I've been on a nuclear fallout/end of the world/apocalypse kick lately. I blame my friend for this one; he told me about a Reddit discussion thread on Britain's letters of last resort, and after a healthy discussion about what the letters say and what they would say were either of us Prime Ministers (luckily for the inhabitants of this make-believe world, we neither of us believe in vengeance and mutual destruction), I started looking up novels about nuclear war. The consensus seems to be that Nevil Shute's On the Beach and Walter M. Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz are the two most notable depictions of a post-nuclear world, so I promptly trekked over to the library (I then discovered that my tiny branch had neither in stock, so I turned around and headed home, where I ordered them and sat around twiddling my fingers for two days and meditated on the virtue of patience).
Canticle follows two thousand years of history after a nuclear explosion in the 20th century, detailing the fall, rise, and fall of human civilization. On the Beach is smaller in scope, focusing on the last days of humanity as nuclear fallout from an explosion in the northern hemisphere gradually drifts south, extinguishing all life in its path.
So, which one is better? It depends on what you're looking for. Canticle is a bit more fantastical, due to its forward-looking nature, but its characters discuss heady, weighed issues of faith, morality, and humanity. On the Beach is narrow, and calmer. You spend most of the book as quietly, reading along and wondering where the action is, until you reach the end and the poignancy hits; the simple story echoes the simple lives the characters lead, knowing their death is inevitable, but the actual moment of death is never simple.
Read both. Read Miller in order to ask yourself the tough questions all of us need to face about the possibility of a global armageddon, and read Shute to truly face what the armageddon would mean for humanity.
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