[1] Its publication in The Saturday Evening Post provoked considerable reaction amongst its readers on account of its portrayal of government's response to the unfolding worldwide crisis.

Buckley, having advance warning of the government's plot to hydrogen bomb major cities, alerts Custance to evacuate.

Picking up a travelling companion, a gun shop owner named Pirrie, after an attempt to procure arms, they find that they must sacrifice many of the aspects of the morality they held before the famine in order to stay alive.

In 2009, as part of a BBC Radio 4 science fiction season, the station broadcast a drama in five episodes, based on the novel and narrated by David Mitchell.

[5] In the 2017 television series Feud, Joan Crawford (played by Jessica Lange) is portrayed rejecting the book as a possible movie source.