Nevil Shute is a journeyman fabulist; fantasy simulating reality is his preserve. A more gifted writer wouldn't be so successful visualizing men and women of a residual humanity, with no future and nothing to think about it. [On the Beach] is not prophesy but fictional essayism; it is not eschatology, it is Univac. The prophet concerns himself with the future while it is still present; Mr. Shute hires fate as his co-author and has a wry old time knocking down his props. We are not harrowed that they become extinct, and it isn't even disturbing that the author alone has survived.

Mr. Shute is too seldom inclined to let the obvious or the twice-told alone. When the dialogue is not straight banality it makes too cheap sport of the habits of life that make life a habit….

Suspense would seem as irrelevant as characterization; in the transmitter sequence...