The Postman actually worked for me in this regard. Isolated villages and wannabe-empire-builders, and the like.
Fourthed. Exceptional book.
Fifthed. I opened this thread to suggest this book. Very realistic depiction.
I first read it as a teen. However, it resonates even more for me as a parent, as…
…the protagonist vainly tries to pass knowledge of the past on to his descendants, but has great difficulty even with teaching his own children to read. Unfortunately, literacy is no longer particularly relevant to their lives. 
Another vote for Threads, I remember the other kids talking about it the next day in hushed, scared, tones.
I’d have to fourth Threads. Not sure if it’s the most realistic post-apocalyptic depiction - we can’t tell - but it’s among the nastiest. The society that emerges towards the end of the film resembles modern-day Somalia, but much worse - Somalia at least has a functioning outside world to supply it with equipment, whereas in Threads there’s a strong implication that the entire world is up the swanee. And Britain is an island, it only has limited area to support farming.
Is it realistic, though? It had a lot of stuff about nuclear winter, and although I’m wary of stirring up a debate about climate science, the general modern consensus seems to be that nuclear winter wouldn’t be as long or impactful as imagined. Still, they wouldn’t have known that in the early 1980s. The complete breakdown of language seemed a bit over-the-top (the idea is that there are no schools after the bomb, and the kids learn everything from televisions, powered by hand generators, but they don’t understand the cartoons because they’re alien to them).
There was a British TV show in the 1970s called Survivors, that tried to present a realistic portrait of Britain post-viral killoff. There were still cars and shotguns, but of course people had to scavenge. There was some semblance of order, and just enough people left to rebuild things, although justice was very harsh and there was no place for the old and weak. Britain seemed like a grim place in the 1970s.
From what I remember, The War Game didn’t extrapolate very far after the atomic strike, which was limited to Birmingham, I think. And I had the impression that people who had lived through the Blitz probably wouldn’t have been all that shocked by it. I realise it was hugely controversial at the time, but that was because the government thought it was inappropriate, not because television-watchers at home were slitting their wrists (they didn’t get to see it, anyway).
Watching Paul Greengrass’ Bloody Sunday I had the same feeling; this is how it all falls apart. The thrust of Threads was that the societal disruptions of the past - the empires that rose and fell - happened against a background of relatively limited technology and interconnectedness. The Roman Empire fell hard, and much knowledge was lost, but humanity persisted. Whereas the modern world is utterly dependent on a sophisticated technological framework for everything, from the internet to container shipping, just-in-time manufacturing, refrigeration etc, and any shock sufficiently powerful to briefly smash this will bring it all crashing to the ground, with the pieces broken for generations.
Now we’re moving into a post-physical age, when all of our data - everything we do and watch - is stored in distant servers, in the cloud. A big solar storm that wipes all that data out would leave human society like a brainless zombie, without any memory left (assuming that human beings survived). I remember reading somewhere that, back in the very late 1800s, it was just about possible for one man to know 99% of every scientific discipline. Or something along those lines; there was a time when an average man could mentally grasp the most complicated machine. Nowadays you have to be a genius and study for years to grasp the intricacies of quantum physics. That kind of knowledge will surely take a long time to reaccumulate if it’s ever lost.
But modern society appears to be quite resilient to massive disruptions. The earthquakes and wars of recent years caused immense suffering, but ultimately Apple’s new iPad is still coming out on March 16. It takes an immensely complicated society to produce and sell an iPad, and have a reason to do so.
No, the film extrapolated an all-out attack, and showed multiple targets in Britain. It concentrated on Birmingham, though. The government objected in part because the film had the government forces taking actions against ordinary citizens in the intent of keeping order that people would not take kindly to.
And it was definitely worse than the Blitz – people having their retinas scarred by looking at the blast, lots of not-well-identified injuries, that sort of thing. They tried to put it in terms of the Blitz, because I suspect that’s what people were familiar with, but things were clearly worse. Again, for my money, it was a scarier film than the others, Threads included.
I just watched it (thanks for the link). It did seem pretty realistic, and very depressing - things go to hell and stay there in an extremely short time.
There was a rather odd novel a couple of decades back, called “After the Zap” IIRC, in which some electromagnetic pulse weapon was set off. It was intended to wipe the enemy’s computers and fry their satellites, etc. Instead it wiped ALL the computers and fried ALL the communications. As an unexpected side effect, it also wiped all HUMAN memory, the brain being electromagnetic too.
Strange book. Everyone sort of wandering around in a daze wondering who they used to be.
I do that now!
