Alas, Babylon was one of three now-classic postapocalyptic novels published at the end of the 1950s. Australian Nevil Shute’s grim On the Beach appeared in 1957, with its fearful story of a lone surviving submarine and its doomed crew sailing from port to port in a futile search for any living remnants of humankind. And in the same year as Frank’s novel, Walter M. Miller, Jr., published his remarkable A Canticle for Leibowitz, in which a postholocaust technician-turned-monk records a new Renaissance and the rise of new secular states. Others followed in the early 1960s and later—George R.
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