This June I had a lot of fun writing about George Allan England’s “June 6, 2016” (www.michaelmayadventureblog.com/2016/06/june-6-2016-predictions-and.html). In that piece I compared England’s version of that date with June 6, 1916, around when he wrote the story. Well, I’m at it again. The story this time is actually a novelization. As a general rule I look at novelizations as marketing by-products generally not worth the time it takes to read them. Television and movies lack the richness of a novel and to have some hack transcribe the screenplay into a readable version is an exercise doomed to fail.
I made an exception in this case for two reasons: one, the person who wrote the screenplay also turned it into a novel. And two, the television episode that the novel is based on is not readily available. There are tantalizing bits as well as a trailer on Youtube but that’s all. The seventy-six minute program was recently released on DVD but to little fanfare. (You’ll see why I say that in a minute.)
The novel/novelization in question is Philip Wylie’s Los Angeles 2017 A.D. from 1971. It was the last book published during Wylie’s life and the second last he had published. Now Wylie is a very interesting fellow. His early work helped inspire Superman (Gladiator, 1930), Doc Savage (The Savage Gentleman, 1932), Flash Gordon (When Worlds Collide, 1932) before he moved onto writing about nuclear destruction (The Paradise Crater, 1945 and others). His early guesses about nuclear bombs got him arrested by the government just before the creating of the atomic bomb. Later he was instrumental in the creation of the Atomic Regulatory Commission. After this he wrote detective novels but also an early examination of feminism, and finally, the last theme that dominated his life, ecological disaster. Los Angeles 2017 A.D. is one of these works.
Los Angeles 2017 A.D. was not a TV movie, but an episode of the anthology show, Name of the Game. In a dream, a present-day scientist goes into the future to see how the world is destroyed by human greed. The human race has been driven underground to escape the poisoned atmosphere, and is ruled by a totalitarian corporation. The episode was directed by a twenty-four-year old named Steven Spielberg. (Who probably never wanted this show to appear again.) It starred Gene Barry, Barry Sullivan, Edmond O’Brien, Sharon Farrell with a cameo by Joan Crawford. Now I haven’t seen this show but if the book based on it is any indication, the program was over-long, talky and heavy-handed. The trailer for the episode is funky, psychedelic and just plain weird. This was 1971 after all. (Wylie has taken a page from Orwell’s book 1984, which was written in 1948. He simply reversed two numbers. Wylie has done this too but also like England, advanced the date a century as well, to arrive at 2017.)
But let’s stick with the book since we have the entire story here before us. The novel begins with a group of millionaires and scientists gathering to discuss environmental impacts. Wylie delivers the facts in strident lectures. Chapter One alone has two lengthy rants, one on who billionaire-business men really are and another on sexuality. These are not two or three paragraphs but run for pages. The first third of the book concerns describing the players, their host, Rafe Cooper, and his sexy, willing cadre of girls. Wylie gives the modern reader plenty of Harold Robbins-worthy dirt, perhaps hoping to appeal to non-Science Fiction fans(?) I suspect none of this was in the TV show since it’s hard to imagine Gene Barry and Sharon Farrell getting naked and nasty. (Maybe this why Spielberg has lots of scenes of people running down corridors?) The scientists and the businessmen (no women, no non-white, non-English-speaking millionaires) come to loggerheads. The eggheads flee to parting shots about how the ecological collapse is coming. The billionaires rally to decide how they will shut the scientists up. (As I write this President Trump has pulled out of the Paris Accord on Climate Change. Hmm….)
It is at this point we really see who the main character is, Glenn Howard (Gene Barry), head of a huge media empire. He is actually pretending to side with big business, so that he can prepare a report for the President of the United States, a man who was not invited to be part of the secret cabal. Howard leaves the failed conference and stops to prepare some tape recordings when he falls asleep in his car. He wakes to find himself in 2017! (This device is lame by SF standards, but it was necessary for the format of Name of the Game, which wasn’t usually an SF show.)
Howard is rescued from the unbreathable air by an outside patrol, men driving an air-tight van and using sealed suits. He is taken to an underground complex, all that remains of the livable area of L.A., and is educated in the history of the last four and a half decades. He learns that the earth produced killer spores in an attempt to kill off humankind, acid rain that ate the skin off of its victims, killer cold with no summer for three years (shades of Roland Emmerich’s The Day After Tomorrow) , and finally poisoned air and killer winds have reduced the human population to a mere fraction of what it had once been.
