Terrified at her torment, they will stand off and cry: Woe! Woe to you, great city, you mighty city of Babylon! In one hour your doom has come!-The Book of Revelation 18:10[Y]esterday was a past period in history, with laws and rules archaic as ancient Romes. Today the rules had changed, just as Roman law gave way to atavistic barbarism as the empire fell to Hun and Goth. Today a man saved himself and his family and to hell with everyone else-Pat Frank, Alas, BabylonWe cant do this. Every man for himself is not going to workIf we cant live together, were going to die alone.-Matthew Fox as Jack Shepherd, Lost (Season 1, Episode 5)When I picked up Pat Franks Alas, Babylon, I didn't have super high hopes for its quality. It was curiosity, mostly, that led me to it. The novel, published in 1959, tells the story of the Florida town of Fort Repose, which is spared a direct hit during a nuclear war, and must then survive the aftermath. (Fans of the short-lived television series Jericho will find this setting familiar). As someone with an interest in the Cold War, as well as nuclear arms and strategy, Alas, Babylon promised to provide some insights into the contemporary thoughts and fears of people living through that period. Its one thing to read a nonfiction volume on the evolving atomic arsenals, strategies, and diplomatic brinkmanship of the United States and Soviet Union. Its another thing entirely to see how those realities manifest themselves within ordinary citizens otherwise powerless and forgotten against a vast geopolitical backdrop. Maybe it was the managed expectations, but I was genuinely surprised at how much I liked it, and on how many levels. Roughly the first hundred pages of Alas, Babylon are devoted to the lead-up to war, which I found fascinating. Ive read my share of nuclear war novels, and many of them skip this part entirely. Books such as Cormac McCarthys The Road or William Brinkleys The Last Ship focus almost entirely on the aftermath of war, referring to precipitating incidents only elliptically, if at all. Frank uses a different tactic. He shows us life in small Fort Repose, introducing us to a handful of characters we will get to know under duress. Meanwhile, he occasionally breaks away to the Mediterranean or Strategic Air Command to give us fleeting images of the rising tension between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. Its arguable, I suppose, whether Frank needed to devote nearly one-third of this relatively short novel (just 316 pages) to setting up a war we know is going to happen. I dont agree with that position. There is a difference, as Hitchcock would agree, between surprise and suspense. No, the outbreak of nuclear war is not a surprise. However, there is still suspense to be had, even though we know whats coming. Frank does a good job of presenting the creeping dread that must have been palpable during events such as the Cuban Missile Crisis (still in the future, when this was published). He demonstrates how helpless people must have felt in the face of such a catastrophe. Like many people, I have control issues. Can you imagine the desperation youd feel if men youd never met, in locations youd never been, for reasons entirely unknown to you, were making decisions that might end the world? Frank imagines it, and its effective. Once the bombs start falling and the missiles flying, the central character, a military veteran named Randolph Bragg, has a back row seat to the end times (it should go without saying that those with a front row seat were incinerated): A stark white flash enveloped their world. Randy felt the heat on his neck. Peyton [Randyniece] cried out and covered her face with her hands. In the southwest, in the direction of Tampa, St. Petersburg, and Sarasota, another unnatural sun was born, much larger and infinitely fiercer than the sun in the eastA thick red pillar erected itself in the southwest, its base the unnatural sun. The top of the pillar billowed outward. This time, the mushroom was there. There was no sound except Peytons whimpering. Her fists were pressed into her eyes. A bird plunged against the screen and dropped to earth, trailed by drifting feathers. Within the pillar and the cloud, fantastic colors played. Red changed to orange, glowed white, became red again. Green and purple ropes twisted upward through the pillar and spread tentacles through the cloud. The gaudy mushroom enlarged with incredible speed, angry, poisonous, malignant. It grew until the mushrooms rim looked like the leading edge of an approaching weather front, black, purple, orange, green, a cancerous man-created line squallAfter the attack, Frank writes, civilization in Fort Repose retreated a hundred years: When nuclear fireballs crisped Orlando and the power plants serving Timucuan County, refrigeration stopped, along with electric cooking. The oil furnaces, sparked by electricity, died. All radios were useless unless battery powered or in automobiles. Washing machines, dryers, dishwashers, fryers, toasters, roasters, vacuum cleaners, shavers, heaters, beaters all stopped. So did the electric clocks, vibrating chairs, electric blankets, irons for pressing clothes, curlers for hair. The electric pumps stopped, and when the pumps stopped the water stopped and when the water stopped the bathrooms ceased functioning.From there, Alas, Babylon takes on the form of something very familiar and timeless. It is tale of survival and adventure, The Swiss Family Robinson mixed with elements of Fallout and The Walking Dead (though lacking any mutants or zombies). Randy and the people around him (among them: his sister-in-law; her kids; a doctor; a retired admiral) must find a safe water supply, stockpile food, trade supplies, and protect themselves from the human wolves traveling over a ravaged countryside. Alas, Babylon works splendidly on this level. Ordinary people have to band together. Problems need to be solved. Society has to be reordered. Courage must be found. Hope must be maintained. Whether you set this story in a post-Armageddon township or a deserted island or an island you think is deserted but actually is not, there is plenty of drama to be found. As I mentioned above, Alas, Babylon has other levels. Most obviously, it operates as what the sci-fi author David Brin has called a self-preventing prophecy. Like Nevil Shutes On the Beach and Eugene Burdicks Fail Safe, Franks purpose in writing this was to warn people. He wanted to get the attention of the masses, and by extension, the attention of their elected officials. It is pretty