From archive (archive)
From: leeper@mtgzz.UUCP (Mark R. Leeper)
Organization: AT&T Information Systems, Middletown NJ
Subject: Re: The End of the Dream/Wylie
Date: 24 Jan 88 23:55:55 GMT




 This is a reprint of some comments I made a few years ago:

 Comments While Reading Philip Wylie's THE END OF THE DREAM
                       DAW, 1972, $?.
              A book review by Mark R. Leeper
     If I am reading a really good science fiction story, I
am willing to suspend my disbelief and go where the author
wants to take me.  Almost all science fiction requires some
suspension of disbelief and it comes as a real surprise when
you find a story that doesn't.  One book that really doesn't
is Philip Wylie's THE END OF THE DREAM.  What prompted me to
read the book was a feeling of DEJA VU following hearing
about a firestorm in Mexico City and a massive chemical
disaster in India soon after.  I'd read about the first
quarter of THE END OF THE DREAM in 1972 and all of a sudden
the news sounded like chapters out of the book.
     So I am re-reading THE END OF THE DREAM, a novel about
the end of the world through environmental disasters.  My
first reaction is that people who claim that Orwell was
right "on target" with 1984 should read this novel to find
out what "on target" really means.  It is eerie how close
some sections of this book reflect events that have occurred
since it was written.  Wylie describes a toxic chemical
firestorm in New York City.  Not quite accurate enough to
make it history, but pretty close to a number of events that
have happened.  There have been toxic fires near New York
and, of course, the Mexico City firestorm.  Wylie describes
how addicted we are to material goods, so while
environmentalism has waves of popularity, they die down and
we go back to poisoning the environment.  That's a direct
hit.  He has descriptions of industry paying for
     "ubiquitous displays of the American future as purged
     of pollution...  [The displays] did not say or much
     reveal how the 'glory of natural America' would be
     recovered, or who would do it, where the money would
     come from or what sacrifices and hardships would accrue
     to any such attempt.  It merely displayed the FAITS
     ACCOMPLIS, everywhere, clear air, clean rivers, and
     deserts made green, with the endlessly hammered slogan,
     'America CAN!  America WILL!'"
I suppose there was a little of that even before this novel
was written, but I remember seeing just what Wylie was
describing on Detroit TV five or six years after he
described it.
     Wylie writes with an incredible authenticity and a feel
for public psychology.  The above was from the last chapter
I read.  Wylie starts the current chapter I am reading
talking about the destruction of a certain part of the
potato crop and how the public only understands it in terms
of a shortage of potato chips.  Even as I am writing this,
it is occurring to me that the way I and most other people I
know look at the citrus cancre is "what is it going to do to
the price of orange juice?"
     I seem to remember some book being sold with the tag
line "Read it while it is still science fiction!"  For THE
END OF THE DREAM, I can't help but feel I'm too late.
     Postscript: The above was written when I was about a
third the way through the book.  I stand by my assessment,
though as the story extends further into the future, some of
what it describes becomes a little more far-fetched. No more
far-fetched than any number of good SF novels, but still a
little less likely than the first part.  I particularly
liked the way Wylie closed the novel.  It was one of the
best pieces of science ficiton I have read in quite a while.
It is still in print from DAW, I think.  Go for it.