The Last Ship (novel)

The Last Ship

Cover of first edition (hardcover)
Author	William Brinkley
Cover artist	Neil Stuart (1988)
Country	United States
Language	English
Genre	Post-apocalyptic
Publisher	Viking Press (hardcover) Ballantine Books (paperback)
Publication date	March 1988
Media type	Print (hardcover and paperback)
Pages	624 pp
ISBN	(hardcover) (paperback) (eBook)
OCLC	16682861
Dewey Decimal	813/.54 19
LC Class	PS3503.R56175 L37 1988

The Last Ship is a 1988 post-apocalyptic fiction novel written by William Brinkley. A television series loosely based on the novel premiered on June 22, 2014, on TNT.

After the success of Sex, Lies, and Videotape, Steven Soderbergh had planned on making an adaptation of the book as his next film; he would abandon the project after several unsatisfactory screenplay drafts.

The Last Ship tells the story of a United States Navy guided missile destroyer, the fictional USS Nathan James (DDG-80), on patrol in the Barents Sea during a brief, full-scale nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union. It details the ship's ensuing search for a new home for her crew.

The Last Ship was released as an eBook on November 27, 2013, published by Plume.

The story is told in a first-person point of view by the ship's commanding officer, "Thomas", whose full name is never revealed. Thomas is writing this account several months after the war in order to describe the odyssey of his Norwegian-homeported ship, the USS Nathan James (DDG-80), in the aftermath of the conflict.

Thomas begins by describing his ship to the reader. He discusses the ethics of commanding a warship, the capabilities of nuclear strike forces, daily life aboard a U.S. Navy ship in the Arctic Circle, and the nature of his ship's mission. Captain Thomas remarks that despite the reduction in the land based ICBM arsenal, there is still considerable power in the SLBMs and Tomahawks; his ship alone has more power than several missile silos combined.