Alas, Babylon, a review

Have you heard of this book? I'd bet that a lot of you have. Have you read it though?

When I started this blog, my idea was to highlight "hidden gems and forgotten favorites." I spend time each month trying to find books that hopefully you haven't heard of or haven't thought about in years. I also try to find books that don't already have a zillion reviews online. Alas, Babylon has loads of reviews. It's a true classic of its genre. It's been printed and reprinted (deciding which cover to highlight here was a difficult choice, but this one is my favorite). It deserves all of that recognition because it is a great book.

However, I was in college the first time someone recommended it to me. A friend of mine mentioned it, and I told her I didn't recognize the title. She said, "Ah! You have to read it!" Some time later, I was in yet another thrift store, and I found a copy (different cover). "That's that book she told me about!" I think I paid $2 for it at the time.

Since the mid 00s, there have been a lot of books and movies and tv series about zombie apocalypses, a variety of dystopias, and ends of the world. While I've heard person after person go on about the media of this topic of the last twenty-ish years, I rarely hear anyone mention Alas, Babylon. How can that be? It's the granddaddy of post-apocalyptic fiction!

There are others, of course. My current copy of Alas, Babylon has some listed in the foreward. But it's my opinion that this one is the best. You'll have to decide for yourself if you agree. Why do I think this one is the best? It's because throughout the novel, there is still faith and hope. It's not doom-and-gloom. I would, in fact, call it hopeful.

Alas, Babylon is about a group of people in an unnamed year (though I'd guess early 1960s) who are surviving in the small fictional town of Fort Repose, placed in central Florida after most of the United States (and the whole world, actually) has been bombed catastrophically. Our main character, Randy Bragg, has insider warning to prepare from his older brother, an Air Force colonel, about a day ahead of the bombings. A bachelor in his thirties, he scrambles to stock up, tells a select few neighbors, and then picks up his sister-in-law, niece, and nephew. Together, his tiny community watches the bombs fall, using binoculars and watches to figure out placement and times.

There is a lot of discussion of military matters in the book. I'm not a military fiction afficionado, nor am I particularly well-versed in that time period's military or political history. (I think it's believable, I'll get to that later.) However, despite that not being of particular interest to me, I have happily re-read this book at least three times in my life. There is a cast of characters that compels me to read their story again and again.

Randy Bragg isn't perfect, but he gets the job done. He overcomes racial tensions, political concerns, social and personal issues, and all manner of physical and local problems through his belief in community and determination to survive. He pulls around himself a group of people that care for each other and work selflessly. It's a team I can root for. If I were unlucky enough to be thrown into such chaos, I'd want people like these on my team.

I also like that women and people of color are treated well and with due respect. You have to remember, this book was published in 1959. Randy Bragg has a girlfriend named Lib McGovern. She has opinions, which she voices regularly. She isn't just a prop character to clean his cuts when he gets home. In fact, she doesn't do that. When he has to take a truck out to lure out highwaymen, she volunteers to drive.

There is also the matter of the Henrys. They are a family of black people who are his neighbors. In a time when racial segregation was alive and well, Pat Frank chose to make almost half the cast of characters black. And they are intelligent, involved, and important to the story. Their race isn't dismissed, but openly discussed. I appreciate that Pat Frank didn't shy away, but rather embraced these characters.

In fact, the only character I felt really didn't get her dues was little Peyton, his twelve year old niece. And even she has her moment of heroism.

So, as someone who has told you I don't know enough to verify that this book is written with military or political history in mind, how can I be so confident to say this one will hold up to scrutiny?

Pat Frank. He only wrote a handful of novels. However, his most notable achievements were all related to his distinguished career as a newspaperman and government consultant on political and military matters. He worked for the Journal (Jacksonville, FL) from 1927 through the end of WWII. Then the New York Journal until 1932. After that, he joined the staff of The Washington Herald in DC.

After five years with the Herald he became the chief of the Washington bureau of the Overseas News Agency. In 1941, he was appointed Assistant Chief of Mission at the Office of War Information. He was also a war correspondent in Italy, Austria, Turkey, Hungary, and Germany for three years. He won a War Department commendation in 1945.

After WWII, he quit journalism to write novels. He wrote fiction and non-fiction, and almost exclusively with topics surrounding nuclear technology and it's effects on the world.

In 1952 he was appointed a member of the United Nations Mission to Korea. He was directly involved in the activities which resulted in the 1953 armistice ending active fighting throughout the Korean peninsula.

He published Alas, Babylon in 1959. Afterwards, he published only one more novel. He also received an American Heritage Foundation Award. He died in 1964 in Jacksonville, Florida. He was only 57 years old.

Here at Weird Old Books, I generally write about fantasy and sci-fi authors who have awards under their belts that I'm very familiar with, Hugos or Nebulas or the like. Pat Frank wrote an excellent post-apocalyptic fiction novel that now reads like vintage sci-fi. It's fun and hopeful and even quaint in places. Helen Bragg is worried about mixing colors at a dinner party and Alice Cooksey starts wearing pants because she has to ride a bicycle to work. These are not the concerns of us leisurely readers in 2026.

However, Pat Frank was writing this novel at a time when the reality of hydrogen bombing out of Russia was a real threat that folks were thinking about and preparing for all of the time. He wrote it like a journalist, like a whistle-blower, and like a non-fiction writer. That comes through. I think the thing that I love about this novel is that ever since the first read-through, I still think about it often. What would I do? Where would I go? Would my neighborhood of people band together? Would we even know them well enough to do so?

If right now your neighborhood was bombed by some foreign power, what would you do? Do you know your neighbor's names? Do you know a doctor you might call on?

More than the skills I could call on to help my community, though that is made painfully important in Alas, Babylon, I think about my relationships with my community. In the book there are characters with no particular skill to bring, but they are still valued because of their relationships. In that way, this book has haunted my thoughts for almost twenty years.

If you have not read it, I highly recommend it. It's an enjoyable kind of haunting, what this book brings you. It puts you in a different time and place, as all novels do. But this one will stay in your mind for a long time, and force you to think about things you might not have thought about before.

As for content warning, this one is a bit tricky. There isn't any sex, I can recall no language, though I just read it, and no drug usage. There is, however, violence. There are the bombings, which are violent on such a large scale it almost becomes meaningless to your mind. But there are also drugheads robbing pharmacies, and highwaymen that attack passersby. Nothing too graphic, but it's there on the page.

There are also some outdated racial terms, the most offensive of which come out of the mouths of the bad guys. To be honest, I had to look it up to even know what it meant. That's how outdated the term was!

I would say the most concerning "content warning" about this book is really the topic as a whole. If you, or someone you are buying for, has the tendency to grow overly anxious about the what-ifs, then this might not be the book for you. The truth is, this book deals with baby bombs compared to what is available now. If reading this sends you down that rabbit hole, it's going to get very dark, very quickly.

But if you can stay out of the rabbit holes, I think this book is worth reading. Randy Bragg and his neighbors are hopeful, and largely successful, all the way to the end. They make it. For me, that's the greatest message of all: We can make it.

My copy of Alas, Babylon is available to buy here.

You can also find copies at Pango Books. If you use my code (WEIRDOLDBOOKS), you receive $5 off of your first order. (I receive $2 towards buying another Weird Old Book to review!)