What is it with me and the nuclear end of the world lately?

[amethyst73]

 My husband and I downloaded an audiorecording of The City at World's End by Edmund Hamilton and have been listening to it.  It's an excellent recording of a sci-fi novel published in 1951 which starts out with a "super-atomic" exploding over Middletown.  The science, such as it is, is pretty laughable, and Hamilton doesn't exactly have a good opinion of the common man, but it's an interesting read as a product of its time.  I'll probably have a review of it when we're done listening.

A friend lent me a copy of Uranium: War, Energy, and the Rock that shaped the World by Tom Zoellner ().  Zoellner makes no secret of his overall opinion of uranium, but once you get past that, it's an interesting read about uranium's discovery as a radioactive element, its early reception as the best substance on earth (even better than radium!), its development and use as a weapon, and US society's reaction to The Bomb.  There's more than that, but I'm only about halfway through the book, being busily fascinated by such tidbits as Bert the Turtle's song about ducking and covering back in the 1950s.

Finally, as I'm nearly done with Zelda: Skyward Sword (only the very last boss battle to go!), I started Fallout 3 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallout_3), one of the games that came with the PS3 we bought a couple of months ago.  Why Fallout 3?  Why not the original Assassin's Creed, which also came with it?  I think part of it was wanting to play a completely different game from just about anything else I'd played or seen; I think the closest I'll have come to it in style is probably Metroid Prime (which, I will note, I quit partway through).  But from what I've read about Fallout 3, it's much more of an RPG than it is an FPS - you can get your wrist computer to auto-aim for you, you have stats and skills... and, yes, it's set in an alternate 1950s, after the nuclear holocaust.

Anyway.  Me and the end of the world.  What gives, self?