The End of the Dream

by Philip Wylie

Mass market paperback.

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction, Apocalyptic, Dystopia, Science Fiction Fantasy

206 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1972

About the author

Born in Beverly, Massachusetts, Philip Gordon Wylie was the son of Presbyterian minister Edmund Melville Wylie and the former Edna Edwards, a novelist, who died when Philip was five years old. His family moved to Montclair, New Jersey and he later attended Princeton University from 1920–1923. He married Sally Ondek, and had one child, Karen, an author who became the inventor of animal "clicker" training. After a divorcing his first wife, Philip Wylie married Frederica Ballard who was born and raised in Rushford, New York; they are both buried in Rushford.

A writer of fiction and nonfiction, his output included hundreds of short stories, articles, serials, syndicated newspaper columns, novels, and works of social criticism. He also wrote screenplays while in Hollywood, was an editor for Farrar & Rinehart, served on the Dade County, Florida Defense Council, was a director of the Lerner Marine Laboratory, and at one time was an adviser to the chairman of the Joint Congressional Committee for Atomic Energy which led to the creation of the Atomic Energy Commission. Most of his major writings contain critical, though often philosophical, views on man and society as a result of his studies and interest in psychology, biology, ethnology, and physics. Over nine movies were made from novels or stories by Wylie. He sold the rights for two others that were never produced.

Reviews

[Karl · Rating 3 out of 5]

DAW Collectors #77

Cover Artist: Podium II

Name: Wylie, Philip Gordon, Birthplace: Beverly, Massachusetts, USA, (12 May 1902 - 25 October 1971)

This posthumous novel of Philip Wylie's comprises a kind of Pollution Papers, documenting the whimpering end of the world. Looking backward from the year 2023—and dimly forward it reports on escalating catastrophes leading up to the abyss. Lethal inversions, volcanic aberrations, exploding rivers (from industrial waste), exploding people (from combustible flatulence), isotopes on the Spuyten Duyvil, sea leeches in the Gulf Stream, plagues of insects, failure of the earth's crust, epidemics of blue haze, green slime, black blight Mr. Wylie's pessimism is given carte blanche.

[Steve Joyce · Rating 4 out of 5]

Later day Wylie is a lot like later day Wells ~ very preachy. He's on a roll in this book. Heck, he even goes off on an irrelevant tangent (maybe to hear himself talk) for several pages about the in-progress sexual revolution!

Wylie's fictional treatise (is that a contradiction in terms?) is so overwhelmingly cataclysmic in its predictions that it's tempting to dismiss the whole thing as ridiculous. Of course, one can't help that he purposely exaggerated things for effect; after all ~ exploding polluted farts? ... come on! Ultimately, the question becomes: Did Wylie's cautionary words (and that of others) ultimately lead to a more environmentally stable world? I'd like to think so to some degree.

I'm a big proponent of judging a work - to the extent possible - based upon the standards and events of the time it was written. And that causes me a big conundrum in assessing The End of the Dream. It's the 2nd time that I've read the book - and my memory of it from the 1st time (a whole lot closer to when it was actually composed) tells me that it was quite powerful and effective. Yet, this go 'round I only give it somewhere about a 3 1/2. Let's give it a 4 for old times sake.

[Desire Manara]

The End of The Dream en español.

[Erik Graff · Rating 4 out of 5]

I first heard of Wylie from C.G. Jung's mentions of his Generation of Vipers, a book purchased in 1973 but still unread, and from his two Worlds Collide novels, read some time later. Thus, finding this, his last book, was an inevitable buy.

The End of the Dream is a series of scenarios of ecological catastrophe framed within a dytopian science fiction novel format. Although mistaken as regards the time-frame of many of his forecasts, Wylie should still be credited for contributing to the raising of ecological awareness in the United States and many, if not most, of his dire prognostications are still worth worrying about.

I read this book up at Grandmother's cabin along the SE shore of Lake Michigan, my primary personal association with the natural world throughout life, the place where, as a high schooler, I had read Silent Spring during a period when the sea gulls were convulsing from the very thing, DDT, she had been writing about. Consequently, this book had a special impact at the time.

