James Nicoll Reviews

Philip Wylie’s 1954 Tomorrow! is a cautionary tale… ABOUT TOMORROW!

Sure, the Communist Russians and their Chinese pawns hate goodness, peace, freedom, and probably puppies as well, and every promise they’ve made in the past turned out to be a barefaced lie. Is that any reason to doubt their current offers of peace? More importantly, suppose the Russians are lying, even though the odds of a thousandth falsehood following nine-hundred-and-ninety-nines lies seems to violate the laws of probability. What can anyone do to blunt the fury of atomic Armageddon if war comes?

Green Prairie, Missouri, arrives at one answer to that question. River City, across the state line in Kansas, embraces its opposite.

Maybe nothing can be done about the Russian delight in badness, and maybe even now the Reds — many of whom are communist! — are plotting a dastardly and cowardly attack on America. Green Prairie believes that Civil Defense could save some who might otherwise die. Therefore, it’s only prudent to accept the cost, inconvenience, and investment of personal time to prepare for the doomsday everyone hopes will never come. The hard-working folks of Green Prairie embrace Civil Defense (like the ants of the fable who prepare for winter).

The people of River City came to a very different conclusion. Civil Defense requires time, money, and effort now. The war Civil Defense hopes to mitigate might never come. River City might be too insignificant to warrant an atomic bomb. If atomic bombs fall on River City, the preparations might prove insufficient. The fiscally conservative grasshoppers of River City reject Civil Defense.

The Connors of Green Prairie are prudent and careful, like their city. Their next-door neighbors, the Baileys, are lazy grasshoppers.

The Connors are good, hard-working Americans, from paterfamilias Henry to mother Beth, to Air Force man Chuck to radio-mad Ted to adorable moppet Nora. Each is willing to do their bit for America, despite the inconvenience.

The Baileys on the other hand are watered-down Methodists who exemplify almost everything wrong with America. Mr. Bailey is talented but shiftless, a decent accountant not above embezzlement if it will solve an immediate problem. Mrs. Bailey is a relentless social climber for whom no price is too high to pay to achieve the wealth and respectability Mrs. Bailey was denied as an impoverished child.

Lenore Bailey has her father’s intelligence and her mother’s drive, combined with a laudable All-American drive to put her talents to good use. Too bad for Lenore that Mrs. Bailey sees intelligence in a woman as a dreadful impediment that can only interfere with finding and trapping into marriage a wealthy man.

Lenore would make an excellent wife for Connor. If Chuck and Lenore had their way, she would. Alas, Chuck is poor and in the Air Force besides. This, plus Mr. Bailey’s poor choice of embezzlement target, hands Mrs. Bailey sufficient leverage to force Lenore into a socially strategic marriage.

Minerva Sloan is the richest woman in town. Heaven smiled on her and took her wealthy philandering husband Emmett off to a suitable and no doubt well-heated afterlife. Although she dotes on her son Kit, she can see marriage, even a doomed marriage to an unwilling woman, might improve him. Thus, when Mr. Bailey’s embezzlement is exposed, Mrs. Sloan and Mrs. Bailey come to terms: Lenore will marry Kit and Mrs. Sloan will not send Mr. Bailey off to prison.

All perfect ingredients for a compelling soap opera were it not for one minor complication. The Red peace entreaties are lies. Bomber wings converge on the US from the north and the south. Missiles track across the sky. San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York and Philadelphia suddenly go silent. Washington itself becomes a desert of red-hot, radioactive rubble.

Green Prairie and River City will not be spared. There’s a hundred-kiloton atomic bomb with the Sister Cities’ names on it. Soon, the two cities will learn which city made the right decision.

~oOo~

Readers who find lengthy, detailed descriptions of the effects of an atomic explosion on people from adults to babies in any way upsetting do not want to read this book. On the plus side, family cat Queenie somehow comes though completely unscathed. Also, if you stop reading around 70% of the way through the book, you can pretend the novel is entirely about the Kit-Lenore-Chuck triangle, spiced with Wylie’s fulminations about the flaws of then-modern-day America.

