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Date: Wed, 2-Jan-85 08:06:06 EST
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Posted: Wed Jan  2 08:06:06 1985
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         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.

					(Evelyn C. Leeper for)
					Mark R. Leeper
					...ihnp4!lznv!mrl