An engrossing analysis of the fiction of nuclear war

In Pat Frank's 1959 novel Alas, Babylon, the character Helen says of her children: "All their lives, ever since they've known anything, they've lived under the shadow of war--atomic war. For them the abnormal has become normal." The threat of nuclear annihilation was a constant source of dread during the Cold War, and in Under the Shadow, author David Seed examines how authors and filmmakers made repeated efforts in their work to imagine the unimaginable.

Seed discusses classics of the...

The subject of this timely book is that body of fiction which speculates in narrative form about the nature of wars likely to break out in the near or distant future. Although earlier instances occur, the origins of this mode lie primarily in the late nineteenth century but writing about future wars continues to this day with notable fiction on the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Ranging widely across periods and conflicts real and imagined, and boasting contributions from the late I. F. Clarke, H. Bruce Franklin and Patrick Parrinder, Future Wars explores the fascinating process of...

This study examines the US fiction and related films which makes a series of interventions in the cultural debate over the threat of nuclear terrorism. It traces the beginnings of this anxiety from the 1970s, which increased during the 1990s after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The traumatic events of 9/11 became a major reference point for this fiction, which expressed the fear that of a second and worse 9/11. The study examines narratives of conspiracies which are detected and forestalled, and of others which lead to the worst of all outcomes - nuclear detonations, sometimes delivered by...