Now that the first works of climate change fiction are arriving, you wonder why the prospect of an apocalypse due to an environmental disaster hasn’t boosted artists’ creative impulses in the same way as the prospect of nuclear war? turned out to be fertile ground for the imagination in the mid-20th century.

At the time, a number of writers and filmmakers were grappling with the idea of ​​the wiping out of the species in the wake of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And the Cuban Missile Crisis in the early 1960s proved to be additional fuel for thinkers to consider what it means for the world as we know it to end in a mushroom cloud.

The effects of large-scale nuclear war on Earth and its aftermath weren’t much studied by scientists back when On the Beach, Nevil Shute’s post-apocalyptic fiction classic, was released in 1957. The novel begins after the war. (confined to the northern hemisphere and sparked by a conflict in Europe that is gradually spreading to more countries) is over and human civilization is on the verge of extinction.

Set in Melbourne, Australia, which is one of the last cities on the planet where life goes on with some semblance of normalcy, On the Beach is an exploration of how humans would behave with the almost certain certainty that the end is close. Unlike most post-apocalyptic fiction, the almost stoic Australians of On the Beach don’t fall for hysteria and hot-blooded urges. The only romance that flourishes between alcoholic socialite Moira Davidson and Commander Dwight Towers, an American naval officer, remains platonic.

At the start of the story, a cloud of radiation moves south and towns in northern Australia slowly and silently die. When a Morse code message was received from Seattle, Commander Towers (who was in charge of a USS submarine in Melbourne under Australian command) and a small crew headed north in search of survivors. And to find out if there is any hope that humanity can survive after all.

Nevil Shute was born in England in 1899 and emigrated to Australia in 1950. While he had started writing in 1923 and established his reputation as an author of the genre of fiction that valued the contributions of the professional middle class, he had a parallel career as an aeronautical engineer. On the Beach was one of his last forthcoming novels – he died in 1960 – and it has become a modern classic. At the time of publication, it was seen as a warning to nuclear powers to pull back from the brink before it is too late. Decades later, its power to shock the reader for the first time has not waned, and it continues to spark questions about humanity’s ability to self-destruct. The book has been criticized for being too pessimistic and not giving enough credit to preparing the world for a nuclear fallout. Shute’s story doesn’t give human survival much of a chance – and there could be an argument that the narrative would lose its power if it provided the reader with a silver lining and was presented as a tale of undefeated human courage. . But it’s also courage to look a monster in the eye and realize when the fight is lost and it’s courageous to accept that loss with grace.

The author is a Bengaluru-based writer and communications professional with numerous published short stories and essays to her credit.

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