The End of the Dream

If Wylie would be alive today, he would have made Fahrenheit 911. It is a book written in the seventies when the public interest in environment was on the rise. Philip Wylie makes some bold predictions in this book. Some of them have gone through, like the Desert war, and other not ... yet, like the river explosion or the explosious farts (you have to read at least that part). On the radio this morning, I heard that a 5 tons of highly noxious gas were released in the atmosphere and eventually made its way in my city. The same thing happens in New York in the book but with more devastating effects. Wylie was very pessimist. The end of civilization started in the eighties in his story. I guess he was off by some decades. We are on that rollercoaster and the train is almost at the top of the ride. I am sure we won't like the way down. This book is half documentary and half a conventional story with characters. Read it and be warned!

Philip Wylie is probably best known for his early science fiction classic (1932) When Worlds Collide. The End of the Dream was his last book, and it has far more in common with his other great piece of writing, Generation of Vipers (1942). Vipers was a diatribe against almost everything American, from 'Mom' to apple pie, and is still an effective read today. The End of the Dream is Wylie's rant against all the ecological sins that man is committing. I first read this when in was first published in 1972, and many of the images he paints in this book have remained with me ever since. The book is structured as a look back from the 2030s to just where man went wrong, at what places he had a chance to change things for the better but blithely ignored them. For by 2030 there are only four million people left alive, most living in enclosed 'bubble' townships and still very much on guard for whatever the next ecological catastrophe will be. As a structure for a novel, this is not terrible, but it definitely leads to an episodic approach, and because Wylie really doesn't present any strong, well defined, and continuing characters who exist over the course of this period (the ones that are there are almost stick-figure place holders), this book does not work as a novel at all.Where this book does work is the incredible searing images he paints of various disasters, from a SST crashing into a New York skyscraper (due to a multi-state wide power outage, not deliberately), to the death wave moving up 5th Avenue from a deadly concentration of noxious gases, to the golf course built over a landfill that suddenly collapses into a bubbling stew of toxic chemicals. Perhaps the sharpest, most biting image is of a sudden attack by trillions of mutated sea worms that come ashore and attack practically anything moving, with the sharp irony that the defense against these creatures is to spread oil all around the chosen defended area, which naturally will, in time, become another eco disaster.Although these images are haunting, and in many cases all too plausible, the time frame that Wylie envisions for these events is much too short, as by the 2001 of this book, most of civilization has been destroyed. This, perhaps, was the singular mistake made by many environmentalist voices of the seventies, the mistake of being too extreme and too dogmatic in their claims of disaster around every corner. It's a mistake that has seriously eroded the credibility of many of these voices. Happily, the Earth is a little more forgiving, and rational men have made some positive changes, than the environmentalist movement foresaw or would give credit to.Does this mean then that the dangers Wylie is warning of here are not really a problem? Not at all. Wylie is very correct in pointing out the many abuses that man still engages in, that have not been adequately controlled, that still can develop into problems of such magnitude that everyone's quality of life will suffer. Although writte

he was a voice in the wilderness. he tried to show us what lay in the canyons between who & what we are & who & what we really are. he tried to show that we humans are bound by law. and that law is nature. and nature does not give a tinkers' damn about our opinions. the "the end of the dream" is now. it's happening now. look around. if someone has to explain, you'd never understand.

Wylie's End of the Dream introduced me to the dangers of scientific specialization. That a nuclear scientist would have only a "basic" knowledge of biology and a chemist that constructs deadly pesticides only a slight exposure to genetics was shocking, yet true. I learned a great deal. If you can find a copy, read it.