Spoiler Warning: This post contains material about the book “On the Beach” by Nevil Shute, if you haven't read it, and hate being told the contents or endings of things you haven't read, stop reading now.

On the Beach by Nevil Shute one of those EOTW books I have been getting recently from Robert and Peter at Booktown in New Westminister. I had put the book on my must read list as a result of reading Farnham's Freehold by Robert A. Heinlein the cover of which states it's the book that “begins where On the Beach left off”. So naturally I had to get it. I won't mention how much I paid for it, I don't think Robert would like that. ;)

I think the book is the strangest EOTW book I have ever read, being a fact based writer I find it hard to write fiction, and maybe it is just to easy for me to become amazed at the talents of writers who pull off literary feats I never would have thought of. The book is about what happens to the survivors after WWIII, written during a time that most thought it would include nuclear weapons of mass destruction. In this book Nevil has setting as after the fact, and everything in the Northern Hemisphere is already gone by the time the reader realizes what is going on.

I took me till near the end of the book to realize that the author was going to break one of those unwritten rules about popular books, the heroes die in this one. In fact, everything dies. It is the worse case scenario you can imagine when it comes to nukes. Basically the plot line is that the radioactive dust left over after the short war from the north is slowly creeping it's way to south, killing everything in it's path. But that's not really what this book is about...

The book is about how a small group of people of Melbourne react to the news that they are all going to die, no escape, “that's the end of it”. And it takes just about three years to happen after the war.

If I had written this book, i would have made the mistake of having the story surround itself with people trying to do what they could to survive, building a massive fallout shelter, and ark two if you will. But that isn't the point the author was trying to make. He was stating a fact of his day that the newspapers were not telling the whole truth about the arms race, I guess they heard him, now that the cold war is “over”. (Actually, don't quote me on that)

There was also another point, I think, that was transmitted to me from the text of this book. That people will do nothing, nothing that is really important, just for the purpose of doing something. In order for people to have meaning in their lives, they need to keep busy, or they are better off just lying down, and dying. Which is pretty much what they all do, you see, instead of building a shelter to live out the five years it would take for the radiation in the atmosphere to become breathable again, they kill themselves. Totally pointless. Which I guess was the whole point. It bothered me, because I can see this as being real. In fact, with global warming becoming more and more a reality each day, I see what happened in the book, happening now. We treat this oncoming threat as if we are going to some how turn off enough lights, use enough cars that only use half as much gasoline, reduce our carbon footprints to less then 0.000001 instead of 2.1 (mine)

The truth is were are in fact doomed. Maybe we won't all die off taking everything with us, but what ever we identify as being us is certain to disappear.

Think of it this way, when the industrial age started, it changed the way we created finished products. We no longer used craftsman's marks, we used trademarks. There was after a short time very few signature pieces of furniture, pottery, or even artwork in our homes. Instead, everything was manufactured on a conveyor belt, coffee cups which used to be handmade on a potter's wheel, something close to my own heart, lacked the original touch of the artist and buyer, we became clones of each other. Everything in our culture changed to follow this new way of thinking, our education became a conveyor belt as well, as did our careers, and even the very roads we traveled on. The simple change of mass production to reduce the cost and increase profits, the response to supply and demand, changed everything in our lives from medicine, to law enforcement, and not much of good IMHO.

That change was something we choose to do, we took on the industrial age with a vengeance and a thirst to satisfy our greed and desires. Global warming is something that we cannot choose against, to be blunt, the changes it will force us to make, along with the changes that are also being forced on us away from fossil fuels will alter everything in our lives to an even greater degree then the industrial age could ever dream of, and in a fraction of the time.

The sad thing I see is that like the people in Nevil's book, most of us are taking the pill out of the red box, and laying down to sleep in one way or another. I guess most of us will win the Darwin award for this one.