Fallout Shelters in Popular Culture
Fallout shelters feature prominently in the Robert A. Heinlein novel Farnham's Freehold (Heinlein built a fairly extensive shelter near his home in Colorado Springs in 1963), Pulling Through by Dean Ing, A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller and Earth by David Brin.
The Twilight Zone episode "The Shelter", from a Rod Serling script, deals with the consequences of actually using a shelter.
In the Only Fools and Horses episode "The Russians are Coming", Derek Trotter buys a lead fallout shelter, then decides to construct it in fear of an impending nuclear war caused by the Soviet Union (who were still active during the episode's creation).
In 1999 the film Blast from the Past was released. It is a romantic comedy film about a nuclear physicist, his wife, and son that enter a well-equipped, spacious fallout shelter during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. They do not emerge until 35 years later, in 1997. The film shows their reaction to contemporary society.
In book 11 of the Cirque Du Freak book series, Darren and Harkat must go into an alternate world. They then find a fallout shelter with post cards on the refrigerator from the late 1940s and realized that they had gone forward in time.
The Fallout series of computer games depicts the remains of human civilization after an immensely destructive nuclear war; the United States of America had built underground vaults to protect itself against a nuclear attack.
Paranoia, a role-playing game, takes place in a form of fallout shelter, which was become overrun by an insane computer.
The Metro 2033 book series by Russian author Dmitry Glukhovsky depicts survivors' life in the subway systems below Moscow and Saint-Petersburg after a global nuclear holocaust.
Cormac McCarthy's book The Road and the accompanying movie has its main characters finding a shelter (bomb or fallout) with uneaten rations.
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Famous quotes containing the words shelters, popular and/or culture:
“Happy is the house that shelters a friend! It might well be built, like a festal bower or arch, to entertain him a single day. Happier, if he know the solemnity of that relation, and honor its law! He offers himself a candidate for that covenant comes up, like an Olympian, to the great games, where the first- born of the world are the competitors.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“What’s wrong, a little pavement sickness?”
—Russian saying popular in the Soviet period, trans. by Vladimir Ivanovich Shlyakov (1993)
“Cynicism makes things worse than they are in that it makes permanent the current condition, leaving us with no hope of transcending it. Idealism refuses to confront reality as it is but overlays it with sentimentality. What cynicism and idealism share in common is an acceptance of reality as it is but with a bad conscience.”
—Richard Stivers, U.S. sociologist, educator. The Culture of Cynicism: American Morality in Decline, ch. 1, Blackwell (1994)