Nuclear Survivors

Richard Eder’s rave review of Denis Johnson’s “Fiskadoro” (Book Review, May 5) treats the book as something new and different. He neglects to point out that this view of nuclear holocaust survivors is old hat in science fiction. There have been many treatments of this subject in the last 30 years, all of them “illuminating our lives” by their philosophical explorations and describing fantastic futures full of believable people. Indeed, one of the most recent accounts, Kim Stanley Robinson’s “The Wild Shore,” even has the idea of a fishing community in a quarantined zone--in this case, Orange County.

SHEILA FINCH-RAYNOR

Long Beach