Despite his attraction to Davidson, Towers remains loyal to his wife and children in the United States. Two Australians sail with the American crew: Lieutenant Peter Holmes, naval liaison officer to the Americans, and a scientist, Professor John Osborne.Ĭommander Towers has become attached to a young Australian woman distantly related to Osborne, named Moira Davidson, who tries to cope with the impending end of human life through heavy drinking. In preparation for this journey, the submarine makes a shorter trip to port cities in northern Australia, including Cairns, Queensland, and Darwin, Northern Territory no survivors are found.
With hope that someone has survived in the contaminated regions, one of the last American nuclear submarines, USS Scorpion, placed by its captain, Commander Dwight Towers, under Australian naval command, is ordered to sail north from its port of refuge in Melbourne (Australia's southernmost major mainland city) to contact whoever is sending the signal. People in Australia detect a mysterious and incomprehensible Morse code-like radio signal originating from the American city of Seattle, Washington. Life in Melbourne continues reasonably normally, although the near-complete lack of motor fuels makes traveling difficult. The only parts of the planet still habitable are Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and the southern parts of South America, although they are slowly succumbing to radiation poisoning as well. Global air currents are slowly carrying the lethal nuclear fallout across the Intertropical Convergence Zone to the Southern Hemisphere. Most, if not all, of the bombs included cobalt to enhance their radioactive properties. There is also an attack by the Soviets on the People's Republic of China, which may have been a response to a Chinese attack aimed at occupying Soviet industrial areas near the Chinese border.
Because the aircraft used in these attacks were obtained from the Soviet Union, the Soviets were mistakenly blamed, triggering a retaliatory strike on the Soviet Union by NATO. The war began with a nuclear attack by Albania on Italy, and then escalated with the bombing of the United States and the United Kingdom by Egypt. World War III has devastated most of the populated world, polluting the atmosphere with nuclear fallout, and killing all human and animal life in the Northern Hemisphere.
The story is set primarily in and around Melbourne, Australia, in 1963. Although Whitman's poem resembles the plot of Shute's novel, the book does not reference it, as it does Eliot's poem. The 2000 film ends with a quote from Walt Whitman's poem "On the Beach at Night", describing how a father comforts his small daughter who is frightened as an approaching cloud bank blots out the evening stars one by one. Eliot's poem The Hollow Men, which includes the lines: The phrase "on the beach" is a Royal Navy term that means "retired from the Service." The title also refers to T. The story has been adapted twice as a film (in 19) and once as a BBC radio broadcast in 2008. For the novel, Shute expanded the storyline. Shute's initial story was published as a four-part series, The Last Days on Earth, in the London weekly periodical Sunday Graphic, in April 1957. As the radiation approaches, each person deals with impending death differently. The novel details the experiences of a mixed group of people in Melbourne as they await the arrival of deadly radiation spreading towards them from the Northern Hemisphere, following a nuclear war some years previous. On the Beach is an apocalyptic novel published in 1957, written by British author Nevil Shute after he emigrated to Australia.
0 kommentar(er)
