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Philip Wylie (1) (1902–1971)

Författare till When Worlds Collide

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53+ verk 2,742 medlemmar 72 recensioner

Om författaren

Philip Wylie was a popular author of pulp fiction, sci-fi, and mysteries, as well as social commentary and nonfiction titles on a variety of subjects. His works include When Worlds Collide, Gladiator, and Generation of Vipers.
Foto taget av: NYWT&S Collection, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Reproduction Number LC-USZ62-118224

Serier

Verk av Philip Wylie

When Worlds Collide (1932) 455 exemplar
Skeppsbrutna i rymden (1933) 364 exemplar
The Disappearance (1951) 267 exemplar
Gladiator (1930) 196 exemplar
The end of the dream (1972) 136 exemplar
Triumph (1962) 130 exemplar
Tomorrow! (1954) 126 exemplar
An Essay on Morals (1947) 73 exemplar
Opus 21 (1949) 55 exemplar
The Answer (1955) — Författare — 45 exemplar
Finnley Wren (1934) 44 exemplar
The Spy Who Spoke Porpoise (1969) 39 exemplar
Los Angeles: A.D. 2017 (1971) 37 exemplar
The Smuggled Atom Bomb (1948) 35 exemplar
Night Unto Night (1944) 33 exemplar
Magic Animal (1968) 29 exemplar
The Murderer Invisible (1931) 25 exemplar
The Savage Gentleman (1657) 21 exemplar
The Innocent Ambassadors (1957) 19 exemplar
They Both Were Naked (1965) 16 exemplar
Experiment in Crime (1956) 14 exemplar
Footprint of Cinderella (1931) 13 exemplar
Sons and daughters of mom (1971) 8 exemplar
An April Afternoon (1944) 7 exemplar
Corpses at Indian Stones (1945) 7 exemplar
Too Much Of Everything (1964) 5 exemplar
Heavy laden (1928) 4 exemplar
Salt Water Daffy (1941) 4 exemplar
The Big Ones Get Away (1940) 4 exemplar
As They Reveled (1935) 4 exemplar
The Best of Crunch and Des (1958) 3 exemplar
Autumn Romance (1965) 3 exemplar
The Party (1929) 3 exemplar
American Thought, 1947, inc. radio chapter (1947) — Inledning — 3 exemplar
Fish and Tin Fish 2 exemplar
Fifth Mystery Book (1944) 2 exemplar
"What, No Harem?" 1 exemplar
Jungle Journey 1 exemplar
Danger Mansion 1 exemplar

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Science fiction - environmental disasters i Name that Book (maj 2016)
Underground complex after a nuclear war i Name that Book (oktober 2013)

Recensioner

A lot of the science in this book is antiquated and the story makes sending an ark to another planet seem so much easier than it would really be, while relegating women to resources possessed by the few surviving men. This is the earlier version of the Seveneves story (Neal Stephenson), and while Stephenson's book is probably more realistic, Wylie's book is far more readable. Another modern version of this story, Aurora (Kim Stanley Robinson) falls somewhere in the middle, far more readable than either Wylie's or Stephenson's book, and with better female characters, but the only one in which humanity succeeds at settling on a new world is this classic version. Maybe modern writers have lost their optimism about mankind emerging out into space, as they have added in the realistic complications that would be involved with such stories in real life.… (mer)
 
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JBarringer | 16 andra recensioner | Dec 15, 2023 |
This book does not get the attention it deserves. Written before the appearance of Superman, Spiderman, etc. Here is many of the themes we find in the supper hero genre. Excellently written.
½
 
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nx74defiant | 6 andra recensioner | Aug 19, 2023 |
Published in 1965 but it holds up really well. Idlewild airport gets renamed to Kennedy airport in the course of the novel's events, but that's almost as much as anything here is dated.

This is mostly a lot of ranting by Philip Wylie about the evils of modern society. Philip Wylie appears as himself in the novel, poking around in the lives of a bunch of biochemical scientists and industrialists. There are some scandals - fast cars and fast women. It's a bit like Bill Gates hanging out with Jeffrey Epstein. The titans of science and industry can have very clay feet!

The shortcomings of science and industry are not just personal though. The quests for status, fame, wealth, and power, have taken over the world. What is really human is to care for others, and not just those here and now, but those of future generations. Wylie mentions the greenhouse effect on p. 278, which "may bring about the flooding of every coastal city on earth".

