Dead Neon: Tales of Near-Future Las Vegas, and: Nevada: The Making of Modern Nevada (review)

At first glance, these two books, Dead Neon: Tales of Near-Future Las Vegas and Nevada: The Making of Modern Nevada, have nothing in common. The former is a collection of imaginary apocalyptic short fiction; the latter is a factually grounded narrative history. The former soars into cyberspace; the latter recounts the realities of Nevada settlement during the last two hundred years. Yet the two books work together surprisingly well. Like bookends, the one projects an unfamiliar future while the other considers an all too familiar past. Reading them concurrently led me to rethink the conundrum that is the Silver State and also to more fully understand Las Vegas's symbolic place in its development.

Of course, Las Vegas had no role to play during the first decades of Nevada's statehood. Overland immigration to California, the initial construction of the transcontinental railroad, and the discovery of gold and silver dictated northern Nevada's prominence. By comparison, the southern reaches of the state were largely ignored. With the building of Hoover Dam, however, Las Vegas began its astronomical and explosive development. Today it is the force that increasingly and almost unilaterally dictates all of the state's politics and economic policies. Hal K. Rothman persuasively demonstrates how the pattern of Las Vegas's growth is a modern paradigm for all of Nevada's early history.

Essentially, he describes Nevada as "a colony of everywhere" (156). Over the years, the colonizers have changed faces, but the impetus to mine Nevada for gain elsewhere has continued unabated. For example, the fabulous Comstock gold and silver claims were quickly exploited by California bankers, who immediately pulled their profits out of state and who quickly abandoned Virginia City as soon as the industry was no longer lucrative. Other mineral discoveries—Tonopah, Goldfield, Rhyolite, Ruth, McGill—shared the same fateful pattern of exploitation and then abandonment. The same holds true of the state throughout the twentieth century. The federal government created a veritable fiefdom, enforcing rules for grazing on public lands and dictating water consumption regulations. National policy led to the detonation of the desert with atomic experimentation, then originated a plan to use Nevada as a twenty-first-century nuclear storage site. Imperialism, over and over again. In the mid-twentieth century, Rothman argues, the mob took over Las Vegas, laundering money to be enjoyed elsewhere. Then Howard Hughes emulated the model. Even today, when the mob no longer plays a prominent gambling role and Howard Hughes is only a distant memory, corporate gaming invests little in the state's infrastructure and draws the profits away.

The strength of Rothman's book is not that he has conducted any new historical research or that he introduces any heretofore unknown historical facts; rather, the strength of The Making of Modern Nevada is that the book gives us a fresh narrative overview, one that quite persuasively explains the dual phenomenon that is the Nevada macrocosm and the Las Vegas microcosm. Both are fiefdoms, controlled by outsiders willing to exploit any treasures either the state or the metropolis might have.

So what is the logical extension of Rothman's thesis? Dead Neon: Tales of Near-Future Las Vegas, where the desecration continues. The third story in the collection, "Nuclear Wasted Love Song" by Lori Kozlowski, extrapolates the boom-and-bust design. I quote at length because this passage well-illustrates an imagined trajectory:

The Big Boom ruined everything. ... All of Las Vegas imploded. Not just one hotel, here or there. But all of them. In one big cave-in, the entire city fell. ...

For years, all the magic of Las Vegas had been piling up. The wizardry, the gluttony, the lust. We went from everything all the time—wild sex, designer drugs, food and drink, flash and cash— to...