The rest of the book shies away from ecology and focuses on the lives of these future humans, especially in terms of sex. The free-loving attitude of Rafe Cooper has become the norm with everyone being available to all others. Reproduction is controlled by a computer containing all genetic analysis so having babies is no longer the focus. The future people throw woman after woman at Howard, trying to harvest his valuable genetics but he refuses them (the most antisocial act imaginable). To change his perspective they take him to a school where he sees children being trained in this new philosophy. Here Wylie crosses several current taboos, logically but distastefully following this idea to it conclusion.
Sex isn’t the only target. Wylie also attacks current social trends such as hippies and rock ‘n roll. The young rebels of the 1960s, those who knew “where it is at” no longer know. They hang out in dark clubs where the elderly dance to very loud, two-tone music without any real tune. Here we can see Wylie, who was born in 1902 and almost seventy years old, reacting to the social activism and rebellion of the counter-culture. Of all the soap-boxing in the book, this one seems least objective. While he can use scientific facts to back his ecological statements, this rant sounds like an older generation simply not understanding the newer. It would be interesting to know how Steven Spielberg felt about this, being only twenty-four and part of that new culture. He did film it because the trailer features many shots of old guys and girls getting down and funky.
The book’s last act has Glenn Howard siding with a rebel faction within Los Angeles. After seeing the spying, Big Brother tactics, the euthanasia chamber, the sex school and all the rest, he plays double agent inside the ruling council, leading a sub rosa organization of people who plan to leave the underground complexes now that the secret is out: the atmosphere is no longer poisonous. The corporate goons who rule don’t want to lose their slaves in USA Inc. Howard leads them to escape but all the rebels are killed or captured and their leader wakes up from his dream. The book ends with Glenn Howard driving back to L. A., a city he literally hears screaming with coming disaster.
Much of what I’ve said here makes it sound like Wylie is a bad writer. Considering how talky the book is I still had little problem reading the entire thing despite its flaws. I think this is because Wylie is capable of some really good writing as well as the long diatribes. For instance, his description of a lethal gas released in India:
…The result was the usual one in a panic. Mere numbers and crowd compression, frenzied ruthlessness and utterly selfish effort, made the great mob slow down. Glenn saw, as the front of the multitude came nearer, a horrible thing. There were palms on both sides of the street, wide walks, and then buildings shops and stores and offices, most of them white and flat façaded. The human pressure began to sway, then slant and finally topple the palm trees, which meant human bodies in hundreds were being shattered against the rough trunks. And then, here and there, he saw the white fronts of buildings turning-red. Which, again, meant only one thing: crushed human beings on the sides of this route were being hauled against the walls until they burst and became paintbrushes, swept along by the masses, and recoloring the walls with their blood.
Los Angles 2017 A.D. is similar to George Allan England’s “June 6, 2016” in that it is largely a comment on present society, not the future. Wylie takes shots at what he sees as the ills of 1971. These include corporations domineering governments, the specialization of Science so that new discoveries don’t take into consideration of other branches (such as a new metal process that causes greater amounts of pollution), social unrest and the counter-culture, sexual hang-ups and the coming of the Disco Era’s philosophy of the “Me Generation”. Also like England, Wylie can’t quite see how the future will change. England’s 2016 had equality for women but didn’t really treat women equally. For Wylie it is race and sexuality. He can’t conceive that future America isn’t going to be white. He has little reference to Hispanics, African-Americans or Asians. His new free-love world doesn’t include gay men. In his own way, Wylie is still stuck in 1932.
Where Wylie scores over England, is many of the ideas he has are currently coming to fruition. The concern for global warming and its effects on the earth and how industry and governments are not really dealing with it, are spot on. Wylie also has the mapping of the genome, though we haven’t used it to create a eugenics system (yet). He predicts viagra, though we haven’t used it as method of controlling the populace. He also successfully brings the reader to the realization that the sexed up, corporate-manipulated world of 2017 is already here in 1971, that we are equally slaves to corporations, dumbed down with sex and unable to stop the rape of the earth. Food for thought, hmm… Despite his clumsy, rant-filled book, the message succeeds in coming through in the end. And what more can you ask of a prophetic Science Fiction novel than that? Recent filmmaker, Roland Emmerich, has mined the ideas of Philip Wylie and ecological disaster in The Day After Tomorrow (2004) in which global warming causes killer cold to change the Northern Hemisphere and 2012 (2012) which takes it even further with global-wide flooding, sending us all back to the Ark. Philip Wylie would have approved.
