Los Angeles: A.D. 2017

Los Angeles: AD 2017 by Philip Wylie

https://medium.com/@peterseanbradle/the-name-of-the-game-524b221e2b49

If you are over 60, you might remember a TV show called ‘Name of the Game.” The show involved the Howard Publishing empire. The show was formatted in an unusual rotating style. One week, it would have a show featuring Robert Stack as the editor of a crime magazine that involved the crime of the week. The next week, Gene Barry would be the publishing mogul, Glenn Howard, and he would have a show about what it was like to be a mover and shaker. The next week, Tony Franciosa was a reporter for something like “People” before “People” was even conceived.

One of the Gene Barry/Glenn Howard episodes involved Glenn traveling in time to 2017 when all the predictions of an environmental disaster had come true. The air is unbreathable. The population has dropped by 80% as people huddle underground in bunkers in a dystopian police state.

This was the only episode that has stayed with me over the last 52 years. Interestingly, it appears that this episode was directed by a 24-year-old wunderkind named Steven Speilberg. So, maybe that has something to do with it. According to Wiki: “The director, the 24-year-old Steven Spielberg, used camera angles to drive his first movie-length television episode across and remarked in later years that the show “opened a lot of doors for me.”

So, there you are: no “Name of the Game,” no Jaws, ET, Indiana Jones, etc.

Based on that 50 year old memory, I decided to read the Phillip Wylie novelization. Wylie wrote the incredibly schlocky “When Worlds Collide” and “After Worlds Collide.” Wylie is a “Golden Age of Science Fiction” writer who nobody remembers.

I will cut to the chase with my recommendation: you don't want to get this book. It is far too expositive. There are long, long passages where Glenn Howard talks about, contemplates, and discusses “free sex.” Initially, he is invited to a party with the movers and shakers where the men - all men - are set up with the sex partner of their desire, watch stag films, and attend a stag show. Howard doesn't partake, but he's overcome with guilt about his “sexual hangups.” When he is in the future, we get more of the same because the world has changed into a world not entirely unlike the world we live - hooking up is not stigmatized. However, it also appears that the people of the future have adopted the idea that even children are sexual beings, and sex education involves hands-on teaching at the kindergarten stage. One character confesses to Howard that her attraction is that he reminds her of her grandfather, with whom she had sex as a nine-year-old.

So, make the story “Drag Queens with Children,” and Howard's future is our present. 

Hooray.

Honestly, I'm not sure what Wylie's take on this is. Howard recognizes it as pedophilia, but that word is never used. There is a discussion about the arbitrary drawing of lines about the age of consent that are viewed as crazy in the future, i.e., our present. It seems like Howard is coming around to dealing with his “hang-ups” by the end of the story.

The ambiguity of Wylie on this is not surprising. In 1971, elite culture was on its way to normalizing pedophilia. If you doubt that, consider that Roman Polanski's anal rape of a 13-year-old was viewed as no big deal by the elites, who were outraged that Polanski was expected to serve any jail time. Consider also Whoopi Goldberg's defense of Roman Polanski on the grounds that what he did was not “rape rape.”

“It's not ‘rape rape.' It's the good kind of ‘learning experience' rape by a very important person, serf.”These kinds of stories about people from the past being transported into a future society have a standard structure. For the most part, this story falls into that structure, except that Glenn Howard is a Marty Stu. He's rated Triple A plus because of his special genes, meaning he must have sex with all willing women. For some reason, he's opposed to this until he works out his “hang-ups.”

Glenn is appointed to the board of directors of the United States, Inc., which has taken over from the defunct constitutional government. The villains are capitalists who insist on continuing to pollute. 

The book is a leftwinger's wet dream. The bad guys were the industrialists that Howard began the story with. After hearing about the ecological disaster that must surely end the world by the mid-1980s, these industrialists decide on a plan to discredit and cancel environmentalists, which leads to disaster. In other words, the characters were flat as carbon paper. 

Nonetheless, I enjoyed the story as a kind of retro-alt-hist. We get to see what people were concerned about in 1971 and what they thought the future would look like. For example, the environmental disaster was wrong, but it involves the same things that doom-criers are still crying doom about: acid rain, global warming, toxic waste, etc. On the other hand, there were things that Howard got wrong. Nuclear waste features prominently in his disaster. We should be so lucky as to have clean, non-polluting nuclear power. 

Wylie predicted global cooling as the thing that tipped civilization over into disaster. When this book was written in 1971, that was the concern, although Wylie allows Howard to say that it could have been global warming just as easily. One thing about this indeterminacy is that global warming is a far nicer problem than a “year without a summer.”

Another feature of the story is how sexist it is. Even 2017 is a man's world. Women are free to have sex with whomever they want, but that comes off more as a great deal for the men. For their part, men are still confidently in charge, while women are still playing support roles. Even for future seeing writers and media moguls, no one expected that “Women's Liberation” was going to mean anything. (Or it could be that in 1971, “Women's Liberation” was still about three years in the future.)

So, the book is schlocky, but if you are masochistic and like schlocky science fiction or social history preserved in amber, you may like this book.