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PhiliP wylie on the state of the nation 75 Although he was one of America’s most popular writers of the 1940s and 1950s, Philip Wylie is not widely read today. During the Cold War, however, he was an important commentator on the fears of nuclear war, and his fiction from this period , especially the novels Tomorrow! and Triumph, offer two of the most graphic accounts of America under attack. Wylie’s studies in psychology and evolutionary biology at Princeton, together with his lifelong interest in science, gave him an intellectual grounding that shaped his postwar career. Although he earned a living as a freelance writer, he prided himself on his expertise in different fields. His stance as a “lay authority” (his own phrase) on civil defense, nuclear weapons, and a host of other subjects reflected his conviction that postwar American life was shaped at every level by science and technology, and he was indignant over the absence of the latter in leading novelists like Hemingway and Faulkner. Wylie contributed to a 1953 symposium on science fiction with an essay entitled “Science Fiction and Sanity in an Age of Crisis,” where he railed against pulp SF for producing “wild adventure, wanton genocide on alien planets, gigantic destruction and a piddling phantasmagoria of wanton nonsense.”1 According to Wylie, there were only a few writers,likeWells,OlafStapledon,andAldousHuxley,whoaddressedthereader’s mind.2 SF can use the principle of extrapolation to bring the reader’s dread to the surface, he argued, identifying one possible reason for the repeated emphasis on destruction in his fiction. The proper function of the science-fiction author—the myth-maker of the twentieth century—would be to learn the science of the mind’s workings and chaPter 5 Philip Wylie on the State of the Nation 76 under the shadow therewithtoplanhiswork(asmany“serious” writersdo) soitwill representin meaning the known significance of man. Logical extrapolations from existing laws and scientific hypotheses should be woven into tales congruent not with our unconscious hostilities and fears but with the hope of a subjective integration to match the integrated knowledge we have of the outer world . . . For the reader not only projects himself into each tale he encounters, but he considers it, whether he is aware of the fact or not, from the allegorical standpoints. It becomes a parable to him.3 Throughout his career Wylie saw his role as addressing national shortcomings, sometimes striking the stance of the nation’s conscience, which tended to give his writings a didactic or polemic urgency. He achieved fame with his attack on American infantilism and hypocrisy in his 1942 best seller A Generation of Vipers. As Clifford B. Bendau has argued, “Using the intellectual evangelism he inherited from his father, he mercilessly exposed the sin of self-deception.”4 Wylie saw the Cold War as a period of extended crisis. In a story written shortly before the end of World War II, he first explored the possibility of a super weapon. “The Paradise Crater” (1945) is set in 1965. Despite the fact that the Allies won the war, a secret Nazi organization is using a cavern in Colorado to build uranium-237 bombs. Unusually for Wylie, the Soviet Union is an ally, not an enemy.5 The advent of the atomic age signaled two things: a massive increase in the destructive potential of military weaponry and a loss of freedom of information , since severe security restrictions were put on scientific research. He combined these two anxieties in his 1946 story “Blunder” set in the 1970s after the “Short War” between Russia and the United States has left the Eastern Seaboard a wasteland. Two scientists plan to explode a bismuth bomb in an abandoned mine in Scandinavia. Their calculations have been published in a journal that other physicists read and note with horror a crucial error in their calculations. Security restrictions prevent this information from reaching the scientists, however, and the explosion bursts out of control, creating an apocalyptically named “omega ray” that destroys Earth. By the end of the story, the planet can only be viewed from Mars, which thereby renders rather absurd one of the scientists’ comments on their experiment: “If this goes wrong . . . it’s justice! It will teach the whole idiotic world that you cannot monopolize knowledge!”6 The moral, however, will fall rather flat if there is no surviving humanity to learn from it. ForWylie,theColdWarwasdefinedthroughoneprevailingemotion:“Welive in a midnight imposed by fear—a time like all dark ages...

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