On The Beach

The thing about this novel is that it should be a hugely emotional story. The last survivors after an unexpected nuclear war, and how they deal with their inevitable deaths from the fallout. Its author was never a writer by profession, self-admittedly; he was a physicist and mathematician, which comes across in the writing. He goes to great detail when describing engines, weather patterns, and the functions of submarines, but when he approaches human nature, he stops. The characters in the story simply do not emote. They accept their fate mechanically, they do not linger in pity, in joy, in romance, or in anything. It is simply their existence that is sad, and even then only if the sobbing reader herself is.