Uncredited cover for the 1960 edition of Pat Frank’s Alas, Babylon (1959)
4/5 (Good)
Pat Frank (1907-1964) began his writing career working for local papers in northeastern Florida before a stint in The Office of Wartime Information (OWI) during WWII. The popular success of Frank’s three nuclear war-themed novels, that culminated with Alas, Babylon (1959), led him to take on the role as a speechwriter for the 1960 Kennedy campaign and beyond.1 As Frank was a lifelong Democrat, Alas, Babylon contains a range of 50s political views that manifest anti-communism and align with the small minority within the party interested in Civil Rights. The novel advocates for vigorous anti-Communist ideology at home and abroad and, in case deterrence fails, survival is possible for those who embody American virtues.
The Narrative Vantage Point Amidst the Mushroom Clouds
Alas, Babylon narrows in on the experiences of a diverse range of characters (White, Hispanic, and Black) in Fort Repose, an imaginary town in Northern Florida, after a nuclear attack that devastates all surrounding regions. Government calls for Civil Defense are not taken seriously. How will the community survive isolated from the rest of the nation? Who will emerge from the wreckage and guide the fractured community forward? What are the new values in the wasteland? Can they survive the effects of surrounding fallout?
The main narrative follows Randolph Bragg, a failed politician who lives off occasional law work and the citrus fields of his childhood home. Randy, a mouthpiece for many of Pat Frank’s own views, served Korea before running for office. He’s a firm supporter of anti-communist crusaders who take the bomb seriously. In the era of the Southern Manifesto (1956), Randy bucks the majority of the Southern Democratic party in support of Brown vs. The Board of Education (1954) and advocates a generational integration of classrooms.2 Of course, this does not go over well with his voters: “behind his back he was called a fool and traitor to his state and race” (10). Living an aimless post-election life before The Day, the nuclear attack soon gives him the opportunity to lead and love.
Other characters include the members of an African American family (Malachi, Missouri, Preacher Henry, Two-Tone) that purchased a portion of the plantation that Randy’s ancestors used to operate. Their agricultural knowledge, bravery, and survival instincts prove vital for the new community. Various Hispanic characters who live in a slum nearby, Pistolville, also interject occasionally in the story. Soon Randy accumulates a small community that will resurrect a New America. In addition to the Henrys, others join forces with Randy including the town librarian who suddenly becomes the source of knowledge (Alice), the family of Randy’s brother Mark (Helen, Peyton, and Ben Franklin), Fort Repose’s doctor (Dan), and Randy’s lover Lib and her family. Occasionally the narrative directly shifts to a few of other, all-white, perspectives.
Randy must overcome various physical and psychological problems created by The Day: the inaction of the Civil Defense representative, the dread that all is lost, the suicide of the mayor and death of the Chief of Police, the effects of fallout and disease, and highway robbers.
A New Morality in the Wasteland?
Post-apocalyptic stories often posit the emergence of a new landscape of moral, racial, and sexual confusion. As Elaine Tyler May points out in Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (1988, revised edition 2017), “fears of sexual chaos tend to surface during times of crisis and rapid social change.”3 Countless SF stories from the era follow this pattern: a few 50s examples include Sherwood Springer’s “No Land of Nod” (1952), Wallace West’s “Eddie For Short” (1953), Wilson Tucker’s The Long Loud Silence (1952), and Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend (1954). Nuclear war in Alas, Babylon, on the other hand, threatens to subvert contemporary values yet ultimately reaffirms what it means to be American (sans democracy).
