A serialized version, edited by Frederik Pohl, appeared in Worlds of If magazine (July, August, and October 1964).

When the attack actually occurs the group, along with Joe, the family's black servant, retreat to the fallout shelter beneath the house.

After exiting through an emergency tunnel, they find themselves in a completely undamaged, semi-tropical region apparently uninhabited by humans or other sentient creatures.

The group is taken captive by blacks, but is spared execution when Joe intervenes by conversation with their captors' leader in French.

Rather than execute them, Ponse, "Lord Protector" of the house to which they have been enslaved, asks them to volunteer for a time-travel experiment that will send them back to their own time.

When the novel was published in 1964, Kirkus Reviews stated that the "characters have souls of wood pulp" and that "The satire on fall-out shelters, race and sex lacks inspiration.

"[3] The critical work The Heritage of Heinlein describes Farnham's Freehold as not "an altogether successful novel" and that the book's sexism "may be a crucial flaw.

"[4] Charles Stross has rhetorically asked whether "anyone [has] a kind word to say for ... Farnham's Freehold", and then described it as the result of "a privileged white male from California, a notoriously exclusionary state, trying to understand American racism in the pre–Martin Luther King era.