for the honor
of the regiment."
"The Last Command" (Analog, January 1967). Also in John W. Campbell, Jr., ed. Analog
7. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1970. Also
in Harry Harrison and Brian Aldiss, eds. Best SF: 67. New York: Berkley, 1968. Also in Leo P. Kelley, ed. Themes
in Science Fiction: A Journey Into Wonder.
New York: McGraw-Hill, 1972.
An aged veteran of a limited nuclear war
sacrifices his life to stop an accidentally reanimated battle machine from
running amok. Very reminiscent of Robert A. Heinlein's "The Long
Watch" (American Legion Magazine, December 1949) or "The Green Hills of Earth" (Saturday
Evening Post, February 1947).
Lawrence, Louise. Children of the Dust. New York: Harper & Row, 1985.
This youth-oriented novel is divided into three parts. In Part One, set in the present, vividly depicts the struggles of a young woman to save her three stepchildren from the fallout of a nuclear war as they create a makeshift shelter in their home. The difficulties of controlling young children in such a situation have never been more convincingly portrayed. After the woman commits suicide, the oldest girl delivers the only healthy child to a survivalist refuge and kills herself and her brother as nuclear winter comes on. Part Two depicts the struggle between the military dictators who rule a subterranean shelter and the few surviving surface-dwellers, many of whom are mutants. In Part Three, telepathic mutants whose furry bodies are an adaptation to the destruction of the ozone layer are replacing humanity. The mode of t he novel shifts strikingly in this last section from grimly realistic to fantastic. Radiation-induced cancer is depicted.
Leiber,
Fritz. "Appointment in Tomorrow" (as "Poor Superman," Galaxy, June 1951). In E. F. Bleiler and T. E. Dikty, eds. The
Best Science-Fiction Stories: 1952. New
York: Fell, 1952. Rpt. as The Best Science Fiction Stories: Third
Series. London: Grayson, 1953.
After
World War III, fakery is used to trick the antiscientific public into accepting
the gifts of science.
___ . "A Bad Day for Sales" (Galaxy, July 1953). In Frederik Pohl, ed. Shadow
of Tomorrow. New York: PermaBooks, 1953. Also
in E. F., Bleiler, and T. E. Dikty, eds. The Best Science-Fiction
Stories: 1954. New York: Fell, 1954. As The
Best Science-Fiction Stories: Fifth Series.
London: Grayson, 1956. Also in H. L. Gold, ed. Second Galaxy Reader
of Science Fiction. New York: Crown, 1954.
Also in H. L. Gold, ed. Galaxy Science Fiction Omnibus. London: Grayson, 1955. Also in Isaac Asimov and Groff
Conklin, eds. Fifty Short Science Fiction Tales. New York: Collier, 1963. Also in Robert Silverberg,
ed. Men and Machines: Ten Stories of Science Fiction. Des Moines, Iowa: Meredith, 1968. Also in Fred
Obrecht, ed. Science Fiction and Fantasy. Woodbury, N.Y.: Barron's, 1977. Also in Martin H. Greenberg and Joseph
D. Olander, eds. Science Fiction of the 50's. New York: Avon, 1979. Also in Frederik Pohl, Martin
H. Greenberg and Joseph D. Olander, eds. Galaxy: Thirty Years of
Innovative Science Fiction. New York:
Playboy, 1980. Rpt. in two volumes. New York: Playboy, 1981. Story is in Volume
1. Also in Isaac Asimov, Martin H. Greenberg and Charles G. Waugh, eds. Thinking
Machines. Milwaukee: Raintree, 1981. Also
in Robert Silverberg, ed. The Arbor House Treasury of Science Fiction
Masterpieces. New York: Arbor House, 1983.
The world's first fully mobile sales robot finds potential customers
scarce after a nuclear bomb hits the city. He weighs a little girl who is
begging for her mother, then goes off "to peddle Poppy Pop to the members
of a rescue squad which had just come around the corner, more robotlike in
their asbestos suits than he in his metal skin."
___ . "Coming
Attraction" (Galaxy,
November 1950). In A Pail of Air.
New York: Ballantine, 1964 Also in H. L. Gold, ed. Galaxy Reader of
Science Fiction. New York: Crown, 1952.
Also in Sam Moskowitz, ed. Modern Masterpieces of Science Fiction. New York: World, 1965. Also in Robert Silverberg,
ed. Science Fiction Hall of Fame,.
Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1970. Donald L. Lawler, ed.: Approaches
to Science Fiction. New York: Houghton
Mifflin, 1978. Also in Patricia S. Warrick, Martin H. Greenberg and Harvey A.
Katz, eds. Science Fiction: Contemporary Mythology--The SFWA-SFRA
Anthology. New York: Harper & Row,
1978. Also in James E. Gunn, ed. The Road to Science Fiction #3: From
Heinlein to Here. New York: Mentor, 1979.
Also in Frederik Pohl, Martin H. Greenberg and Joseph D. Olander, eds. Galaxy:
Thirty Years of Innovative Science Fiction.
New York: Playboy, 1980. Rpt. in two volumes. New York: Playboy, 1981. Story is
in Volume 1.
In a cruel, decadent post-World War III world, preparing for
World War IV, nothing seems to have been learned. The story deals with the
sadomasochistic relationship between a prostitute and a pimp. Clothing styles
are influenced by antiradiation protective clothing worn during the last war. A
young woman is afraid to see the moon because she knows there are nuclear
missiles based on it.
___ . Destiny Times Three (Astounding, March, April 1945). New York: Galaxy, 1957. Also in Martin Greenberg,
ed. Five Science Fiction Novels.
New York: Gnome, 1952. Bound with Norman Spinrad, Riding the Torch, in Binary Star #1. New York: Dell, 1978.
Parallel world story considering various alternatives toward the control and use of "subtronic" weapons. [More]
___ . "The Foxholes of Mars" (Thrilling Wonder Stories, June
1952). In A Pail of Air. New
York: Ballantine, 1964. Also in Judith Merril, ed. Beyond Human Ken. New York: Random House, 1952 (omitted from Bantam and
Grayson versions). Also in James Sallis, ed. The War Book. London: Hart-Davis, 1969.
A meditation on the
stupidity and inevitability of war told from the point of view of a soldier
fighting among alien creatures on Mars in a conflict involving nuclear bombs.
___ . Gather, Darkness! (Astounding, May, June, July 1943). New York: Pellegrini &
Cudahy, 1950. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1951. New York: Berkley, 1962.
Boston: G. K. Hall, 1980. Manchester: Four Square, 1966.
A well-known
novel of the struggle of "witches" to overthrow the ruling
priesthood, both sides using science in the guise of magic. Although the story
is set in the wake of a devastating war, the weapons used are not specified.
However, the uprising results in the use of "atomic batteries."
___ . "The Last Letter" (Galaxy, June 1958). In A Pail of Air. New York: Ballantine 1964. Also in The
Worlds of Fritz Leiber. New York: Ace,
1976. Also in H. L. Gold, ed. The Fifth Galaxy Reader. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1961. New York: Pocket
Books, 1963.
A satire on the proliferation of junk mail. In the
supermechanized postholocaust Atomic Cave Era, the sending of a single
handwritten love letter disrupts the entire postal system and nearly triggers a
war.
___ . "The Moon Is Green" (Galaxy, April 1952). In The Secret Songs. London: Hart-Davis, 1968. In E. F. Bleiler and T. E.
Dikty, eds. The Best Science-Fiction Stories: 1953. New York: Fell, 1953. Rpt. as The Best
Science Fiction Stories: Fourth Series.
London: Grayson, 1955. Also in E. F. Bleiler and T. E. Dikty, eds.: Frontiers
in Space. New York: Bantam, 1955.
A
couple has been living in a shelter for two years after a prolonged cobalt bomb
war has made life aboveground unsafe. A stranger tells the woman of wonders of
surface life, but he turns out to be a liar, immune to radioactivity. She
refuses to believe this and runs away. The story is well told.
___. The
Night of the Wolf. New York: Ballantine,
1966. London: Sphere, 1976.
Consists of four stories, retitled. Two deal
with nuclear war:
nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;"The Lone Wolf" (originally "The
Creature from Cleveland Depths," Galaxy, December 1962).
