Welcome to "Our Nuclear Nightmares" a series on the literature of the Nuclear Age. Each episode will offer a detailed summary of a fiction novel, analyze its themes, and place it in the historical context.

For almost four decades humanity lived under the threat of nuclear annihilation, that their lives, their world would end in a flash of light. Through those long years, novelists sought to imagine the nature of a nuclear conflict and its possible grim aftermath. The end of the Cold War tensions saw these novels relegated to the trash and forgotten, but they deserve to be remembered and understood as they helped create the outlines of the world we live in today.