Our nuclear fantasies have gotten more hard-core.

Something interesting is happening in the realm of airport "bookstore" best-sellers. I'm not talking about the self-help "You can become a sales genius" genre, but the thrillers. I've long been fascinated by their appeal and the shifting signals their subjects offer about often unspoken fears in the heart of our culture.

Sure, some of their success undoubtedly derives from their surface glitter—the glaring, fool's-gold-loaded cover lettering on a background of what looks like high-tech, super-reflective, virtually radioactive titanium. Some of it lies in their size. (I wouldn't rule out the subliminal reassurance they offer the nervous traveler of their ability to serve as additional emergency flotation devices.)

But I love airport best-sellers because I see them as our Nostradamuses, the literary canaries in the dark coal mines of our paranoia. They sniff out and serve up fictionalized but "realistic" prophecies of coming doom of one sort or another. Perhaps it's that in their visions of total world immolation they diminish in the mind of said traveler the possibility of something so trivial as a 757 engine malfunction.

The nature of the doom these books threaten us with has recently undergone a subtle shift, especially in the realm of what I've called in the past "nuke porn." I coined the term (in a Harper's article) at the height of the Cold War to characterize the way nuclear war novels and films from Fail-Safeto Strangeloveand the like adapted or imitated the techniques one could find in conventional porn: the excitement of arousal and buildup, the finger on the trigger as the world was brought to the trembling brink of a consciousness-obliterating climax. And the post-coital tristesse of "survivor novels" like On the Beach, where the onrushing end of the species licensed a doom-inflected licentiousness.

I attempted to make the point that it was not just novels and films like Red Alert(the template for Dr. Strangelove) and Fail-Safe and On the Beach that incorporated pornographic tropes and techniques but that the literature of real-world nuclear strategists had internalized the tropes and techniques of nuke porn. (Nuclear strategist Herman Kahn's elaboration of a 44-step ladder of escalation deliberately used the rhetoric of porn: Step No. 4: "hardening of positions"; No. 11: "Super-Ready status": all the way to No. 44: all out "Spasm or Insensate War."

The genre and its derivatives virtually disappeared during the decadelong "holiday from history" that began with the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union. Nuclear fears re-emerged in airport bookstores (and on TV series like 24) in another form. The post-9/11 thrillers usually featured some rugged "rogue agent," lone-wolf good-guy tracking down al-Qaida loose nukes. And—for the most part—finding them and defusing them at the last second. Doom averted, the nuke porn version of coitus interruptus.

The new nuke porn is hard-core, more graphic and full-frontal than the Cold War version of the genre. Instead of the anticipatory excitement (Fail-Safe, Strangelove) or the post-coital tristesse (On the Beach) of First Era nuke porn, we get real-time blast-burns and melting flesh. There was always an erotic component to apocalyptic literature—those end-of-the-world sects were notorious for their doom-fueled orgiastic behavior—but I always wondered why most nuke porn was about looking forward to the approaching act or looking back on its consummation but rarely about looking directly at it. Yes, Strangelove ended with a suite of stock footage of mushroom clouds exploding (to the strains of "We'll Meet Again"), but while we saw the explosions there, we never confronted face to face—in the way film and fiction can—the actual experience of being inside a nuclear blast. (The most notable exception being, of course, the few seconds of—did it happen or was it averted?—nuking footage in Terminator 2. Remember the playground scene where the nuke turns the frolicking moms and kids into scary X-rays? * It's a key transition between the old nuke porn and the new.)

But now the genre has entered a new era—an era of looking "directly at it"—a fact that didn't really register with me until I read Whitley Strieber's airport novel, Critical Mass, in which we get the nuke porn equivalent of the "money shot." You know Strieber, right? Mr. Airport Extreme. He's the auteur of what some might see as another strange form of porn, those alien-abduction fantasies that feature anal probes. He was among the first to bring UFO abductions complete with probes into the airport "bookstore."

Streiber is on top of all the end-of-the-world trends—he's got a novel out on the latest apocalyptic dementia centered around the so-called "Mayan prophecy" that the world will end on Dec. 21, 2012.

Up till now, I've not been, how shall I put it, overwhelmed with the verisimilitude or literary merit of the alien anal-probe novels. (And yes, I know not all of his books are about anal probes—I don't believe the Mayans were rectally focused—but when God gives you something like that to ridicule, it's a sin to act as if it weren't insanely hilarious as well as obscenely stupid.)