Alas, Babylon

Alas, Babylon is a novel by the American writer Pat Frank, published in 1959 and one of the earliest examples of fiction about the aftermath of a nuclear war.

The book opens in December in a small town in Florida called Fort Repose, which is based on Mount Dora, a real town in the same part of the state. Word reaches one of the residents, Randy Bragg, that his brother in the air force is worried: the confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union has reached the point where something could start. When it does start, Fort Repose survives the strikes but loses its connection to everything else, and the novel follows the people there as they work out how to live without electricity, fuel, medicine or news. Frank wrote the book about ordinary competence rather than spectacles, and the title comes from a line in the Book of Revelation.

The novel has been in print for decades and has been read as both a story and an argument about what a community needs in order to survive.