In the sixties, nuclear holocaust was a foregone conclusion. We were going to destroy the planet. You don't get a lot of nuclear holocaust fiction these days.
Walter Tevis wrote The Man Who Fell to Earth in 1963. The action in the book takes place between 1985 and 1990. People ride monorails, use picture phones, and when the math gets hard they break out their slide rules. The United States is practicing increasingly isolationist policies, and many foods are being replaced with synthetics.
Then there's the martians. Apparently they had their own devastating wars 500 years ago. Now there are only 300 of them left and they've been watching our television broadcasts. Their resources are limited and they will die out in another 50 years. But they've managed to get enough together to power an old single-occupant spacecraft for a one way journey to earth. And they're really smart.
So T.J. Newton walks into a small Kentucky town one early morning. He converts a nice ring into some cash at the jewelry store and moves on. When he has enough cash, he goes to the patent lawyer's office and shows him some patents and makes a business proposal.
He proceeds to make a lot of money. The idea, though he doesn't tell the humans, is to build a ship to bring the rest of the aliens to earth in. By 1988 work begins in earnest on the ship. Then, right after Christmas, it comes apart. The FBI arrests him, the CIA interrogates him, and in a bureaucratic SNAFU he is blinded.
It's a short book. Only five cassettes. It doesn't end in nuclear holocaust, but the characters see that as more likely than not to occur in the next few years.
This book was made into a movie in 1976 starring David Bowie as the alien. After reading reviews on Amazon, I'm not rushing out to rent it. Tevis, who died in the eighties, wrote two other books that were made into movies: The Color of Money and The Hustler.
I'll come out and admit that when I borrowed this book from the library, I was actually looking for The Queen's Gambit which got a mention in a recent comic book (Superman : Secret Identity #2 p. 10) written by Kurt Busiek.