Research Sources for Nuclear Holocausts Before the end of 1985, when the research for the first edition of this book concluded, very few studies of nuclear war fiction had appeared, but a number of important ones appeared shortly afterward. The very first was Sam Moskowitz’s “The Atom Smashers: Fiction’s Prophetic Parallel to Fact,” in a […]
Supplementary Checklists The following checklists are provided to aid those in search of texts on themes closely related to nuclear war. They are not as comprehensive as the main bibliography (nothing published since 1984, for instance), and are merely suggestions for further study. The reader wondering why a particular item was not listed in the […]
Chapter 5: Avoiding Nuclear War Avoiding a nuclear holocaust: it might be supposed that such would be the aim of the authors of nuclear war fiction. The issuing of awful warnings. The depiction of Armageddon. Foreshadowing the wretchedness of the new dark age. And for a minority of authors, this is so. Yet most of […]
Chapter 4: The Long-Term Effects of Nuclear War Most nuclear war fiction can be fairly clearly divided into one of two groups: those depicting a conflict and its immediate consequences, and those set in the more distant future, long after the war has taken place. Thanks to the vigorous tradition of postholocaust adventure stories in […]
Chapter 3: The Short-Term Effects of Nuclear War One might suppose that the depiction of the immediate consequences of a nuclear war would be a primary subject of the fiction under consideration here. Far from it. Aside from those few authors whose subject is the atomic bombing of Japan, only a relative handful of authors […]
Chapter Two: The Causes of Nuclear War Nuclear war in fiction is distinctive not only in the way that its course and aftermath are portrayed, but even in the portrayal of its causes. A number of the more popular causes of holocausts are considered in the following pages: accident, madness, the “bolt from the blue” […]
Chapter One: The History of Nuclear War in Fiction Throughout the ages—and long before the invention and development of nuclear weapons—there had been those who prophesied that the world would end because of man’s wickedness.Such prophesies were always believed, no matter how many times they had been proved wrong in the past. There was a […]
Preface to the First Edition
By Paul BriansProfessor of English, Washington State University, Pullman, Washington This new edition of my comprehensive survey of fictional depictions in English of nuclear war and its aftermath has been revised and expanded. In particular, the bibliography has been expanded with over 450 additional entries. The chapters of historical and critical discussion are essentially unchanged. […]
A Bibliography of Science Fiction Secondary Materials in Holland Library, Washington State University If you are doing research on science fiction, this bibliography is a good place to start. It is not a complete bibliography of SF research, only of that in the WSU library; and the call numbers may not match those in other […]