It's the educational philosophy of Summerhill that Wylie proposes here. Down the Wilhelm Reich line. All this pathological lust comes from warped child rearing practices. If we didn't repress their natural behaviors, we wouldn't have such a sick society.

This book is remarkably relevant to the battles of our time. Maybe the social revolutions of the late 1960s - whose early rumblings Wylie is documenting here - the failures of those revolutions have led to the reaction of our time, the attempt to stuff the genie back into the bottle, the reimposition of social hierarchies based on gender, race, etc.
… (mer)
 
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kukulaj | 1 annan recension | Jan 24, 2023 |
4.5 stars
The author, through the voice of his character Cole Hendron, gives an explanation for how Bronson Alpha and Bronson Beta came to be approaching our solar system:
".. among the many billions of stars, there are probably millions of suns with planets. It is always possible that some catastrophe would tear the planets away. It would require nothing more than the approach of another star toward the sun to destroy the gravitational control of the sun over the Earth and Venus and Mars and Jupiter and other planets, and to send them all spinning into space on cold and dark careers of their own.
This world of ours, and Venus and Mars and Jupiter and saturn, would then wander throughout indefinite ages - some of them perhaps eternally doomed to cold and darkness, others might, after incalculable ages, find another sun.
It might be assumed, for purposes of explanation of the Bronson Bodies, that they once were planets like our Earth and Uranus, circling about some life-giving sun. A catastrophe tore them away, together with whatever other of her planets there might have been, and sent them into the darkness of interstellar space. these two - Bronson Alpha and Bronson Beta - either were associated originally, or else established a gravitational influence upon each other in the journey through space, and probably have traveled together through an incalculable time until they arrived in a region of the heavens which brought them at last under the attraction of the sun. Their previous course, consequently, has been greatly modified by the sun, and as a result, they are now approaching us."
So, cole hendron, along with other top scientists, has to do something about this! Earth is going to be battered into bits! They decide, that there's a chance that they can make it to Bronson Beta, and live there. Only 100 humans will be able to fit in the rocket they have planned to build. The rest will have to perish.
"Very different from its companion up there, but not so different from our world, it seems. It has a surface we can see, with air and clouds and its atmosphere. The clouds shift or disappear and form again; but there are fixed details which do not change, and which prove a surface crust exists. The atmosphere was frozen solid in the long journey through space, but the sun has thawed out the air and has started, at least, on thawing out the seas."

When Bronson Alpha passes by the Earth for the first time, it wreaks havoc on our planet.
"on the night of the 25th, tides unprecedented in the world's history swept every sea coast. There were earthquakes of varying magnitude all over the world. In the day that followed, volcanoes opened up, and islands sank beneath the Sea; and on the night of the 26th the greater of the Bronson Bodies came within its minimum distance from the earth on this their first approach.
No complete record was ever made of the devastation.
Elliot James, who made some tabulation of it in the succeeding months, could never believe all that he saw and heard, but it must have been true.
The eastern coast of the United States sustained a tidal wave 750 ft in height, which came in from the sea in relentless terraces and inundated the land to the very foot of the Appalachians. Its Westward Rush destroyed every building, every hovel, every skyscraper, every city, from Bangor in Maine to Key West in Florida. the tide looped into the Gulf of Mexico, rolled up the Mississippi Valley, becoming in some places so congested with material along its foaming face that the terrified human beings upon whom it descended saw a wall of trees and houses, of stones and machinery, of all the conglomerate handiwork of men and nature - rather than the remorseless or uplifted water behind it. When the tide gushed back to the ocean's bed, its strewed the gullied landscape with the things it had uprooted.
It roared around South America, turning the Amazon Basin into a vast inland Sea which stretched from what had been the east coast to the Andes mountains on the West Coast. The speed of this tide was beyond calculation.
Every river became a channel for it. It spilled over Asia. It inundated the Great plain of China. It descended from the Arctic regions and removed much of france, England and germany, all of Holland and the great Soviet empire from the list of nations..."