A silly tale of inventors in an underground society of the future of
continuous nuclear war. Assumes continuing technological development and
merchandising during the war. The population saddles itself with
"ticklers," electronic masters which take over. nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;"The
Wolf Pair" (originally "The Night of the Long Knives," Amazing, January 1960). A much more interesting story,
this begins in the desert where "Deathlanders" who can sense
radioactivity survive, leading a life motivated solely by the lust for murder
and sex. In a fine opening scene, a man and woman meet and they warily disarm
and disrobe for sex. The pair murders an old man who has helped to organize
Assassins Anonymous (for people who want to give up murder) and seize his
antigravity ship. They are taken to the "civilized sector," then find
themselves plunged into a war involving new technology created by surviving
military nuclear project scientists. The narrator admits that he was one of
those who "pushed the button," and finds relief in confession. The
conclusion offers muted hope as the pair join the growing Assassins Anonymous.
[
___. A Specter Is Haunting Texas. New York: DAW, 1968. New York: Walker, 1969.
In this farcical
postholocaust thriller, North America has been taken over by hormonally induced
giant Texans.
Leigh, Steven. Flamestones. In Janet Morris, ed. Afterwar. New York: Baen, 1985.
Set after the May 15 Mistake, when New York, Moscow, and Tel Aviv had all died in radioactive fire. Civilization continues, but with food shortages, mounting civil disorders, and worsening international tensions. An old man hunting mysterious flamestones in this hills witnesses a nuclear explosion which signals the final cataclysm. Strange new people arrive to dominate the postholocaust world. There is a poetic allusion to the nuclear winter theory: the winter would have come early on wings of ash.
Leinster, Murray. See under Jenkins.
Lem, Stanislaw. Fiasco. Trans. Michael Kandel. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987. Originally appeared in Polish as Fiasko, 1986.
An interstellar expedition from Earth destroys the civilization it is trying to contact. A brilliant satire dealing heavily with SDI and deterrence theory, reminiscent of his classic Solaris.
Lengyel, Cornel [Adam]. Eden,
Inc. Los Angeles: Fantasy Publishers, 1952.
Unavailable for review. See Segal.
Lessing, Doris. The
Four-Gated City. London: MacGibbon &
Kee, 1969. London: Panther, 1972. New York: Knopf, 1969. New York: Bantam,
1970.
The appendix of this novel represents Lessing's debut in the
writing of science fiction. Among other rumors in the book, it is said that a
Chinese pilot has destroyed Britain by crashing with nuclear weapons stolen
from Aldermaston (target of famous antinuclear protest marches). Although the
culture she has depicted in the novel has been deteriorating throughout the
sixties, this abrupt culmination in apocalyptic destruction is quite
unexpected. Survivors from the cast of characters live a primitive life on an
island off of Scotland. Children evolve strange talents. The disaster remains
vague, seemingly more a metaphor for an apocalyptic mood than a serious vision
of reality.
Lethem, Jonathan. Amnesia Moon. New York: Harcourt, 1995.
This surrealistic novel opens in a stereotypically post-nuclear world, complete with mutants; but it soon transpires that although a major catastrophe has struck the world, people in different regions have experienced different catastrophes, and all of this seems to be taking place within their minds.
Life, Editors
of. "The 36-Hour War." Life, November 1945.
Nine pages of pictures depict an imaginary
nuclear attack on the U.S., launched by rocket, with a brief text based on the
projections of General Henry H. Arnold. An antimissile missile is shown, an
underground lauching site and factory, and the ruins of New York. The text
asserts that the U.S. wins the war although forty million Americans die.
Lightner,
A[lice] M[ary]. The Day of the Drones. New York: Norton, 1969. New York: Bantam, 1970.
A juvenile novel
with a premise strikingly reminiscent of Margot Bennett's The Long
Way Back. In the heart of
"Afria," a tribe of blacks who survived the Disaster maintains a
culture based on the prohibition of scientific knowledge and progress and
enforcement of strict eugenic laws against light-skinned babies (whiteness and
science being held responsible for the holocaust five hundred years earlier).
They live in an isolated safe zone, surrounded by radioactive deserts. The protagonists
are a young girl and her brilliant but unfortunately light-skinned male friend.
When he shoots a duck with a strange cord tied around its leg, the tribal
leaders become convinced that another group of humans must have survived
elsewhere, and an expedition including the two young friends is sent north by
solar-powered helicopter. They eventually reach England, where they find a
tribe which herds bees and which models its structure after the insects: women
do all the work, men are treated as lazy drones who are killed when they rebel
or fail to engender healthy progeny. (In contrast, men and women are equal in
Afria.) A man they save from execution by bee sting thinks they are gods.
