WYLIE, Philip (Gordon)

(1902-1971)

   US author who became notorious for his penetrating surveys of US mores and behaviour, and who coined the term "Momism" to describe the US tendency to sacralize motherhood, thus making family dynamics and morality impenetrable to reflection; outside sf he probably remains best remembered for Generation of Vipers (1942), where the coinage appeared. In the sf field he was most significant for 4 works: Gladiator (1930), filmed as The Gladiator (1938), about a young man endowed with superhuman strength, a tale directly responsible for the appearance of the comic-book hero SUPERMAN (though there PW's traditional scepticism about the relationship of a superior being to normal humanity was safely displaced onto the morose Clark Kent); When Worlds Collide (1933) and its sequel, After Worlds Collide (1934), both with Edwin BALMER, a retelling of theNoah's ark legend involving the END OF THE WORLD and interplanetary flight (the 1st vol was adapted into an sf COMIC strip and a successful film, WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE [1951]); and The Disappearance (1951), which ingeniously assaults the double standard through a tale in which the men and women of Earth disappear from one another, having been suddenly segregated into 2 PARALLEL WORLDS.The first 3 of these novels were published early in PW's career, the period during which he produced his most highly regarded single work, Finnley Wren (1934), a baroque anatomy in fictional terms of the young century into which were embedded 2 tales of sf interest, "An Epistle to the Thessalonians" and "Epistle to the Galatians". Other work from the 1930s included The Murderer Invisible(1931), a tale inspired by H.G. WELLS's The Invisible Man (1897) (with R.C. SHERRIFF, PW scripted the 1933 film version of The INVISIBLE MAN); the screenplay for The ISLAND OF LOST SOULS (1932), adapted from Wells's The Island of Dr Moreau (1896); The Savage Gentleman (1932), in which achild is brought up isolated from humanity, and excoriates the social world when finally exposed to it; and scripts for 2 further films, The King of the Jungle (1933) and Murders in the Zoo (1933).In the early 1940shis attention became fixed upon the apocalyptic implications of nuclear energy, and in "The Paradise Crater" (October 1945 Blue Book) - upon whose earlier submission to American Magazine he was put under house arrest for undue prescience - he described a high-tech post-WWII 1965 threatened by an underground Nazi attempt to rule the world through the use of atomic bombs; fortunately the hero blows up the villains' Californian HQ, causing a tsunami which takes care of Japan as well. In Blunder: A Story of the End of the World (1946 chap), atomic experiments blow up the entireplanet. In several later works PW continued to address the new vulnerability of the world. Titles include The Smuggled Atom Bomb (1951 Saturday Evening Post; in Three to be Read [coll 1951]; 1956),"Philadelphia Phase" (1951), The Answer (1955 chap) - a pacifist fantasy - Tomorrow! (1954) and Triumph (1963), the 2 latter novels being pleas for a nuclear Civil Defence. Towards the end of his life he turned from atomic DISASTER to ecological disaster in The End of the Dream (1972) (ECOLOGY)and a The Name of the Game tv tie, Los Angeles: A.D. 2017 * (1971). He also wrote an essay on sf, "Science Fiction and Sanity in an Age of Crisis", which appeared in Modern Science Fiction (anth 1953) ed ReginaldBRETNOR.PW was a highly successful commercial writer, much of whose work pretended to no more than entertainment value. In his sf, however, though he never abandoned a commercial idiom, he gave something like full rein to the anatomizing and apocalyptic impulses which made him, during his life, a figure of controversy to his large readership.

   JC

   Other works: The Golden Hoard (1934) with Edwin Balmer, a mystery; Night unto Night (1944), a ghost story; The Spy who Spoke Porpoise (1969).

   About the author: "Philip Wylie" in Explorers of the Infinite (1963) by Sam MOSKOWITZ; Still WorldsCollide: Philip Wylie and the End of the American Dream (1980 chap) by Clifford P. Bendan.

   See also: DYSTOPIAS; FEMINISM; HOLOCAUST AND AFTER; INVISIBILITY; NUCLEAR POWER; POLLUTION; SEX; SOCIOLOGY; SPACESHIPS; SUPERMAN.