Farnham's Freehold - Plot

Plot

Hugh Farnham, a middle-aged man, holds a bridge club party for his wife Grace (an alcoholic), son Duke (a law graduate), daughter Karen (a college student), and Barbara (Karen's sorority sister). During the bridge game, Duke berates him for frightening his mother with preparations for a possible nuclear attack by the Russians. When the attack actually occurs, the group, along with Joe (the family's African American servant), retreat to the fallout shelter below the house.

After several apparently nuclear explosions rock the shelter, Hugh and Barbara become romantically involved; after their copulation, the largest explosion of all hits the shelter. With only minor injuries, and with their bottled oxygen running low, the group decides to ensure that they can leave the shelter when necessary; upon exiting through an emergency tunnel, they find themselves in a completely undamaged, semi-tropical region apparently uninhabited by humans or other sentient creatures. Several of the group think the final explosion somehow forced them into an alternate dimension.

The group strives to stay alive as a pioneer family, with Hugh as the leader (despite friction between Hugh and Duke). Karen announces that she is pregnant, and had returned home the night of the attack to tell her parents; Barbara also announces that she is pregnant (although she does not mention that her pregnancy resulted from her sexual encounter with Hugh during the attack). Karen eventually dies during her labor, due to complications, and her infant daughter follows the next day.

Grace, whose sanity has been challenged by all these events, demands that Barbara be forced from the group or she will leave. Duke convinces Hugh that he will go with Grace to ensure her safety, but before they can leave, a large ship appears overhead. The group is taken captive by people of clear African ancestry, but is spared execution when Joe intervenes by conversation with their captives' leader in French.

The group finds that it has not been transported to another world, but instead is in the distant future of their own world. A decadent but technologically advanced African culture keeps either uneducated or castrated whites as slaves. Each of the characters adapts to the sudden black/white role reversal in different and sometimes shocking ways. In the end, Hugh and Barbara fail to adjust to the new situation and attempt to escape, but are captured. Rather than execute them, Ponse (the "Lord Protector" of the house to which they have become slaves) asks them to volunteer (though they speculate that if they didn't volunteer they would have been forced to anyway) for a time-travel experiment to send them back to their own time.

They return just prior to the original nuclear attack, and flee in Barbara's car. As they drive, they realize that while Barbara had driven a car with an automatic transmission, this car - the same car in every respect but one - has a manual transmission, and Farnham deduces that the time-travel experiment worked, but sent them into an alternate universe. They survive the war, then spend the rest of their lives trying to make sure the future they experienced does not come to pass.