DAN BLOOM HOPES “CLI-FI” WILL SWAY NON-BELIEVERS
In the 1957 pulp classic On the Beach, the novelist and aeronautical engineer Nevil Shute imagined a horrific scenario in the aftermath of World War III. A small group of survivors clustered in southern Australia await the arrival of a deadly radioactive cloud, contemplating the near-certainty that the rest of humanity has already perished.
It’s a terrifying prospect, of course, which is why the book has retained its grip on the public imagination, adapted twice as a movie and, in 2008, as a BBC radio broadcast. Dan Bloom first read On the Beach in a high school English class in 1967. It gave him Cold War nightmares.
Bloom was panicked all over again a decade ago when he read the doomsday predictions of the British environmentalist James Lovelock. Writing in the Independent, Lovelock envisioned an earthly population wildly diminished…
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