Merlin Publishing

Sam Baneham's highly original, satiric Irish novel, The Cloud of Desolation (1982) creates through memorable story and singular language a technocratic dystopia. Irrational people, as Baneham clearly shows, may yet bring about the Biblical 'day ... of wrath, a day of desolation,... a day of clouds and thick darkness'. Although written almost three decades ago, its fear of all-out nuclear war remains all too pertinent to the twenty-first century. Baneham's parable of a possible City of the Future warns against unleashing the Bomb's Cloud of Destruction that inevitably must become a Cloud of Desolation.