While Wylie embraces (or given the publication date, helps invent) nuclear war novel conventions such as the tendency of some Americans to instantly form homicidal mobs of looters and worse when subjected to minor setbacks like blackouts, traffic jams, or nuclear holocaust, it’s interesting that Wylie is not nearly as down on cities as later authors have been. You definitely don’t want to be in any of the unlucky cities on December 23^rd, 1955. In the aftermath, however, the cities recover faster than the countryside.

As well, while Wylie gets in a dig at France, he never doubts that America’s European allies will pitch in to help the US recover¹.

The Music Man​’s River City is in Iowa, not Missouri, and in any case The Music Man was first staged in 1957, after Tomorrow! was published. Wylie couldn’t have had the musical in mind… but I sure did when I listened to the radio-play adaptation of this atomic potboiler.

Generally speaking, Wylie novels are turgid and overwrought. This is no exception. However, there are some points of interest.

Take race relations, for example. For the most part Minerva gets her way², whether strong-arming Lenore to become engaged to Kit or forcing her paper to denounce Civil Defense for the crime of making her late to a dinner party. To her considerable irritation, Minerva is inextricably entangled with River City’s African American hospital, whose head, Alice Groves, always finds some way to outmaneuver Minerva. Why? Because the hospital was founded by her husband Emmett. What led Emmett to take note of and become concerned about River City’s black neighborhood? That’s where the brothels he frequented were³.

As it turns out, although good character and careful preparation can make survival more likely, there’s only so far that can take one. The Connors and Lenore for the most part come through OK, albeit lightly battered, radioactive, and aware that of every four children born, one will not meet community standards. On the other hand… stalwart newspaper publisher Coley Borden has many fine qualities, but located as he is at ground zero, he is instantly sublimated into superheated gas. Luck and location trump preparation.

Wylie’s intended moral was that Civil Defense is useful and necessary. It cannot save everyone but it can save more people than would survive without it. Perhaps unintended is a homily about the fragility of the US. The Reds drop five H‑bombs and twenty-five atomic bombs on the US⁴. This is sufficient to kill twenty million Americans⁵, and to reduce a considerable fraction of the rest of US to chaos. A chaos full of murderous mobs. A reader in 1954 might find Wylie’s pro-Civil Defense argument worth considering. A reader in 1965 or 1975, when nuclear arsenals were far larger, might find it difficult to see the point. Certainly by 1963’s Triumph, Wyle took a considerably dimmer view of the options open to Americans.

Tomorrow! is available here (Amazon US), here (Amazon Canada), here (Amazon UK) (audiobook only), here (Apple Books), here (Barnes & Noble), here (Chapters-Indigo), and here (Words Worth Books).

1: Russia appears to focus its attack on the US and not on the US’s NATO allies. Maybe this was due to a shortage of bombs. Or perhaps there was a disinclination to hit targets whose fallout would reach Moscow.

2: For example, atomic attack costs Minerva her legs and her son, but it doesn’t dislodge her from her position as a wealthy, influential woman.

3: Also, by choosing for the site of the Infirmary a previously white neighborhood, he could vex local racists, who would then move to the suburbs, where he could them sell them new houses.

4: The US retaliation is less effective at disrupting Russia, at least in the beginning. Russia does not have the same structural weaknesses as the US. Not that that saves Russia. The war ends, as so many US/Soviet conflicts do, with the revelation that the US has an undisclosed super-weapon, a cobalt-clad hydrogen bomb sufficiently powerful to level Moscow… from its submarine detonation site in the Gulf of Finland, six hundred and fifty kilometres away. This is an exceptionally large device. To quote:

On Mars, if there are naked eyes, they could have seen it without other aid.

Yes, this is quite hard on every neighboring nation and also on regions downwind of the Gulf of Finland. Why there? The bomb was so massive that it had to be delivered by submarine, there being no missile or plane with sufficient capacity.

Maybe Europe’s enthusiasm for helping the US is due in part to their uncertainty as to whether or not the US has a second submarine-delivered device. The US might just use it if the other nations of the world seemed to be taking advantage of the weakened US. This is just speculation on my part, I should add; the novel doesn’t explain.

5: Twenty million Americans die in the immediate aftermath. More die later.