It sounds silly, but I’m going to put in a vote for The Road Warrior, and its basic conflict between the grasshoppers and the ants. Some people are going to try to hang on to what’s left and rebuild society, and some people are just going to want to watch it all burn up.
(I can’t vouch for the movie’s fashion sense, but I’ve always just assumed that that’s what Australians wore in the 80s).
Agreed, and the ‘Warday’ itself is very well done, some of the imagery is chilling. Such as the survivors of a plane crash watching a nearby city being destroyed by nuclear weapons, its over the horizon and all they can see is a chalky flicker of light on the underside of the clouds overhead as the warheads detonate.
Its such a pity that a proposed sequel detailing events from the Soviet perspective was never completed.
It’s at least a sort of weapon that’s been contemplated. No country has admitted building one, but it would be a stretch to categorically rule it out.
another vote for Earth Abides. Simply great book.
(I keep suggesting it to everyone who checks out The Stand by Stephen King from the library. I think the contrast between the two is interesting.)
I’m of the considered opinion that any depiction that includes a “society that emerges” is soft-pedaling the outcome of a full-scale nuclear exchange.
I know that experts can be found who say a full-scale nuclear exchange won’t be so bad, and that nuclear winter won’t be so bad. IMHO many of those experts have some conflict-of-interest problems, but certainly they’re as human as the rest of us…and the rest of us have a terrible record of assuming war won’t be as bad as it subsequently turns out. We universally underestimate casualties and assume a short war that won’t affect commerce, despite having been wrong almost every single time, year after year, for thousands of years. Technology has exacerbated this problem…teething troubles aside, most of them have been much more destructive than originally imagined once they were employed in significant numbers. Just to take one random example, the movement to ban cluster bombs is driven by the effect large numbers of unexploded submunitions have on communities for years after the wars have ended and everyone has gone home – a major issue, but surely not one intended by the designers of these weapons.
The Day After famously showed Jason Robards standing in the pile of 2x4s that had been a house. I was unimpressed. Frankly, that looked less apocalyptic than, say, the post-tornado footage of Joplin, Missouri.
This is the book I was going to suggest. I’ve enjoyed a lot of post apocalyptic fiction and the world realised in that book seems like the most realistic.
Well, that sequence also showed him taking in a view of what used to be Kansas City, but was now a flattened vista of rubble and fires. And we understand of course that thousands of other cities in the northern hemisphere have been similarly destroyed.
The Day After doesn’t follow on, like Threads and other works do, to show the longer term consequences of all-out nuclear war. I wish it had, just for another half hour or so. But given that the movie ends when it does, I thought they did all right with it.
IIRC the film centres on Kent (just checked, yes it’s Rochester in Kent) not Birmingham. What I found most chilling about the film is that in many key scenes they link the speculative horrors with the real horrors of the second world war. It’s also indicative that they chose a relatively small town to set events in. It can be taken as a given that the situation closer to London and other big cities would be even worse.
I didn’t realize they were thinking about a sequel to Warday. I would have much rather read that proposed sequel instead of Nature’s End. Although Nature’s End had a few interesting bits in it (the Tax Police, Ultra-advanced Gerontology, the killer smog and the Amazonia fires).
The ersatz government documents in Warday really added to the verisimilitude. The clinical tone just felt real, which made it a whole lot scarier. If any of you all haven’t read it, I’m sure it’s a bit dated—the Soviet Union was the major antagonist, after all—and there isn’t even the hint of the Internet, IIRC; but it’s a really interesting read all the same.
I don’t think it was meant to be a complete breakdown of language;
the doctor at the end could still speak and expected her to be able to speak, but she and a similarly-aged boy couldn’t because they’d been retarded by the effects of radiation while in the womb. And I don’t know if those TVs are the entirety of schooling they get.
It’s a barely functioning society even 15 years later.
When The Wind Blows has been already given but here’s a story about it. When the two leads, John Mills and Peggy Ashcroft, where putting down the voice tracks they were very uncomfortable with the stop go nature of the recording process and asked could they just do it together and all in one go like it was a play. Eventually that was agreed and they did it in one take, propper old school pros that they were. The wonam who had to edit it say in a interview that she then when she went to edit voice and film she did it also in one sitting as it was too painfull to do anymore. She came out tired and with tears streaming down her face.
The whole thing is up on youtube but I would find it very heard to watch it again not because of violence and the like and that’s not in it but the old couple is just so cute and it’s just so heartbreaking to see them go through it.
Now I’m remembering that low level fear that was with me all through my teenage years.