Alas, Babylon surprised me with its commentary on race in the American south, and hopes for an integrated future.4 Randy’s inability to frame his views with “the moderate Southern quasi-liberal, semi-segregationist double-talk” that would have led to his election leads him directly to political failure. His wartime bonding with a black soldier instead leads him to support Brown vs. The Board of Education (1956): “it was strange that a Negro could be an officer and a gentleman and an equal below Parallel Thirty-eight, but not below the Mason-Dixon Line” (44). But wartime experiences do not equate erasure of underlying racism. Randy must confronts his own underlying unease and inability to hold certain conversations with the Henrys who were once his family’s slaves. I found Randy’s confrontation of his own flaws the bravest moments of the novel. Post-bomb America, or at least this isolated fragment of Florida, can move beyond segregated racial hierarchies.
In addition to its reaffirmation of moral imperatives, Alas, Babylon serves as a polemic of preparedness. As David Seed points out, Pat Frank’s background in journalism lends Alas, Babylon a survivalist informational air. He describes the workings of CONELRAD, provides details about the potential transportation chaos caused by For Repose’s location, what foods will collect radiation, and the correct role of the local Civil Defense representative.
Final Thoughts
I enjoyed Alas, Babylon as a 50s example of a survivalist take on nuclear conflict. However, Frank dangerously tangles himself in a series of conflicting positions. Our limited view of the conflict and its effects weakens the horror. Newsclips and brief mentions of suicide or lingering trauma suggest devastation but it infringes indirectly on our main characters.5 In addition, Randy’s constant understanding of the new present through the lens of his war experiences serve to routinize the extraordinary. I can’t help but imagine how much more effective it would all be if Randy’s experiences were rendered more intense and traumatic than his experiences in Korea.6
Frank, like so many authors of post-apocalyptic fictions who postulate survival, almost yearns for the new manifestation of America exemplified by Fort Repose.7 Randy recreates a new and better community. Which leads to the most devastating conundrum–the new Fort Repose does not function as a democracy. Randy finds himself giving orders and waving his gun as a Reserve Officer (151). No one but the criminals mind. While old hierarchies of racial segregations lay in ruins, a new post-democratic benevolent dictatorial figure emerges out of a perpetual state of martial law. The military man will serve as the backbone for the new tomorrow. And it’s implied this system will continue as Fort Repose remains isolated from the surviving portions of the rest of the nation still under governmental control.
Frank’s narratological choices weaken the overt Civil Rights message. While other tangential characters–Florence and Alice–receive sections from their perspective, the African American characters such as Malachi, vital for everyone’s survival, seem to occupy an untold narrative in parallel. Black characters sacrifice themselves yet remain on the periphery. White characters peer at them from afar. Black characters serve and assist white leaders. White characters might acknowledge and address the unequal nature of the arrangement but the narrative structure of the novel reinforces the inequality. Regardless, Frank imagines a desegregated classroom will appear in the new American South.
Sometimes the flaws in the novels that try to say something revelatory and radical (for the day) are easier to see. At least Alas, Babylon tries.
Notes
- Mr. Adam (1946), Forbidden Area (1956), and Alas, Babylon (1959). He also wrote How to Survive the H-Bomb… and Why (1962) which serves up a propagandistic take on Kennedy’s treatment of Civil Defense in comparison to Eisenhower. See Wikipedia. ↩︎
- The Southern Manifesto (1956) condemned Brown vs. The Board of Education (1954). Only three senators from the ex-Confederate states didn’t sign it — Al Gore, Sr. (Tennessee), Estes Kefauver (Tennessee), and Lyndon Baines Johnson (Texas). ↩︎
- May, 4. ↩︎
- For a sustained analysis of Frank’s novel and race, see Jacqueline Foertsch’s unmissable Reckoning Day: Race, Place, and the Atom Bomb in Postwar America (2013), esp. 47-53. I left the monograph sections on Frank unread until after I wrote the review as I am easily demoralized by the brilliant analysis of others. ↩︎
- One could argue that Helen’s behavior after the death of her husband is the closest he gets to a central character. However, as the perspective never shifts to her (as it does to Alice and Florence), it remains distant. ↩︎
- Guy Oakes’ The Imaginary War: Civil Defense and American Cold War Culture (1994) does a great job laying out the logical conundrums created by government propaganda about the importance of deterrence and the possibility of survival. ↩︎
- In Martha Bartter’s article “Nuclear Holocaust as Urban Renewal” (1986), she explores the deep ambivalence within tales of future atomic war. Authors, and their characters, yearn to “build, a new infinitely better world out of the old” (148), and what better way than to destroy all that was. Narratives often betray a sinister destructive urge. She argues that “atomic war has traditionally been presented both as obvious disaster and as secret salvation” (148). Alas, Babylon fits this formulation. ↩︎
Robert Hunt’s cover for the 1988 edition of Pat Frank’s Alas, Babylon (1959)
Green’s cover for the 1st edition of Pat Frank’s Alas Babylon (1959)
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Science Fiction and Other Suspect Ruminations 
Great review of a complex book. This lines up with my memories and articulates its strengths and weaknesses well. I’d say it’s still well worth reading.
