Dad's Nuke, first published in February, 1986 by Donald I. Fine, is a science fiction

Science fiction

Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginary but more or less plausible content such as future settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, aliens, and paranormal abilities...

 dark comedy novel

Novel

A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....

 written by Marc Laidlaw

Marc Laidlaw

Marc Laidlaw is an American writer of science fiction and horror and also a computer game designer with Valve Software. He is perhaps most famous for writing Dad's Nuke and The 37th Mandala, and for working on the popular Half-Life series.-Biography:Laidlaw was born in 1960 and raised in Laguna...

. It is a parody of middle class suburban life, and tells the tale of a nuclear family in the post-nuclear (holocaust) age. The protagonists are a father, mother, daughter, and eight biologically-engineered children living in a gated suburban enclave following the near collapse of modern civilization. The story consists of a series of episodes demonstrating the ridiculousness of the family's sheltered, conformist lives, and culminates in the collapse from within of the suburban community. The title refers to a nuclear reactor purchased by the family's father figure, as part of his hostile, one-upmanship, "keeping up with the Joneses

Keeping up with the Joneses

"Keeping up with the Joneses" is an idiom in many parts of the English-speaking world referring to the comparison to one's neighbor as a benchmark for social caste or the accumulation of material goods...

" competition with his next door neighbor.