Shute, Neville. On the beach, London ; Melbourne : William Heinemann, 1959.Shute's best-seller, set after a nuclear war, was written in the context of a massive cold-war arms race, with the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki fresh in the minds of readers. As the radioactive fallout of the global conflagration slowly seeps out from the war's hotspots, the action zeroes in on the people of Melbourne, whose southerly latitude ensures that they will be among the last survivors. Different ways of coping with the knowledge of certain death are examined, from the hedonistic to the macabre and suicidal.
Meanwhile, the last remaining submarine from the US fleet is dispatched to investigate a mysterious signal it has picked up, and the possibility that other parts of the world have escaped the fallout. Shute's characters acceptance of their imminent doom is worthy of study in and of itself: it strongly contrasts to the tendency of the protagonists of much dystopic fiction to rage against their inevitable downfall.
