As the first atomic bomb was hurtling toward Hiroshima and the pages of history, Nevil Shute was working as an engineer in the British military and already rising as a novelist. After the war, Shute emigrated to Australia and grew to become an internationally acclaimed writer, in particular imagining the horrific impact of global nuclear destruction in his novel On The Beach. Fallout traces Shute’s career and the trajectory of the novel as it was turned into a high profile feature film in Melbourne in 1959, while simultaneously exploring the lesser-known background to the dropping of the bomb. Post-Fukushima, Shute’s predictions become eerily prescient once more.