This makes sense, in that Shute really didn't try to map out air currents and such. Instead, he simply thought of the poisoned air as a curtain, coming down on the human race. Or as a curtain coming down on a Mercator map, taking "out" one parallel of latitude at a time.
Not exactly, tontac. Shute does have a scene where Dwight explains to Moira that no winds blow straight down from the north to the south; that if they did, they'd be dead already. He then goes on to explain about the pressure equator, picking up winds from the north and transferring radioactive particles down to the south as it shifts with the seasons. This was why it was taking so long -- two years, in the book.
It's true Shute envisioned the radiation gradually seeping down uniformly, latitude by latitude. Whether that's what would really happen I have no idea. But he did in fact go into the matter of air currents.
But ... didn't the novel also mention the scientists in Antarctica? I think I remember that from the part where one character was incensed that rabbits had a greater resistance to radioactivity, so that for as long as a year after the last Australian died, the rabbits would have free ownership of the continent.
No, the book makes it clear in a couple of places (once by Dwight, once by John Osborne) that there's
apparently no one still in Antarctica...though these statements are tempered by the characters saying they don't
believe anyone's down there now. It's never made absolutely definite, but it seems we're supposed to infer that there is no longer anybody there. If there were, Dwight says, "they might go on for quite a while." But ultimately they too would die.
The rabbit business comes up in the Pastoral Club, where Osborne's uncle is the member trying to get through the club's store of vintage port. Late in the book they're at the club and it's Osborne who tells him that the rabbit is the most resistant animal they know of, and that after people are gone rabbits would be running about Australia eating all the feed the next year...though they'd all go in the end; there'd be nothing left alive by the end of the next year.
Neither the 1959 nor 2000 movies makes sense in saying that Australia would be the only place left with life. A look at the map shows how this is almost physically impossible, not to mention logically ridiculous. In the book of course the entire Southern Hemisphere is left, slowly dying over two or more years. When the main characters in Melbourne all die, Tasmania, the South Island of New Zealand, and the southern portion of South America (southern Chile and Argentina) are still left, with the "Indians" in Tierra del Fuego fated to be the last human beings on Earth to die.
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