Alas, Babylon

by Pat Frank

Randy knew he wasn’t an alcoholic because an alcoholic craved liquor. He never craved it. He just drank for pleasure and the most pleasurable of all drinks was the first one on a crisp winter morning.

“Four subs is a lot of subs when there shouldn’t be any,” Mark said. “It’s like shaking a haystack and having four needles pop out at your feet. Chances are that haystack is stiff with needles.”

he is dying faster than he should. The better a man is at business, the worse in retirement. One day he’s running a big corporation and the next day he isn’t allowed to run anything, even his own home. He wishes himself dead, and he dies.”

All he asked was that she live and he live and that things remain the same.

With the use of the hydrogen bomb, the Christian era was dead, and with it must die the tradition of the Good Samaritan.

If the dollar was worthless, everything was worthless.

The question of who won the war, or if the war still continued, who was winning, had replaced the weather as an inexhaustible subject for speculation.

It takes two to make a peace but only one to make a war.

Not the least of his accomplishments, especially in Alas, Babylon, was to be among the first to give a public voice to the fears and anxieties associated with a nuclear attack and with threats of atomic radiation. And unlike others in the genre, he offered unmitigated hope. Randy Bragg and company not only survive the devastation that leaves vast Contaminated Zones throughout the United States, but they also apply the best in themselves to begin the re-establishment of life within a civil society.