This Is the Way the World Ends

First published: 1986

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Science fiction—apocalypse

Time of work: 1995

Locale: Massachusetts, a submarine, and the antarctic ice cap

The Plot

George Paxton, an engraver of tombstones and a contented family man, is persuaded to buy a scopas (Self-Contained Post-Attack Survival) suit for his daughter but soon is forced by financial hardship to cancel the contract. Later, he meets Nadine Covington, an odd woman with black blood who offers him a “free” scopas suit as part of a commission. To collect it, Paxton must visit a surreal MAD Hatter’s tea party (MAD signifying Mutually Assured Destruction, an idea associated with arms races) and sign a document stating that his purchase of the suit is an admission of complicity in the nuclear arms race.

A nuclear attack begins while Paxton is trying to get the suit home. He is shot by a neighbor intent on stealing it and sees a giant vulture flying overhead. He awakes aboard a fully armed nuclear submarine bound for Antarctica to learn that he is one of six individuals who are signatories to the McMurdo Sound Agreement. The other people aboard the submarine include a beautiful psychotherapist named Morning Valcourt. Paxton is asked to decide whether the submarine should launch its missiles by way of reprisal. He opts instead to ditch their payloads. He is visited again by Covington, who shows him a series of prophetic lantern slides painted by Leonardo da Vinci (according to the instructions of Nostradamus), one of which shows Paxton with his daughter Holly and Valcourt, all wearing scopas suits.

As the bizarre voyage continues, it becomes apparent that the signatories to the McMurdo Sound Agreement will be required to answer for their complicity in the destruction of humankind before a tribunal of the “unadmitted,” human beings who, because of the nuclear holocaust, were robbed of their opportunity to be born. Covington and the MAD Hatter are among the representatives of the unadmitted. Paxton and his codefendants are “tortured” en route by being given the best of everything they desire, consuming it while envious crowds of the unadmitted look on.

The prosecution and the six defendants present their various cases, revealing, among other things, that the war was an accident caused by misidentification of a flock of giant vultures as enemy bombers. Only Paxton comes close to being acquitted, having only one of the four charges against him upheld, but his conviction for crimes against the future still carries the death penalty. The prophecy of the lantern slide remains to be fulfilled, and it is—but the Christmas Day that Paxton spends playing on an ice sheet is a carefully contrived illusion. Afterward, there is nothing more for him to do but to engrave a tombstone suitable for the entire human race. The novel’s last words are provided by Nostradamus, whose exhibition of his secret slides to a boy in 1554 has provided a frame narrative for Paxton’s story.