On The Beach was Shute’s most celebrated novel, published in 1957 when nuclear annihilation was still a somewhat novel and nebulous threat, rather than its own pop-culture genre. The novel takes place mostly in Melbourne, Australia, as a cloud of nuclear ‘dust’ descends from the northern to the southern hemisphere. The dust originated from over 4,000 nuclear detonations, set off in a brief but cataclysmic war between most of the world’s major and minor powers. The USA, Russia, and China are all named, but it […]