Recreational Reading, sidetracked

RECREATIONAL READING

October 15, 2015  B. J. Brill

Usually, when this world is too much with me, I like to read of others.

In the process of sorting through several thousand of Sylvia’s paperbacks I came upon “When Worlds Collide,” by Philip Wylie and Edwin Balmer, Dell 1933. It was in company with three other Philip Wylie books:

The Gladiator (a man of steel has Forrest Gump –like adventures), Manor Books, 1976, copyright 1930;

The Smuggled Atom Bomb, Lancer Books 1965 , copyright 1948; and

Tomorrow, Popular Library, 1963, copyright 1954. Dedicated to the men and women of the Federal Civil Defense Administration  and those other true patriots and volunteers who are doing their best to save the sum of things.

In 1963 Popular Library’s Editorial Board considered Philip Wylie to be one of this world’s greatest authors.

By the time I was old enough to read, this genre (Black Utopias) was not something I would check out of the Library. However, NOW, having grown up in the “time” he writes about, I can identify , surprisingly,  with the feelings and attitudes he describes so vividly.  I can recall instructions given on “what to do” in the event of “the Bomb”. As I grew older and learned  “more” I thought, “ A hell of a lot of good that will do!”

But at the time it did scare me.

We also had to live with the jets that routinely broke the sound barrier over Lake Huron. At first that scared me, but then in the vast skies over Lake Huron we could watch the contrails and try and guess when the sonic boom would come.

The radio news listed how much “TNT” was used in the latest “test”. That scared me.

 This past year there has been some concern shown that “families” or parents and children are participating in pickets and demonstrations. The concern is that the children are “too young” to be exposed to concerns of adults? I’ll tell you the world we face as children is a lot less scary than the world we can  Imagine! I hated fire. When the hay- barns would ignite by spontaneous combustion I would imagine the Black Donnellys were riding again – even though they had been dead for half a century

 

And then they built a Candu Nuclear Power Plant just eight miles away. I don’t know if any locals protested its building.  ‘Refrain’:  It scared me.

Eventually our whole family moved more than a thousand kilometres  North.

Within two years of our arrival a proposal of a Nuclear Power Plant to be built on our “doorstep” elicited an “Open House/Town Hall”  meeting where the community (myself included) protested. It never did find a taker in all of the North.

And then, 40 years later, the spent fuel bundles (Nuclear Waste) stored at the site I moved away from, was being offered to my new home!

And city council said, “Why not? “  “Let’s get on the list of possible sites and be wined and dined and educate the people so they know how safe it will be and the employment opportunities…”

The loss of forest industry mills had left many northern communities so desperate for employment opportunities that they are/were willing to consider Nuclear Waste storage.  It took almost three years of protest by a more active, younger, generation to have the city council officially withdraw their offer of candidacy.

(Big Sigh)

Actually none of the four books has anything about Nuclear Waste. Nuclear Power Plants had not yet come on line to create it.

The Nuclear Waste described was more the result of “the impact” or “impending impact”, physically and mentally upon world population and the earth itself.

 When Worlds Collide was written before the Bomb.  The use of Nuclear Power (atomic pile) to power the space ship would have been science fiction at that date, most likely. A few years later Wylie did get arrested for writing about “the bomb” before the “bomb” was fully developed and public knowledge. Some science fiction writers could add two and two most accurately.

When Worlds Collide is not man destroying the earth.  It is man trying to escape the doomed planet so that “man” would survive.

Years ago I saw the movie.  The only “memory clip” I have is of people running to board the ship. After reading this book for the first time I wonder what the movie was about?  The book is quite dramatic and descriptive.  I will have to keep an eye on the Movie Channel.

However dramatic and devastating the story line, it was the contents of the list of what to take when they escaped that caught my eye.

Page 205: quote “ Our first and most necessary unit for self-preservation proved to be the common honey bee, to secure the pollination of flowering plants, trees and so on. Keppler says that of some twenty thousand nectar insects, this one species pollinates more than the rest put together. The honey bee would take care of practically all of this work, as his range is tremendous.  There are a few plants, Kepplar tells me, such as the red clover, which he cannot work on, but his cousin the bumblebee , with his longer proboscis, could attend to them.  So first and foremost among living things , we bring bees.” End quote.

Now, I wonder, do the chemists of the deadly pesticides tell themselves “Why worry about destroying honey bees with neonicotinoids when there are twenty thousand other pollinators out there.”

However – “pollination” is becoming a suicide mission for the majority of those twenty thousand, too.