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ground. As Level 7's safety falls into question, its inhabitants confront their growing isolation, overconfidence in technology, loneliness below a dead world, and the insanity of a society whose momentum toward annihilation exceeded its collective will to live. At last, the inhabitants of "Level 7" are wiped out after a malfunction in their nuclear power pile results in lethal contamination of their erstwhile sanctuary. They are apparently the last human beings on Earth to perish, and X-127 is the very last one at the story's conclusion. The extinction of humanity has taken four months from the time that the missiles were first fired.
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nuclear missiles, and their support staff, were selected for their ability to behave like machines, yet are counted upon to preserve the human spirit and rebuild the human race. X-127 and his colleagues attempt to carry on human life, but discover that institutions such as marriage and preparations for child-rearing have been hollowed out by conditions and attitudes in the antiseptic underground.
253:(which lasts a total of 2 hours and 58 minutes). From that point, humanity's few civilian survivors are situated within a collection of underground shelter complexes on Levels 1 through 5 at various depths from the irradiated surface, while military personnel already occupy the deepest and safest Levels 6 and 7. It later emerges that the orders given have been wholly automatic due to a
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X-127 and his fellow shelter inhabitants belatedly learn the criteria that had determined admission to the shelters: civilians were granted only an illusion of protection, while government officials and military personnel were granted significantly more security. Those who were assigned to launch the
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Officer X-127 is intended as a preventative anti-radioactive medicine, good for consumption in any place in the world. It is especially offered to button-pushers, rocket constructors, nuclear physicists, megaton bomb manufacturers, "small" atomic bomb producers, and last but not least, statesmen and
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measurements. It is left to the individual reader to determine if this indeed identifies a
Western setting or merely reflects the author's background. In any case, specific national identities are arguably irrelevant to the book's themes of dehumanization, the abstraction of nuclear warfare, and the
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Toward the end of the novel, the inhabitants of surviving shelters within collaterally hit neutral nations, the former enemy nation and the unnamed protagonist nation gradually meet their deaths as radioactive surface contamination makes its way down past air filters and into water sources in the
237:. It is told from the first-person perspective (a diary) of a modern soldier, X-127, living in the underground military complex Level 7, where he and several hundred others are expected to reside permanently. X-127 fulfills the role of 'push-button' offensive initiator of his nation's
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This book is neutral - in the sense that it does not defend either the East or the West. It is not neutral in the sense that it accuses both. It is submitted for the benefit of the West and the East, as well as anybody caught in
349:. It had originally been written as a feature film adaptation, but was cut down to fit into the show's one hour time slot. It has been released on DVD with all other extant episodes of the series.
324:, who discover the diary amongst the ruins of a destroyed Earth. However, this was removed in editions published before 2003 because it was felt that it spoiled the ending of the book.
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capacity against an unspecified enemy. X-127 narrates life within a deep shelter before, during and after a nuclear war that wipes out the human species.
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danger that this leads to when combined with the destructive potential of the weapons involved. The novel thus acts as a warning against the
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4.5 stars out of five, stating that X127's story "has the strange unreality and impact of the too intense reality".
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strategy; the war has taken place as a series of automated electronic responses to an initial accident.
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politicians. It is 'not' (!) effective against buttons, robots, rockets, and the bombs themselves.
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499:"Future Hell: Nuclear Fiction in Pursuit of History"
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468:Nuclear Holocausts: Atomic War in Fiction
109:Learn how and when to remove this message
536:. Library of American Fiction. Madison:
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643:Novels about nuclear war and weapons
47:adding citations to reliable sources
633:Israeli speculative fiction novels
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638:American post-apocalyptic novels
587:Gale, Floyd C. (February 1961).
462:"Two: The Causes of Nuclear War"
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16:1959 novel by Mordecai Roshwald
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538:University of Wisconsin Press
618:1959 science fiction novels
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474:Kent State University Press
438:Roshwald, Mordecai (1959).
414:Apocalyptic science fiction
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339:for a 1966 episode of the
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532:. In Seed, David (ed.).
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419:1959 in science fiction
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381:Galaxy Science Fiction
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460:Brians, Paul (1987).
613:1959 American novels
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595:. pp. 139–143.
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562:"SR, P2 1980-11-03"
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346:Out of the Unknown
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572:January 15,
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