In high school most of my friends were vegetarians. I was a vegetarian myself throughout that period and until sometime after acquiring a first graduate degree. The reasons weren't health-related, not so much economically or ecologically related, but primarily ethical. We would joke among ourselves about specism, the human conceit of being the crowns of creation. From our perspective, every species had an equal right to the planet and human expansive hegemonism was as "wrong", so far as planetary balance was concerned, as a cancer is wrong from the perspective of an individual organism. This ethic was a kind of nature religion, something many of us associated with the popular, idealized image of the Amerinds' hunting practices.

I less simplistically idealize the many native American nations now and will now eat, though rarely purchase, meat, but I still hold to a reverance for the natural world, to the feeling that it, in whole and in parts, is sacred, holy, not to be roughly or inconsiderately treated.
While environmentalism can be regarded a pragmatic matter, for me it is primarily an ethical and religious concern. If indeed we've destroyed our nest, the consequences described by Wylie will follow and will be in some collective sense deserved.

A friend recently turned me on to a new movement in Christian theology which has been rereading the canon, particularly the Hebrew canon, in light of the relations of humans to the natural world. Judging from the few monographs I've read so far, it seems a fruitful approach. Much of what I've tried to express here can readily be reformulated in terms of the Judeo-Christian tradition, although, granted, the apolcalypticism of Revelation and of certain branches of fundamentalist Christianity which obsess about that antique polical screed would appear to stand in opposition to any reverance for the natural world.

In any case, Wylie's book and any book which helps its readers appreciate the precious fragility of our world is worthy of an imprimatur and of praise.

[A. · Rating 2 out of 5]

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.

[Bill · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a summary of Wylie's views on the environment and the politics that created its destruction. It is most pertinent to the 21st century earth and her inhabitants. It's not really a novel, though the events described are fictional, but not improbable for the most part. It reads like a summary of the state of the world written for a non-scientist policy maker.

[Joe · Rating 1 out of 5]

I rarely give books 1 star, but this "novel" was no such thing, more a disjointed screed against technology. There was no plot, just fragile threads connecting the various diatribes. I wish I hadn't wasted my time. No wonder it's out of print.

[Ned Hamson · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fan of all of Wylie's books but this one put together by his wife shortly after his death was perhaps the best at foretelling the future. I assigned it to be read by students in my American Politics classes in the last 1970s. Th comment often was, "Are you sure this is fiction, a lot of the is already happening?" A crashing environment was the key thread. Read it now and you will see that and be surprised at a probable future of AI virtual reality as well.

[Boweavil · Rating 3 out of 5]

The man was a genius and saw long before many others that humans are destroying our planet, however, this book is not as riveting as some of his earlier ones. It is a little too preachy. Rather than just showing us the results (as in The Disappearance), he lectures us. And, unfortunately, completely missed out on plastic.

[Alexander Lehmann]

I really liked the book, the sequence of catastrophes that happen is quite interesting, especially given that it was published in 1971 already

[Stephen Rowland · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's a mess but I found myself always fascinated.

[lauren · Rating 3 out of 5]

read this for school.....philip wylie you are crazy

[Luke Pete · Rating 3 out of 5]

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 apart 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 Antartica. 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 fresh water 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.

[Audrina Williams · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read this for an environmental and human values class. He predicted a lot of ecological disasters and whatnot well. Even some of the outlandish things like the pig exploding had merit. Interesting book if you understand that the author was dying and these are basically his last words (a bit of a pessimistic outlook, you could argue he was an optimist– I wouldn’t). The ending was sorta silly, same with the chapter on VR sex.

[Aaron · Rating 3 out of 5]

Started, lost interest, too mechanical, too orderly with the look back of a book report. Not what I am looking for in an adventure at this time.

[Olivia "So many books--so little time."" · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an excellent cautionary tale about what will happen if mankind keeps polluting the environment.