Einstein's Monsters (1987)

Martin Amis skillfully brushes away the dust which had laid down shrouding the Nuclear Weapons Race, by the aid of a compilation of five short stories. A well-written set of views do make you indulge into
1) Thinkability – “Nuclear Weapons repel all thought, perhaps because they can end all thought.”…that makes one think, doesn’t it?
2) Reality – so grotesque which is!

“Language cannot live with this reality”-so true. So when you enter the world of nuclear weapons there are two possibilities – Nuclear Warfare or Nuclear Disarmament, both of which are difficult to imagine-the former due to its immense fatal repercussions and the latter because of its immense improbability. His distinct style of writing is unquestionably impressive. The story “Insight at Flame Lake” so uniquely uncovers the life of a young boy suffering with Schizophrenia. A probable future of humankind has been unveiled – and beneath the veil is laying a world so petrifying, dehumanized or rather inhabitable – a world inhabited by the Einstein’s Monsters.

“Events that we call “acts of God” – floods, earthquakes, eruptions – are flesh wounds compared to human act of nuclear was: a million Hiroshimas. Like God, nuclear weapons are free creations of the human mind. Unlike God, nuclear weapons are real. And they are here.”

“Indeed they are remarkable artifacts. They derive their power from an equation: when a pound of uranium-235 is fissioned, the liberated mass within its 1,132,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms is multiplied by the speed of light squared – with the explosive force, that is to say, of 186,000 miles per second times 186,000 miles per second. Their size, their power, has no theoretical limit. They are biblical in their anger.”

This piece of literature/fiction is a masterpiece for sure. Another of his work “Times Arrow” , the autobiography of a doctor who helped torture Jews during the Holocaust, which was shortlisted for the 1991 Booker Prize, drew notice both for its unusual technique — time runs backwards during the entire novel, down to the dialogue initially being spoken backwards — as well as for its topic. I havent read Times Arrow but appears to be quite tempting :)