Thank you for the kind words. How would you rank it amongst the 50s post-apocalyptic fictions you’ve consumed? What did you enjoy most about it?
I’ve wanted to pick this one up from time to time, more because it’s considered one of the great science fiction novels than because of the plot. How would you rate the prose: readable, or a bit of a slog?
I don’t consider it one of the great SF novels. The prose is more informational than beautiful. Frank isn’t the best at crafting scene or impact. He is good at including a lot of Civil Defense information in a way that doesn’t feel like overload.
It’s a fascinating book for its attempt to address Civil Rights, and includes minority characters who are important to the story despite the fact that they aren’t as present as they could be, in the Southern Manifesto era.
Thanks, I appreciate it. I know Jo Walton has written about “cozy catastrophes” over at Reactor.com, mostly British science fiction. It sounds like this story edges into that at times but at least it’s somewhat progressive on race?
It certainly tries to be. As I point out in the review, the structural choices tend to undercut the intent. Randy represents a somewhat enlightened Southerner who still finds himself passively racist towards his family’s ex-slaves who still live nearby on a piece of land his family sold them (he’s caring, appreciates their help, helps them out, etc. but still struggles to interact with as equals). Yet, essentially overcomes it by the end of the novel. He supports integrated classrooms. He mobilizes his community to help the Henrys who have put so much labor into supporting everyone else. He’s even married at the end by a black preacher while there are multiple surviving white church leaders in the town. Frank regularly highlights the visceral racism of others in the community and sets up characters to change their racist views.
I should also point out that the beginning of the novel is really poor. Two older women are convinced that Randy spies on them when he actually thinks he sees an extinct bird. I get why it. We gotta set up the story with some normal town gossip and judging before the bomb hits and people need to readjust their horizons. But… it’s blargh.
Thank you for taking on this classic! I think the limited scope of the book, eliding over the broader horror, was intentional. We get to infer just how bad everything must be by the ending.
Which, ultimately, is the point of the book—if the Bomb falls, the best case scenario is the one we find in the book, which is no utopia, but a straggling survival. But at least, hopefully, a more egalitarian one (so far as race relations are concerned).
The scope is absolutely a choice. However, the “cozy” nature of existence reads as miraculous and counter-intuitive if Frank simultaneously wants to argue for us to take Civil Defense planning seriously. You never get the sense that Civil Defense stockpiling, shelter building, etc. would have helped many people in For Repose. And outside the town everything seems blanketed by bombs. It’s not like they needed to plan in advance at all and they mostly still survive! The polemical point that we must be prepared doesn’t, in my view, entirely work.
The evolution of Randy is the most interesting element of the book — especially his own acknowledgement that he has a passive sort of racism towards the Henrys (vs. a sense of equality with his fellow soldiers who happened to be black), perhaps due to the environment of being on the old ex-planation in the South, that he must overcome.
Agreed re: that evolution. “Everyone’s a little bit racist, it’s true,” as the song goes.
