Philip Wylie worked as a consultant for Civil Defense in the early 50's and I am sure that this influenced his decision to create this novel. He wanted to preach the cause of Civil Defense.

He did it by comparing sister cities River City and Green Prairie in there preparedness for a atomic attack, with Green Prairie having an active program and River City none. He talks about the difficulty with maintaining such a program through the characters and their lives. He uses a 4-5 page editorial of a newspaper editor in the book who is fired for printing it.

The attack when it does come is probably one of the best described by writers of that time. It focuses on the blast and firestorm with a passing glance at radiation and little discussion of long term effects of the radiation. It showed the preparedness of Green Prairie responding to the attack and the chaos of River City and other cities elsewhere in the USA.

A few things were odd....cities were attacked but the air force base outside Green Prairie wasn't...they could track the flights of Russian aircraft but the enemy seemed to be able to reach their target in the middle of America with no problem...perhaps this was a comment on his part on the preparedness of the military of the time.

You cannot view this book with the knowledge we have now. I recall the Cuban Missile crisis as a Canadian boy of 12 years and remember the air raid drills and family discussions of what we would do if there was an attack. Those discussion back then were pretty lame and this book would have seemed very real then. ( )

A grim, unrelenting view of what might happen if a major war destroyed society without eliminating mankind. ( )

It was an era more than half our population knows only through history. It was an era in which the United States went from being the only nation possessing nuclear weapons to facing the reality that the 'Godless Commies' also had them. It was an era in which the Cold War blossomed, together with fear that it could well turn into a hot -- and radioactive -- one.

Philip Wylie's 1954 novel Tomorrow! takes us inside that time, not only into the fears that existed but the debates over defense strategy and the need for and efficacy of the Civil Defense program. The book, re-released this month by Bison Books as part of its 'Beyond Armageddon' series, can't help but show it's age, especially with references to 'colored people' or using a worse epithet for the name of one area. Yet what is anachronistic today makes the era more real.

Wylie tells his story by way of two large cities on the Great Plains divided by a river and a state line. One, Green Prairie, is the exemplar of preparedness, with an active Civil Defense program. River City is the antithesis, abandoning any organized Civil Defense program. As such, Wylie can play out a debate over the value of Civil Defense in the face of nuclear weapons. Tomorrow! leaves no doubt which side Wylie is on. Still, that message does not mean his characters are simply unadorned storytelling devices. In fact, the potential future he envisions ('X-Day') does not arrive until well more than halfway through the book. (Wylie's 1963 novel, Triumph, dealt exclusively with a group of survivors of a nuclear World War III.)

Wylie builds the story largely on the interplay of three families. Except for the youngest daughter, the entire Conner family is actively involved in Green Prairie's Civil Defense program and eldest son, Chuck, is a lieutenant in military intelligence. Social status is the primary concern of their next door neighbors, the Baileys. Mrs. Bailey dreams of marrying her daughter Lenore, Chuck's longtime girlfriend, to Kit Sloan, the scion of the richest family in the two cities. While Lenore is active in Civil Defense, Mrs. Sloan is infuriated by the inconveniences caused by Green Prairie's Civil Defense drills and embarks on a campaign critical of the program. Not only is the Civil Defense debate played out within these broad outlines but so are other aspects of real life, be it human weakness or loyalty to others or oneself.

Although Wylie is an advocate of a Civil Defense program, he also recognizes there is no precedent for and no way to predict human response to a nuclear attack. He would, in fact, raise that very issue in a published review of three disaster studies in the December 1956 issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. In fact, Tomorrow! doesn't fit firmly into a particular political ideology. It also takes on the dangers of McCarthyism and how casting things as either American or un-American is not only counter to the nation's founding principles but weakens national security.

Some of the issues Tomorrow! raises persist. For example, the book indicates that by taking proper measures a nuclear war survivable. That thought still raises hackles for essentially saying nuclear war is 'winnable.' Meanwhile, the Civil Defense debate has a few echoes in today's Department of Homeland Security and an era in which nation-states do not alone pose cognizable threats.

That doesn't make Tomorrow! prescient or predictive. In fact, one could debate whether it succeeded as a cautionary tale in 1950s America. Yet that is irrelevant to the fact the the book immerses today's reader in an era in a way no nonfiction work could.

(Originally posted at A Progressive on the Prairie.)

This was one of the scariest books I read in my youth. Rousing as well. I recommend it to everyone! ( )