Finished We 10/6/21
This is one of my ancient paperbacks that I've never read and there is no indication where and when I bought the book.
"An infantile majority becomes lunatic". That sounds like a quote that describes our time and tribulations.
The book is primarily about the future (2023 is the tipping point) ecological disasters. 'Climate Change' isn't really mentioned.
One 'disaster' concerns frozen foods that cause deadly 'exploding farts'. People and animals die when their farts explode internally. This was easily the highlight of the book.
One incident concerned deadly bees coming across the border from Mexico to Texas. It reminded me of the current controversy over Covid. Many don't believe that it is dangerous. In the novel a Texas mayor chastises the people for being overly sensitive to the threat. "The bees are, at most, a nuisance. They need to cause no deaths and no protracted prostration. Sure, they can and do hurt like hell. But the risk of having a sharp pain is no excuse for roaring out of town by auto and getting maimed in the eight-car crash just now reported on the Pan-Texas Throughway. What's wrong with those sons and daughters of the Lone Star State, anyhow?"
Near the middle of the novel Wylie provides a long rant against The Sexual Revolution. He's not a fan.
Some random reviews at Goodreads:
"This isn't so much a novel as a poorly-written list of a bunch of horrible ecological disasters - except rather than being horrible, so many of them are so far-fetched as to be really hysterical. There's a huge, huge, huge anti-industrial/anti-corporate feel to the book, down to frozen dinners that make people explode when they fart (I'm not kidding). I would be hard pressed to say which of the "disasters" is the funniest but boy there's a bunch of them. There's also a metric ass-ton of amateurish sociological analysis that just winds up leaving a bad taste in the mouth and a slightly sick feeling to the stomach. But no matter! We're all doomed anyways."
"It's a mess but I found myself always fascinated."
"The End of the Dream is Phillip Wylie’s pulpy tale of the end of the world. It’s his final work after a history of writing for films equally as creepy, adventurous, and campy (Island of Lost Souls, The Invisible Man) and after scathing indictments like Generation of Vipers. It reads as a compendium of newspaper clippings, editorials, letters, and classified government documents that tell of escalating catastrophes that befall the world thanks to man’s technological death march. A second narrative concerns the narrator who is a part of a global group to stem the toxic problems like London Fog-style smog in NYC, flesh-eating worms washing up out of the oceans, blighted rice crops, and energy addiction that causes the destruction of Antarctica. It’s less cerebral as PKD and less literary than JG Ballard, who are more masterful of this sort of thing, but Wylie is certainly the most blunt, leveling blow after blow about how the ignorance on the part of civilization begins to deteriorate rapidly.
Books like this are always in trouble of aging as soon as they’re published. Dream is set in 2030 and catalogs events of the previous 60 years. There was no major crop failures which saw two continents effectively turn over to cannibalism in the 2000s, for example, but Wylie is writing with an unabashed sense of his fans. His pen dips toward pulp and wonder a la HG Wells and is effectively anticipating the second wave of B-movie Natural Horror films that would come after the success of Jaws but recycles things the Cold War era radiation stuff-- think THEM.
Despite the hyperbole, Wylie bends his points around them. Much of what he has written has come in some form: perhaps mutated Brazilian bees will not pour over the Rio Grande, but the fact that the bees only kill four people and cause a panic in which thousands are trampled and squeezed to death is a good representation of things that have already happened, and had happened when Wylie wrote his book. A plane flies into a building in New York City. At points, he backs out of the pulpy punches into the book's strong miasma of malaise. The hedonic mess that people continue to march into never lets up and neither does the result. Scenes of futile washing of glaciers for freshwater and the “invisible scythe” causing the screams of thousands of New Yorkers succumbing to smog are the high points. Pair this with scientists over-explaining and pundits continuing to “monitor” the situation and the warning seems to ring quite true today."
'The End of the Dream' was published posthumously in 1972 and foresees a dark future where America slides into ecological catastrophe. Wylie is probably most known for his 1943 book, 'Generation of Vipers'. Here he invented a concept called 'momism' which railed against America's adoration of mothers. He felt that this was a weakness. Seems kind of strange to come out with this during the darkest days of WWII and it was very controversial.
If alive today I would bet the farm that Philip Wylie would be a fixture on Fox News.
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