Although supposedly a book for the young, there is no attempt to minimise the horrors: irradiated kids’ hair falling out in clumps brutalised survivors scouring the ruins for people to eat the wails of families as disabled relatives are massacred for being a burden. Why did it change me? Well, I have not stopped thinking about this story since, and it gave me nightmares throughout my teenage years. Babies are born deformed in one case, without a mouth. They eventually emerge victorious, but the triumph is short-lived when it transpires that the nuclear-irradiated soil offers no hope for a crop of food to sustain survivors. Any power you have been arbitrarily granted is a means to defend yourself from extinction.Ī concentration camp is set up, leading many of the protagonists to form a rebel movement. But with such desperation, so little hope, so few resources, any such effort is doomed. It would be reassuring to imagine a rational and equitable means of organising a post-apocalyptic society would be swiftly devised. What that actually means is a barbarous tyranny where those who are disabled, infirm or shocked beyond help (“spacers”, they’re called) by Earth’s final conflict are poisoned or shot. What happens next? Well, a new order is set up by a local commissioner, supposedly charged with distributing food and kick-starting some semblance of recovery. You do not want to be alive in the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust. In the ruins, he finds his brother and father, but his mother is one of the many instant fatalities and – as the reader will promptly conclude – one of the lucky ones. Young Danny had gone on a bicycle ride out of town when the nukes wiped out Skipley.
This story, aimed at teenagers, has one clear purpose: forget any illusions you may have that a nuclear exchange will wipe out a decent chunk of your neighbours, but humanity will pull itself together in the ruins.
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