Alex WellersteinVerified account

On The Beach, absolutely greatest novel of the age

I'm assuming you've already included Tom Lehrer's collection. My favorite non-Lehrer apocalyptic song is Jackson Browne Before the Deluge.

My favorite Cold War anxiety song that nobody really realizes is about the Cold War is Billy Idol’s “The Dead Next Door”.

The Clash tune "London Calling"... 'Cause London is drowning, and I, I live by the river!' https://youtu.be/EfK-WX2pa8c 

The Years of Rice and Salt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Years_of_Rice_and_Salt … not an "On the Breach" story, but an alternate history. Doomsday Book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_Book_(novel) … a time travel SF story

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43290/the-second-coming … by WB Yeats. Much apocalyptic lit fits this category. Kant has a piece about time stopping. Right now I’m into 99 red balloons. War Games (80s movie).

Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban is surely the most thoroughly imagined piece of post-apocalyptic fiction. Not sure if it is about the end of "the" world, but it certainly deals with the end of a world and its aftermath.

And let's give ol' Tolkien hids due on apocalyptic speeches. Here's one of my favs from the movie: https://youtu.be/xVEYcTyj1Do 

Song: Push the Button by Teapacks. Books: Station Eleven, Cat’s Cradle, Oryx and Crake, The World Without Us

Alan Weisman's The World Without Us is illuminating 60 years after Silent Spring & 55 after On the Beach. Excerpts of the latter wouldn't do justice to Shute's character development:(

Alison MacQueen’s Political Realism in Apocalyptic Times is due out in January, but here’s a related article http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/685750 …

Karen Thompson Walker, The age of miracles. The earth's rotation is slowing *and* you're in middle school. Rough. http://www.theageofmiraclesbook.com 

The Last Man by Mary Shelley; Level 7 by Mordecai Roshwald; A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller; On the Beach by Neville Shute; The Drowned World by J.G. Ballard

Threads

Instead of writing all about Stanley Kubrick, thirteen days etc, I'l just say this: https://youtu.be/UC_gXD5OE88 

Super fond of the Louvin Brothers “The Great Atomic Power”

In the Year 2525 by Zager & Evans. More end of humanity than end of the world. Hit #1 on the charts 4 days before the launch of Apollo 11. https://youtu.be/izQB2-Kmiic