Alas Babylon
A story of a group of people who rely on their own courage and ingenuity to survive in a town which escaped nuclear bombing.
Stats for nerds
18recommend
26mentions
24people
2009–2026years
73% recommend23% neutral4% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank is another great book in a similar vein.
- Prisoner's Dilemma. Effectively the start of the war in Alas, Babylon. Great book about the communities that remain after nuclear war.
- Another fantastic book in this genre is "Alas, Babylon" by Pat Frank.
- I'm Gen X, which means that we were, as a group, routinely traumatized as kids with killer bees, acid rain, a frank exchange of nuclear warheads ... suddenly sex was death and we weren't sure of the parameters. But the nukes were always in the background and when you review the media of the period it was like seeing the same guy in the background of different movies, always looking at the camera.
I had read Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank, really the prototype of this kind of thing, about a limited nuclear event and what would happen. There's a great bit:
On the ninth day after The Day, Lavinia McGovern died. This, too, had been inevitable ever since the lights went out and the refrigeration ceased. Since Lavinia McGovern suffered from diabetes, insulin had kept her alive. Without refrigeration, insulin deteriorated rapidly. Not only Lavinia, but all diabetics in Fort Repose, dependent on insulin, died at about the same period as the drug lost its potency.
Now, insulin is much more shelf-stable, but you get the idea. I was struck. So imagine a tween who had drawn up lists of "who had what," where we were going to meet, and general plans for your limited nuclear war. I did have the relatively bright idea of trekking to this particularly cold and hidden spring as a kind of natural refrigerator for wrapped food and batteries and the like. All of that eventually faded after the Berlin Wall came down.
I still think about it, from time to time, as "What would I be good for besides slave labor?" They made us get pretty handy with electronics for my degree and the rest of my sciences were well-rounded with chemistry and some very basic civil engineering. I ran amok in TechShop before they folded, so the shop stuff I can get by with to some degree.
In terms of computing's value, I think the two biggest areas of overlooked utility would be packet radio for a low-bandwidth internet, and having the foresight to have offline copies of Wikipedia, scans of the Gingery books, and so forth, connected up to a PC with line conditioned solar power. With dozens of the same PC or laptop, because those parts wear out. Otherwise, yes, IT probably won't be a big part of your average scavenger horde hellbent on reenacting parts of The Road Warrior.
- -Demon Haunted World A Candle In The Dark - Carl Sagan I enjoy his writing in general, but this one talks a lot about being a skeptic and critical thinking which is paraphrasing strongly.
-The Pillars Of The Earth - Ken Follett. Could not stop thinking about it when I wasn't reading it and was pretty bummed when it was over. Its about a cathedral being built in the 1100's. My most favorite book this year and probably ever.
-The Knowledge - Lewis Dartnell If all people were to suddenly disappear leaving the current world infrastructure still in place, how you could go about restarting civilization. Its more a manual than a story, but I enjoyed learning how so many different things work.
-Alas Babylon Pat Frank - A story about a family and some friends and how they survive in Florida after a nuclear attack on the US.
- If I must pick one without knowing why, I would likely pick Ark by Stephen Baxter.
The story is hard sci-fi and is, very broadly, about a multigenerational spaceship which travels across the stars following a planet-scale catastrophe. The writing and the world building are amazing and i've already read it probably a dozen times. I vaguely suspect if I can only have one book forever, some shit has gone down and I'd want a book like this.
Ark is actually the 2nd book in an unfinished trilogy, Flood precedes it and is a really great read.
Baxter's NASA Trilogy (Voyage/Titan/Moonseed) also deals with similarly isolated individuals and is a great read, though the ending is... trippy.
The Sky So Big and Black is also a book I can infinitely re-read. There's a pervasive sadness to the book which I enjoy. It's the fourth book in a quadriligoy but the first four are neither required nor are they as good as the final installment.
I'll also throw out Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank. It's a great read and depicts another scenario where shit has gone down and perhaps you're left with one book. The book talks about the tragedy of what would happen after the fall of civilization but also talks about (despite loss) people could be happier with a slower simpler life, which is deeply ironic considering it was published in 1959.
