the majority version, spaceships;
a minority version, nuclear war aftermath.
More recently, it has been argued that an all-out nuclear exchange would generate a Nuclear Winter - with no aftermath.
Poul Anderson covers both options, i.e., spaceships and nuclear aftermath - but not Nuclear Winter.
Anderson's Post-Nuclear Wars Futures
The Psychotechnic History
The Maurai History
Vault Of The Ages
Twilight World
Shield
some short stories
Why dredge this up at this time of knight? Because, in our late night other reading, we are rereading Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns which includes the effects of a single electromagnetic pulse on the Western hemisphere - and this explains that typo of "knight" instead of "night."
Good Knight.
Kaor, Paul!
ReplyDeleteBut none of the Anderson titles listed, except TWILIGHT WORLD, deals directly with the possible consequences of a nuclear war. And TWILIGHT has been criticized for technical errors on how such a war might be fought. Also, there are good grounds for doubting that the drastic genetic mutations depicted would actually occur. But that was not completely unreasonable, considering how TWILIGHT was collected and pub. so early in the Nuclear Age that not much was yet known about such questions.
One of the earliest post nuclear war novels I read was Pat Frank's ALAS, BABYLON (1959), about the struggles of a small Florida town trying to cope with surviving nuclear exchanges between the US/USSR. I think the author did a good job, because more was known by then about such a war and its consequences than Anderson knew in the 1940's.
As far as "nuclear winters" goes, I think Harry Turtledove's much more recent 3 volume SUPER VOLCANO ERUPTION gives us a good idea of what a sharp cooling of the Earth would be like after the Yellowstone hot spot blew up. Nothing good, getting stuff like a new Ice Age starting.
Ad astra! Sean
You also have the middle option used by writers like H Beam Piper who had a nuclear war/aftermath followed later by spaceships sent out from the Southern Hemisphere which didn’t get hammered as hard. There’s a whole continuum with the options you mentioned at either end.
ReplyDeleteAs for nuclear winter, it was never anything but a scam created by Carl Sagan and one of his climatologist buddies using a global climate model they tweaked until it spit out the scary results they wanted. Even if you accept it as gospel, warhead yields have been drastically reduced and it’s fairly well accepted that firestorms of the type they predicated the whole thing on aren’t physically possible in most of the major modern cities that would be targeted.
Kaor, TJ!
ReplyDeleteAnd Piper's scenario is reasonable, because it makes sense to think nations not too badly hit by a nuclear war would become the next dominant powers.
Exactly, technological changes will affect how nuclear wars are fought and what may be their consequences. Models are only as good as the data fed into them.
Ad astra! Sean