Abstract
Thirty-six years ago cinema audiences throughout the world saw their worst fears realized in the brilliant, unsparing images of Dr Strangelove; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. The final frames in the Kubrick film displayed the mushroom cloud that signalled the end for all living things; and the last sound from that worst of all possible futures was the voice of Vera Lynn, as she sang of her hope that the world might have a second chance: ‘We’ll meet again, don’t know where, don’t know when.’
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Notes
Ananda K. Coomaswamy, Völuspá. Done into English out of the Icelandic Elder Edda (Kandy: Kandy Industrial School, 1905), p. 11.
St Augustine, Concerning the City of God against the Pagans, Introduction by John O’Meara. New translation by Henry Bettenson (1972) (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1984), p. 488.
Ronald L. Meek, Turgot on Progress, Sociology and Economics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), p. 41.
The synopsis of Le Dernier Homme (pp. 458–66) follows on from the laudatory comments in Chapter X on Grainville in: J. Michelet, Histoire du XIX e siècle jusqu’à Waterloo (1875). The imitations of Grainville were: Auguste François Baron Creuze de Lesser, Le Dernier Homme, poèm imité de Grainville (1831);
Elise Gagne, Omegar, ou le dernier homme, proso-poésie dramatique de la fin des temps en douze chants (1858);
Alexandre Soumet, La Divine Épopée (1841).
H. G. Wells, The Time Machine (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1972), p. 124.
H. G. Wells, The War in the Air (London: George Bell, 1908), pp. 345–56.
H. G. Wells, The World Set Free (London: Odhams Press, 1926), p. 156.
The Brothers Čapek, R.U.R and The Insect Play (London: Oxford University Press, 1961), p. 90.
Further details for these stories are: Kurt Abel-Musgrave, Der Bazillenkrieg (Frankfurt, 1922).
Professeur X, La Guerre microbienne (Paris, 1923).
Peter Anderson Graham, The Collapse of Homo Sapiens (Putnam, 1923).
Shaw Desmond, Ragnarok (Duckworth, 1926).
Cicely Hamilton, Theodore Savage (J. Cape, 1928).
Miles (Stephen Southwold), The Gas War of 1940 (Scholartis Press, 1931).
Francis H. Sibson, Unthinkable (Methuen, 1933).
Moray Dalton, The Black Death. Sampson Low (1934).
Joseph O’Neill, Day of Wrath (V. Gollancz, 1936).
Alfred Noyes, The Last Man (London: J. Murray, 1940), p. 23.
Far more comprehensive accounts of the nuclear catastrophe fiction will be found in Paul Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light. American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (New York: Pantheon, 1985);
Paul Brians, Nuclear Holocausts. Atomic War in Fiction,1895–1984 (Kent, Oh.: Kent State University Press, 1987);
I. F. Clarke, Voices Prophesying War. Future Wars, 1763–3749 (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 1992);
David Dowling, Fictions of Nuclear Disaster (London: Macmillan Press, 1987);
H. Bruce Franklin, War Stars. The Superweapon and the American Imagination (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).
Aldous Huxley Ape and Essence (London: Chatto & Windus, 1949), p. 94.
Mordecai Roshwald, Level Seven (London: Heinemann, 1959), p. 125.
Leigh Brackett (E. L. Hamilton), The Long Tomorrow (London: Mayflower, 1962), pp. 16, 184.
Walter Miller, A Canticle for Leibowitz (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1960), pp. 255, 319.
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Clarke, I.F. (2000). The Tales of the Last Days, 1805–3794. In: Seed, D. (eds) Imagining Apocalypse. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-64895-5_2
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