The End of the Dream
First edition, 1972
The End of the Dream (1972) is Philip Wylie's final novel, published posthumously by Doubleday. Set in 2023, it is narrated retrospectively through the documentary records of the Foundation for Human Conservancy, which catalogued the slow environmental collapse of the United States from the 1970s onward. Pollution of air and water, the extinction of species, the poisoning of food supplies, and the cascading failures of ecosystems are presented as an accumulation of foreseeable consequences that went unaddressed until it was too late. The last surviving pocket of intact wilderness is a private Adirondack estate called Faraway, owned by Miles Smythe and his ecologist colleague Will Gulliver, who spent their lives trying and failing to prevent the outcome the novel documents.
Wylie spent much of his career writing science fiction, social commentary, and popular science, and had been warning about environmental degradation since the 1950s. The End of the Dream reads as his final reckoning with those warnings. Published two years before the first Earth Day had much political traction and a decade before acid rain became a mainstream concern.
Hardcover. First Edition, First Printing. Octavo, cloth. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1972. #10613.
Fine in fine dust jacket.
Wylie spent much of his career writing science fiction, social commentary, and popular science, and had been warning about environmental degradation since the 1950s. The End of the Dream reads as his final reckoning with those warnings. Published two years before the first Earth Day had much political traction and a decade before acid rain became a mainstream concern.
Hardcover. First Edition, First Printing. Octavo, cloth. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1972. #10613.
Fine in fine dust jacket.