I am not certain that Frank’s message is (also as the song goes!) “Be Prepared.” It think it’s more “there really is no preparation sufficient if the balloon goes up.”
Maybe. However, some details suggest he does want us to be prepared. He brings up the lack of action on the part of the actual Civil Defense liaison in the community. And points out that the liaison refused to do his job and pass out Civil Defense brochures because they were too gruesome (Alice stockpiles them in the library instead). And observes that some cities that took longer to be bombed didn’t seem to have any plans of evacuation. These are the basic preparation strategies encouraged by Eisenhower’s administration. Comments like that seem to suggest that Frank wants us to think preparation could have saved lives. Again, the problem is Fort Repose… it’s miraculously spared.
So yeah, maybe a revision — “Be Prepared. For when the bomb goes up we could all die, but a few of us could survive and we’ll need that preparation.” Haha.
As I point out in the footnote, nuclear war propaganda (and by extension various forms of fiction) often find themselves in a twist. EDIT: I’ll quote the passage from the Oakes book that I think really narrows in on the matter. My attempt at explanation wasn’t as articulate. I LOVE THIS PARAGRAPH so I had to transcribe all of it:
“Optimists supported self-protection because it would work. cynics supported this policy not because it would work. It would not. But if the public believed in self-protection, the moral underpinnings of American security would be secure. From the cynical standpoint, civil defense did, indeed, have the purpose of protecting the public, but in a rather circuitous sense. Civil defense would convince American that they could protect themselves. This conviction, in turn, would provide the necessary support for deterrence, which would protect the American people by preventing a nuclear war. The real objective of civil defense, then, was not to protect the public in a nuclear attack. This was impossible. Rather, civil defense would forestall such an attack by creating a popular tolerance for deterrence. But Americans would tolerate deterrence only if they believed that in the even of its failure, they would still survive. This meant that it was necessary to promote civil defense not primarily as a means of legitimating deterrence, but as a means of ensuring survival. If civil defense could be marketed on this basis, tolerance for deterrence would follow and the ultimate purpose of civil defense would be achieved.”
I think Frank is a bit of a cynic but supports deterrance. I get the sense he knows that real survival isn’t possible. But he need us to believe that it is so he tells a story of survival in order that we believe that America’s had a vigorous geopolitical duty to support nuclear deterrence and prevent Communism from spreading. I expect a certain level of polemical confusion. And it’s on show here. That isn’t necessarily a flaw.
Well said. 1959 is also an interesting point of inflection. Before then (and arguably until, say, the mid 60s), nuclear war was probably survivable…by the Americans. The Soviets simply didn’t have the ability to reliably deliver nuclear weapons onto the American mainland.
Not that Frank could be sure of this, of course…
Frank seems a bit caught up in the post-Sputnik (1957) terror — the novel rides those panicky coattails. He mentions how the Russians are sending up more and more that spy on American instillations. Russia, as you probably remember, comes off far better post-nuclear exchange than the US.
This was my reaction when I read the book around 1962 when I was 13 or 14: this guy is telling us it won’t really be so bad so we won’t worry so much that it might happen, or about what we could change to keep it from happening. Not too subtle if I could pick it up at that age.
It’s a direct piece of Cold War polemic for deterrence — but as I mentioned in my discussion with Gideon, it demonstrates the confusing and muddled logic of deterrence propaganda. I’m not even convinced that my labeling him of a cynic is correct. For all I know he’s an optimist. (definitely check out the Oakes quote in my response to Gideon). Both groups of Cold War warriors believed that deterrence is the ultimate goal, regardless if they believed that one could or could not survive an actual attack. No wonder the Kennedy campaign enjoyed his take and employed him as a speechwriter considering JFK’s forceful stance as a Cold Warrior.