Tony Drake, one of the main characters, and Eve hendron's love interest, is standing in the clearing of the complex in Michigan where the rocket is being constructed, looking up into the sky:
"he was standing alone, looking up and checking his mental calculations, when someone stopped beside him.
'what is it, tony?' hendron said.
'Where's the Moon tonight?'
'Where - that's it where? That's what we'd like to know - exactly what happened. We had to miss it, you see; probably nowhere in the world were conditions that permitted observation when the collision occurred; and what a thing to see!'
'the collision!' Said tony.
'When Bronson Alpha took out the moon! I thought you knew it was going to happen, Tony. I thought I told you.' "

The capital of the country is moved to Hutchinson Kansas. Cole hendron has two airplanes at his command, and Elliot james, the diarist in the book, accompanies the expedition to call on the president.
"We explained the situation to the president, and he was delighted to know that we had survived the crisis of the passing. He then continued gravely: 'I believe that Hendron will be successful. You alone, perhaps, may carry away the hope of humanity and the records of this life on earth; and I will return to the tasks confronting me here with the Solace offered by the knowledge that the Enterprise could be in no -' "

An extra ship is built, and the 500 humans that are left in the Michigan encampment are removed. From there place in the heavens, they watch the destruction of their former home.
".. the nebulous atmosphere of Bronson Alpha touched the air of earth, and then the very Earth bulged. Its shape altered before their eyes. It became plastic. It was drawn out egg-shaped. The cracks girdled the globe. A great section of the Earth itself lifted up and peeled away, leaping toward Bronson Alpha with an inconceivable force.
The two planets struck.
Decillions of tons of mass colliding in cosmic catastrophe.
'It's not direct,' Duquesne shouted. 'Oh, god! Perhaps -'
everyone knew what he was thinking. Perhaps they were not witnessing a complete annihilation. Perhaps some miracle would preserve a portion of the world.
They panted and stared.
Steam, fire, smoke. Tongues of flame from the center of the earth. The planets ground together and then moved across each other. It was like watching an eclipse. The magnitude of the disaster was veiled by hot gases and stupendous flames, and was diminished in awfulness by the intervening distances and by the same slowness with which it took place.
Bronson Alpha Rode between them and the earth. Then - on its opposite side - fragments of the shattered world reappeared. Distance showed between them - widening, scattering distance. Bronson Alpha moved away on its terrible course, fiery, flaming, spread enormously in ghastly light."

The rocket carrying Cole Hendron, Tony Drake, and Eve Hendron lands safely on Bronson Beta. They decide to wait throughout the long night till morning, to test the air and the hot Earth beneath the rocket. But one by one, tony, Hendron, Duquesne, even Eve, slip out of the rocket, not able to wait till the morning. Then they realize the other rocket may not have made it. They have a little philosophical conversation about the legacy of mankind:
" 'it is nothing - if we merely continue the earth - here. When I recollect the filth of our cities, the greed of individuals and of nations, the savagery of wars, the horrors of pauperism permitted to exist side by side with luxury and wealth, our selfishness, hates, diseases, filth - all the hideousness we called civilization - I cannot regret that the world which was afflicted by us is flying in fragments utterly incapable of rehabilitation, about the sun. On the other hand, now we are here; and how are we to justify the chance to begin again?' "

Tony Drake and Elliott James make a trip on an airplane to a domed city they had seen in the distance.
"Dimly Tony heard James shouting 'it's magnificent!' And in an almost choked voice he replied: 'they must have been amazing.' in the majestic streets beneath that dome no living thing moved. No lights glowed in those streets where the setting Sun allowed Shadows to fall; no smoke, no steam, no fire showed anywhere, and although their motor made hearing impossible, they knew instinctively that the colossal, triumphant metropolis below them was as silent as the grave."

Well, as it turns out, the other rocket did make it, though just barely. The tubes that contained the atomic force that propelled the rocket, were melting as they approached Bronson Beta, and they were barely able to land. On their way back to their settlement, Tony and Elliott swooped South, to explore a bit more before returning. This trip revealed the little settlement where Reynolds and his group had crashed. They are ecstatic to know that their friends survived.

This book is full of racial stereotypes, and of course misogynistic roles for the women. (Except for Eve Hendron, Who is allowed to be a scientist helping her father.) Tony had had a "Jap servant" named kyto. Well, Kyto gave Tony the surprise of his life, when he approached him one day in their settlement on Bronson Beta:
… (mer)
 
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burritapal | 16 andra recensioner | Oct 23, 2022 |

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Statistik

Verk
53
Även av
11
Medlemmar
2,742
Popularitet
#9,366
Betyg
3.8
Recensioner
72
ISBN
137
Språk
4

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