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This Is the Way the World Ends - Softcover

 
9780441807116: This Is the Way the World Ends
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Essef - When George Paxman, a contented tombstone engraver in a sleepy Massachusetts town, is offered a bargain, he doesn't hesitate long. The deal is that his beloved daughter gets an otherwise unaffordable scopas suit to protect her from radioactive fall-out and all George has to do is sign a document admitting that, as a passive citizen who did nothing to stop it, he has a degree of guilt for any nuclear war that breaks out. George signs on the dotted line. And then the unthinkable happens. The world and everyone in it (scopas suit or no scopas suit) is destroyed in nuclear Armageddon. Except for George and five others who must now face prosecution from the great mass of humanity who will now never be born. And George Paxman stands accused in the name of all the people who stood by and never raised a finger to stop the horror of nuclear war.

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Product Description:
In 1995, an ordinary tombstone engraver named George Paxton signs a document to obtain something for his daughter and finds himself implicated in the start of World War III
Review:
James Morrow had published SF novels before, but This Is the Way the World Ends (1986) reached a new level of intensity, tackling World War III horrors with ultra-black magic realism plus a touch of Lewis Carroll. Like George Orwell's 1984, it still packs a grim punch although history took another course.

As the Cold War heats up, Americans frantically buy "scopas suits"(Self-COntained Post-Attack Survival) as protection against nukes. Tombstone engraver George Paxton can't afford one for his young daughter, until a strange old woman commissions epitaphs for her "parents" and pays by directing him to a magic shop where the scopas suit costs only his signature--acknowledging responsibility for any nuclear war. Soon we realise George's improvised epitaphs are for Eve, Adam and everyone:

She was better than she knew. He never found out what he was doing here.

Whimsy and social satire give way to nightmare as the missiles fall, scopas suits prove useless, and post-nuclear hell is painted in stomach-churning detail: flashburns, melted eyes, shattered people begging for death.

George, though, is rescued. As one of six who signed the McMurdo Sound Agreement, he must stand trial in Antarctica for complicity in murdering humanity. Prosecution, defenders, judges and police are the "unadmitted", unborn future generations now denied real life, whose sheer rage has won them temporary existence. Old disarmament and deterrence arguments, wittily rehashed in the Nuremberg-like court, seem all too different after the worst has happened. This queasy tragicomedy isn't easily forgotten. --David Langford

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  • PublisherAce Books
  • Publication date1991
  • ISBN 10 0441807119
  • ISBN 13 9780441807116
  • BindingMass Market Paperback
  • Rating

Other Popular Editions of the Same Title

9780156002080: This is the Way the World Ends

Featured Edition

ISBN 10:  ISBN 13:  9780156002080
Publisher: Thomson Learning, 1995
Softcover

  • 9780575081185: This Is the Way the World Ends (S.F. MASTERWORKS)

    Gateway, 2013
    Softcover

  • 9780030080371: This Is the Way the World Ends

    Henry ..., 1986
    Hardcover

  • 9780575071018: This Is The Way The World Ends (Gollancz SF collector's edition)

    Gollancz, 2000
    Softcover

  • 9780099630708: This is the Way the World Ends

    Legend..., 1989
    Softcover

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