Speaking of Heinlein, while we are all familiar with at least one or two of his works, not many people are aware of one of his more interesting pieces – Farnham’s Freehold. A short read about some folks who pile into their bomb shelter to survive WW3 and wake up far in the future where things are a good bit different than the time they just left. It touches on some fairly sensitive issues (not the least of which is Heinlein’s apparently increasing fascination with..uhm …’close family relationships’…).

What is interesting is that Heinlein not only wrote about riding things out in a bomb shelter (or fallout shelter, really), but he actually built one under is home. In the ’60’s he had a custom home built (which was numbered ‘1776’, of course) and under it he built a bomb shelter. While the house is gone, the shelter remains.

Fallout/bomb shelters also appeared in a few of Heinlein’s other works. There was a very nice one in ‘Friday‘ (one of my favorite Heinlein books), and theres some very clever information in the story about camouflaging the shelter and hiding its security system control switch. Good reading.

One more thing, while I’m on the subject of books. Here’s a link I found listing a nice collection of post-apocalypse fiction. I’ve heard of many of them, and a lot of them are pulp, but they’re still quite entertaining.