Summary:
Nuclear war wipes out most of humanity and friends, including their supper. A small remnant escapes to Iceland.
Discussion (Spoilers):
When this appeared, nuclear holocaust stories had been appearing since the bombing of Hiroshima (see Pohl's earlier "Let the Ants Try" which provides an interesting contrast--optimistic about surviving nuclear bombing, but not so lucky about what might follow). Many worried about not just about the survival of themselves, but also human species. Some may have more optimistic than they ought to have been.
While not a difficult story, it can be read too hastily. One might miss choices of tone and word choice. In a sense, there is no story. There is, but it is subverted, short changed. If someone insists there is a story, ask them to summarize it.
There's a boy, but he's sentimentalized, orphaned, helpless, wet. We're told he's nine then reminded he's young. The opening line: "On Timothy Clary's ninth birthday he got no cake."
We have an omniscient narrator who drops into the minds of many. Then we switch to Harry Malibert, a scientist who runs a radio telescope in Arecibo. We think we've finally got our protagonist. But not exactly. We're given the nigh impossibility of survival. Probably it is set in Iceland for its geothermal activity so there is a remote chance of survival, a source heat and energy that is not reliant on the sun.
Then there's the issue of tone: "Get away! Climb the highest mountain! Drop yourself splat, spang, right in the middle of the widest desert! Run! Hide!"
All of those exclamation marks. Due to juxtaposition, it suggests that some leap off the mountain. But "splat?"
A few paragraphs later, it suggest that Timothy "might have wound up in the plane of refugees that reached Pittsburgh just it time to become plasma." Just in time? Plasma? There's a dark humor here at work. It discusses all of the likely outcomes where he'd die, but then writes:
"he might have been given medicine, and oufnd somebody to protect him, and take him to a refuge, and live...
"But that is in fact what did happen!"
At this point, we doubt that any kind of survival will happen, and that last line, a little glib, remarking on the improbable chance that something good would happen. That last line is repeated at the end, where we have even less faith. But he adds, "At least, one would like to think so." This final sentence rubs a little of the dark humor off. It feels more honest in its feigned hope even though it has provided ample evidence that it won't.
This wasn't the only nuclear-worry story to catch the Hugo's eye that year. David Brin's The Postman also took home a trophy. This was probably part of the zeitgeist, worrying over the arms race build-up. See the cover story in the image above.
At any rate, what makes this story successful is knowledge of the subgenre (post nuclear war stories), knowing the common tropes found in such stories. "Let the Ants Try" subverts the subgenre as well with the thwarting of hope for human survival, but part of the success of that is also knowledge of other stories. But this one takes a hard, realistic look at our optimism. It is the Uber-story, paradoxically superseding all others yet entirely depending on knowledge and existence of that subgenre.
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