Obviously, Kennedy and Frank’s efforts were successful. Quemoy and Matsu remain free! 🙂
@Gideon — I don’t understand America’s JFK obsession. I like the Peace Corps, conceptually. If you’re going to fight the Cold War, fight it by doing good abroad. I mean, he did make general gesticulations towards Civil Rights…
“I don’t understand America’s JFK obsession. I like the Peace Corps, conceptually. If you’re going to fight the Cold War, fight it by doing good abroad. I mean, he did make general gesticulations towards Civil Rights…”
I once did a talk on JFK’s legislative legacy. He actually initiated a lot of proto Great Society efforts, which were carried out far more effectively by his successor and due to his martyrdom than had he tried it, himself.
Yeah, LBJ took advantage of JFK’s death in a very effective way to get controversial, and ground-breaking, legislation passed.
Speaking of LBJ, I attended the University of Texas (where his library is located) when Lady Bird Johnson died. I happened to be sitting near the presidential library while a progression or event in her honor took place. I was ambushed by a reporter — they were fascinated that a young student was interested in Lady Bird Johnson’s legacy. I panicked and dodged their questions and cameras in confusion as I certainly wasn’t hanging out around his library for that reason… I was trying to escape my annoying roommate in a nearby dorm and would wander in the evening around the campus.
I mean, who wouldn’t want to hang out near this building?
https://www.lbjlibrary.org/about
America’s JFK obsession (now fading, fortunately, since the number of people who remember him is shrinking fast) reflects the extreme trauma of his assassination for the nation at large. Don DeLillo aptly described it in LIBRA as the act that “broke the back of the American Century.” That last phrase was coined by Henry Luce in a paroxysm of boosterism in 1941 and caught on later, when the US was riding high relative to the rest of the world, since our main competitors had been flattened during World War II. JFK, handsome, articulate, and charismatic, was just the thing to inflate that bubble even further. His death thrust mortality–of all sorts– firmly into the national consciousness and ended the illusion of invulnerability, a lesson rubbed in firmly and painfully by the fiasco of Vietnam. (But you’re a historian–you must know more about these things than I do even though i lived through them.)
Yes, my comment was definitely more aimed at what he accomplished as president vs. the aura he resonated. I find the ramifications of the assassination downright fascinating — I mean, I’m a Malzberg aficionado and his fiction constantly revolves around that moment. In Scop (1976), Malzberg imagines a “dream of waste” descending from the moment in which American loses its innocence and sense of purpose in the world. Many of his fictions resurrect the horrific spectacle of the assassination as a malignant representation of the encroaching disfunction of the mechanical age.
And the beginning of Guernica Night (1975)… Malzberg can write!
“Here we are in Disney Land/Disney World; clutching the strange hands of those with whom we came, we move slowly through the ropes under the chanting of the attendants, swatting insects of habitation, toward the exhibit of the martyred President. The martyred President has become a manikin activated by machinery, tubes and wiring; he delivers selected portions of his famous addresses, stumbling back and forth […] (1)”
This discussion almost makes me want to put my current read aside and finally tackle Malzberg’s The Destruction of the Temple (1974), also about the Kennedy assassination.
Thanks for reviewing this! I remember reading this for high school English (that 1988 cover was the one I had), specifically, I seem to recall two items of note: that the exchange was precipitated by some sort of difficulty in or around Syria and that there dire need to secure salt. The latter was pretty interesting to me at the time as I wasn’t aware of the criticality of such a resource.
I can’t say I remember salt — although I’ll have to look more specifically for it. In the novel the Soviets wanted access to the Mediterranean Sea, which would have substantial geopolitical relevance. But, to be honest, I glossed over some of the lengthy sections describing the growing conflict.
Just to clarify, I’m referring to the residents of Fort Repose, not the Soviets. And yes, a couple quick searches confirm that as a plot point. I don’t recall the author specifically mentioning staving off something like hyponatremia, but I do remember now the diary bit about finding a supply of salt nearby.
Ah yes, they send their little navy of fishing ships on an expedition to get salt late in the story.