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underground shelters, almost-forgotten relics of the Cold War era, are making a comeback

a $41 million facility Radius built and installed underground that is suitable for 750 people, McCarthy says. He declined to disclose the client or location of the shelter.

Vicino, whose terravivos.com website lists 11 global catastrophes ranging from nuclear war to solar flares to comets, bristles at the notion he's profiting from people's fears. "You don't think of the person who sells you a fire extinguisher as taking advantage of your fear," he says. "The fact that you may never use that fire extinguisher doesn't make it a waste or bad. "We're not creating the fear; the fear is already out there. We're creating a solution."

In the USSR writers of science fiction had the future as a semi-official responsibility.  Whatever they invented, they were expected to endorse the radiance to come.  But since the future, in Soviet SF as in every other kind, is a refraction of the present anyway, the scope was large for sly commentary on the present, and deniable ironisation of it on terms far freer than in realist Soviet literature, especially when the SF was being written by the brilliantly self-possessed Arkady and Boris Strugatsky.