The Long Tomorrow

'''Brackett, Leigh. The Long Tomorrow'''. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1955. Available also as a audiobook from Audible.com.

Post-holocaust tale; note Bartorstown, in Book Three, an underground research facility dominated by a computer and a nuclear reactor (Wolfe 136). Note also placing the "technological social remnant . . . within a twenty-first century agrarian society akin to New Mennonites of the 'past'" (Kessler, "Bibliography," listed under Reference).

There are groups of fanatics in the novel, and usually peaceful religious people are capable of stoning to death a (correctly) suspected heretic from Bartorstown; but, significantly, the society of the New Mennonites (and others) is shown to have positive aspects and act as a legitimate response to a nuclear, hence technologically-mediated, apocalypse — at least for a few generations, and if we accept survival with stagnation as an acceptable way for humans to be in the world. The acceptability of stagnation is up to readers, although the generic expectations of SF, and the plot of the novel tip us toward Bartorstown and the possibility of restoring a technologically-advancing human culture).

Expanded by RDE, 22Feb19