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From: notes@ucbcad.UUCP
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Subject: Re: Shielding impressionable young minds - (nf)
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Date: Sun, 4-Dec-83 01:56:55 EST
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Posted: Sun Dec  4 01:56:55 1983
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#R:tekig:-166500:ucbesvax:3000006:000:2470
ucbesvax!turner    Nov 26 02:52:00 1983

There was a "day after" book by Philip Wylie, the title of which slips
my mind.  Not the best thing I ever read on the subject, but not so
shocking that Reader's Digest wouldn't condense out a few gory parts,
and run it to the cold-war-fevered public at the time.

Still it was pretty bloody--he vividly describes what happens to people's
faces when a huge overpressure hits a window pane that people are
standing in front of.  Technically, it is better on most counts
(especially the immediate effects on targeted cities) than "The Day
After".  (Although they didn't know about EMP back then.)

Wylie was, for a time, a Civil Defense official of the kind who are the
heroes of his novel; in retrospect, his view of the short- and long-term
dangers of fallout is frighteningly poor.  In the end (*spoiler warning*)
the U.S. "wins" by exploding something like a 300 megaton device in the
Baltic that simply wipes out the USSR.  This is a few weeks after the
initial exchange, and is recognized as potentially imperilling the rest
of the world.  But they do it anyway, to rid the world of Communism.

In addition to that little lesson, it is also something of a propaganda
piece on the value of a good civil defense--the events take place in a mid-
west "twin-cities" metropolitan area (maybe Minneapolis-St. Paul?), where
one municipality has a "good" CD program, and the other has almost none.
The one with the "good" program ends up saving more people, obviously.

Apart from the more problematic politics of "The Day After", and the
CD-propagandizing of Wylie's novel, they were basically the same story.
The presentation was less ideologically charged this time, but neither
attempted to cultivate careful thinking in the minds of their audiences.

Wylie's novel is (still) worth reading, though.  Another relatively good
(and less biased) novel in this small genre is Pat Frank's "Alas, Babylon",
an account of living in the U.S among the "lucky" few who escape inciner-
ation and radiation poisoning.  Together, these books form an interesting
and reasonably convincing picture of what is, by today's standards, a
quite limited exchange of ICBM's.

I read these when I was around 12.  They made a lasting impression on me.
Too many science fiction writers have made World War III into just another
exotic backdrop, but Wylie and Frank confronted the subject more directly,
and produced what I think are superior stories.
---
Michael Turner (ucbvax!ucbesvax.turner)