Amazed by their tale of flying through the air, he tells them the traditional
"story about the Rights": "You see, they weren't
right. . . . they were wrong. Only the bees can fly. And of
course the birds. For men to fly is against the gods, and when these two
brothers flew, it brought death and destruction from the gods until they were
all dead." (Compare with Edmund Cooper, The Cloud Walker.) As in several other works, radiation seems to have
induced mutations tending toward gigantism: huge spiders and glow worms abound
as well as bees (no land animals except birds and insects survive). The major
link between the cultures of the two tribes is Shakespeare, and the only relic
the heroine succeeds in bringing back from the tribal treasure cave is a
precious copy of his collected works. The young man is killed defending the others;
but the girl takes the blond, blue-eyed savage she has learned to love home
with her, planning to return some day to collect more books. The novel has a
suspended ending: it is uncertain whether her tribe will accept the stranger.
Like The Long Way Back, this is a
parable of racism, and like many of these works, critical of the conservative
religious beliefs which prevent scientific and technological progress.
Linaweaver, Brad. Moon of Ice. New York: Arbor House, 1988. London: Grafton, 1989.
An alternate history novel mostly narrated by Goebbel's daughter in which Hitler developed the atomic bomb and used it to win World War II. There are numerous references to the use of atomic weapons during the war, but the novel focuses on Nazi politics rather than nuclear issues.
Linebarger,
Paul. See Smith, Cordwainer.
Livesey, Eric M. The Desolate Land. London: Digit, 1964. A high-atmospheric bomb test by the U.S.
creates a radioactive belt which cuts off and then destroys most life in the
Northern Hemisphere. Monsters rapidly evolve in the radioactive zone, and
plague and chaos spread. The radioactivity is spread by plant life growing in
the zone. America uses an atomic bomb to prevent Latin American refugees from
crossing the Mexican border, in contrast with the British, who hospitably
welcome all comers to sanctuary in the Hebrides. A few tens of thousands survive
in Arctic refuges until the radioactivity dies down. The largely depopulated
North makes contact with the apparently unaffected Southern Hemisphere. The
novel ends with a love story and with plans to rebuild. It is emphasized that
the British had warned the Americans about the possible meteorological effects
of high-atmospheric testing, but had been ignored.
Ljoka, Dan. Shelter. New York: Manor, 1973.
A hapless male NASA
astronomer is trapped in a fallout shelter with twenty-one women when the Russians
explode nuclear bombs planted all over the U.S. A second attack, caused by
China, dooms the world. Our hero is brutalized and forced to impregnate his
companions by a vicious washerwoman, but he eventually kills her. Another plot
involves the building of fallout shelters in New Zealand, and the vicious
struggles and mob violence that result from the selection of a minority of the
population to survive. In the end, everyone dies, but an epilogue states that
one hundred million years later, a newly evolved being struggles from the sea
to begin evolution anew.
Logsdon, Syd. A Fond Farewell to Dying
(one portion published in Galaxy as "To Not Go Gently," 1978). New York: Pocket Books, 198l.
After a
nuclear bombardment of the western coast of the United States has split
California along the fault line and various other forms of atomic havoc have
been wreaked on the Earth, the polar caps melt and the sea level rises,
creating a drastically altered world. In 2202, two centuries after the war,
most of humanity has been sterilized. India is the only center of civilization
left in the world, but it is engaged in a sometimes hot, sometimes cold war
with the newly formed Muslim nation of Medina. The main focus of the story is
on a series of experiments with transferring people's minds into freshly cloned
copies of their bodies in order to prolong life indefinitely. Logsdon does not
really deal with the obvious point that strikes one about all such schemes:
does not the transfer of thoughts into a computer and their reimposition on a
new brain involve a break of continuity in consciousness such that the original
person experiences death and what survives is a replica--not the original? In a
world where fertility is fragile and birth defects common (the mutants have
become a new class of untouchables), the idea of a longer lifespan has great
appeal. To the protagonist's Hindu lover, however, his research is a
blasphemous parody of the traditional doctrine of reincarnation. Her moral
qualms are sensitively treated, but in the end science--as usual--prevails. The
picture is a complex one, however, for the protagonist is motivated not by
idealism, but by a personal terror of death. He is shown as being much less
thoughtful and compassionate than his lover, although he does finally succeed
in accomplishing reincarnation. He had been brought up in a fiercely judgmental
Protestantism which he has rejected, partly on the grounds that it was
difficult to be impressed by the Apocalypse in Revelation when one lived in the
aftermath of a nuclear war. In contrast, Hinduism is presented as adaptive,
complex enough to maintain its relevance in the transformed world, and tolerant
of adulterous promiscuity as a means of enhancing conception. At any rate, the
frenzy to reproduce and prolong life at any cost is logically related to the
near annihilation of the human race.
