Literary aftershocks

As Albert E. Stone points out in his preface to Literary Aftershocks, the 1992 issue of Nuclear Texts and Contexts carried a headline proclaiming "Farewell to the First Atomic Age." Literary Aftershocks, Stone asserts, "takes seriously that adjective first and invites readers of history and literature to do the same.". And indeed readers of this volume will do so, for Stone has compiled a sweeping, vitally important survey of the literary response to nuclear realities from 1945 to the present. Represented here are a diversity of writers, predominantly American, speaking with urgency and passion to a host of concerns: radioactivity, nuclear warfare, disarmament, the future of the planet, respect for life, and more. The breadth of selections is striking, ranging from such well-known works as Bradbury's Martian Chronicles, Hersey's Hiroshima, Ginsberg's "Plutonian Ode," and Schell's Fate of the Earth to writings and authors heretofore given scant attention. Together, these voices emit a clarion call for life and not death, for peace and not war. . Writing in crisp, pointed, and always accessible language, Stone approaches his material partly chronologically and partly by genre. Here r