neat, with the hindsight that comes from the world not ending in the fires of a thousand suns, to catch a glimpse of the 1959 mindset. For instance, Frank is quite concerned with the so-called missile gap that John Kennedy trumpeted on his way to the White House. We know now that this gap did not exist. But knowing this after the fact does not change how it must have felt at the time to believe it did. Frank unwittingly captures that. Alas, Babylon is a product of its time in ways that go beyond its knowledge of Civil Defense preparations and the shortcomings of the Conelrad emergency broadcasting system. It is set in the South, five years after Brown vs. the Board of Education, so its racial views are a bit complicated. Certain of the characters express abhorrent views and use abhorrent language that was typical of the time and place (I say this without meaning to imply that this has magically disappeared from the world). To Franks credit, Randy is not an out-and-out white supremacist. He is described as abiding by the Supreme Court decision in Brown, so at the least he is not a segregationist. He has black neighbors who play prominent roles in the story. They are stereotyped, to be sure, but most of the characters are stereotyped to an extent, taking on the shorthand roles we expect from this type of tale (e.g., the virtuous doctor, the spunky kid, the selfish hoarder). There is also a strain of paternalism running through the novel. There are several female characters, some of whom are relatively well-rounded (to be fair, this is not a character study; with the exception of Randy, no one is plumbed for depth). However, there is more than one occasion where a character muses how the womenfolk would survive without their men. The tone of Alas, Babylon is one of grim hopefulness that stands in contrast to the fatalism of The Road or On the Beach. The stark realities of a ruined world are made visible (it is terrifying how quickly they run out of booze), but Franks characters seldom lose heart. He presents the classic tableau where the worst of mankind is balanced by the best of mankind; where mans ingenuity for destruction is matched by an ingenuity for rebuilding. There are more themes to touch on, more elements to discuss, but in the end, strange to say, Alas, Babylon works because it is fun to read. There is something fundamentally enjoyable about watching disparate men and women come together under unimaginable stress to solve problems. They are, in a sense, MacGyver-ing a new country for themselves with shoe strings, paper clips, and elbow grease. In the face of an unimaginable horror, they must discover new sources of sustenance, heal themselves without modern medicines, and - perhaps most importantly - find a way to distill their own liquor.

What a book! What a challenging and hope-filled and inspiring book. I was terrified to read this book. Our world feels incredibly unstable at present and I was certain that this book would be incapable of giving me anything other than additional stress and anxiety. I was so wrong. Mercifully, I was so very wrong. The most valuable lesson for me personally: there are no hopeless options in a nuclear war. This may sound trite but for me personally, it was a powerfully inspiring lesson to learn. I know that fear has no place in our lives but that doesn't mean that I do not wrestle with it. What I was able to see play out (and therefore was able to connect with and relate to) was that each path through the chaos has some human advantages, therefore, no path is without hope.Instant death would be a gift because of the blissful ignorance and absence of suffering. Radiation poisoning would be painful and awful but a powerful opportunity to suffer with dignity and (in my Catholic tradition) suffer for sanctification. Survival would be challenging and brutal but life would go on and we would find Easter sunrise services to attend.While this story is highly technical it is also rich with personal story lines. By the end of the text, we know and care about the cast of characters and are more than rooting for them. I can honestly say that I did not want this book to end. I wanted to hear more about this incredible story of survival and human spirit.

Pat Frank's Alas, Babylon is a classic novel of post-nuclear war survival. Set in Fort Repose, Florida, a tiny town that is missed by the nuclear missiles that level all major cities in the U.S., it is less Cold War science fiction than a survivalist epic.The author of One Second After acknowledged this book as one of his inspirations, and the two books are very similar in many ways. Both feature the residents of a small Southern town forming a survivalist community in the wake of the collapse of the U.S. government and technological civilization. In Alas, Babylon, it is a nuclear war between the US and the USSR, the ominous and inevitable build-up to war taking up the first half of the book, as only a few people realize just what is unfolding before them on the news.As in One Second After, Alas, Babylon features an All-American protagonist stepping up to take charge because no one else will, while he tries to manage his small family (in this case, the family of his brother, an Air Force officer who knew what was going down and sent them to relative safety ahead of time). There are food shortages, the necessity of modern people figuring out how to survive without modern technology, the return of the barter economy, as well as bandits and highwaymen. As a survivalist epic, it's not as grim as it could have been, but it's another one of those books that might make you think about stocking up on bullets and beans, just in case.For a book written in 1959, Alas, Babylon holds up surprisingly well, largely because as with all stories about a total collapse of civilization, once the grid goes down and there is no more government, it doesn't matter whether it was 1959 or 1980 or 2014, everything is going to look like the 19th century pretty quickly. The USSR is no longer, but Russia still has missiles pointed at us; nuclear war may no longer be as likely as it once seemed, but it's hardly a threat that's vanished. The black characters, despite living in Florida in 1959, are treated better by the author than in some more recent post-apocalyptic novels I could name.This was a good read for anyone who's a fan of survivalist novels and stories about what a community would do after the end of the world. Very slightly dated, but the writing style and the challenges facing the characters will mostly keep you from noticing.