Although the scientific schemes of the protagonist
succeed in the end, Logsdon displays great interest in and sensitivity to
Indian culture. The failures of the Indian government to live up to the
heritage of Gandhi are reflected in the destructive war carried on between
India and Medina. In common with some other novelists, Logsdon envisions atomic
power--in the form of fusion--as a prime source of energy in the post-nuclear
war age. A Fond Farewell to Dying
is an interesting work on several accounts, not the least of which is its vivid
cast of characters. The sensitivity with which it explores various moral issues
is unusual. The renewed hostilities between Muslim and Hindu seem to indicate
that the human race has not learned much from the experience of the holocaust.
Shrunk to a fraction of its size, struggling to survive, humanity will still
find ways to rend itself asunder.
Long, Frank B[elknap]. "Collector's
Item," Astounding, October
1947.
A recording machine sent six hundred years into the future brings
back news of the invention of atomic beam weapons which can pierce the defense
screens invented in 1953, and which until then have prevented war. The inventor
is accidentally killed before he can create the screens. Images of the
far-future holocaust are brought back to the present. Hiroshima and Bikini are
referred to.
___. "Guest in the House" (Astounding, March 1946). In Rim of the Unknown. Sauk City, Wisc.: Arkham House, 1972. Also in August
Derleth, ed. Strange Ports of Call.
New York: Pellegrini & Cudahy, 1948.
A house is accidentally carried
half a million years into the future where its occupants must deal with an
unpleasant investigator of the secret of time travel who tells them that a
Great Holocaust ended the First Atomic Age to which they belong. He and his
like are mutations produced by the resultant radiation, but he is defeated by
the nine-year-old son of the family, himself a brilliant mutant thanks to
radiation from Los Alamos.
Lovejoy, Jack. A Vision of Beasts,
Book l: Creation Descending. New York: TOR,
1984.
Descendants of scientists fight degenerate mutant "gunks"
in the cave-shelter community of Saluston. The first line of the book is:
"The mysterious cataclysm may not actually have begun as a war--at least
not a war in the ordinary sense--but in the end it had been vastly more
devastating."
___. A Vision of Beasts, Book 2: The Second
Kingdom. New York: TOR, 1984.
The
humans flee Saluston and the vicious gunks, avoiding poisonous "dead
zones," in quest of a place of refuge. They encounter mutated beasts and
plants. California has fallen into the sea and become a chain of islands. In
the third volume, published in 1985, A Vision of Beasts, Book 3: The
Brotherhood of Diablo, the cataclysm is
finally explained in chapter 9 as having been a war perhaps triggered by
seismic activity setting off leaking canisters of radioactive waste on the sea
floor. The mutations may have been caused by DNA research gone wrong. The
Earth's magnetic field has collapsed and reversed, exposing the planet to
radiation.
Lovins, Amory B., L. Hunter Lovins, and Patrick O'Heffernan. See O'Heffernan.
Lowndes, Robert W., and James
Blish. See under Blish.
Ludlum, Robert. See Harris, Brian.
Lunan, Duncan. The Day and the Hour. in J. E. Pournelle and John F. Carr, eds. There Will Be War, Volume V: Warrior. New York: Tor, 1986.
Two centuries after World War III, the atmosphere is still clouded with dust. Battlefield tactical nuclear weapons are being used by doughty Scots to defeat the Soviet occupiers of Britain. The story features a gun whose shells can travel backward in time.
Lyons, Victor S. The
Unconquerable Survivor of 2055 A.D. New
York: Exposition, 1973.
A mawkish and gory account of the complete
destruction of Washington D. C. and its surrounding territory by atomic bombs.
The narrator is a sixty-year-old man who wanders grieving through ruins, heaps
of rotting corpses, and hordes of insects. His laments at being the sole survivor
cease only at death when it is quite arbitrarily stated that the previous
scenes of appalling destruction have been an illusion created by the army to
deceive the enemy.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P
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