This June I had a lot of fun writing about George Allan England’s “June 6, 2016” (www.michaelmayadventureblog.com/2016/06/june-6-2016-predictions-and.html). In that piece I compared England’s version of that date with June 6, 1916, around when he wrote the story. Well, I’m at it again. The story this time is actually a novelization. As a general rule I look at novelizations as marketing by-products generally not worth the time it takes to read them. Television and movies lack the richness of a novel and to have some hack transcribe the screenplay into a readable version is an exercise doomed to fail.
I made an exception in this case for two reasons: one, the person who wrote the screenplay also turned it into a novel. And two, the television episode that the novel is based on is not readily available. There are tantalizing bits as well as a trailer on Youtube but that’s all. The seventy-six minute program was recently released on DVD but to little fanfare. (You’ll see why I say that in a minute.)
The novel/novelization in question is Philip Wylie’s Los Angeles 2017 A.D. from 1971. It was the last book published during Wylie’s life and the second last he had published. Now Wylie is a very interesting fellow. His early work helped inspire Superman (Gladiator, 1930), Doc Savage (The Savage Gentleman, 1932), Flash Gordon (When Worlds Collide, 1932) before he moved onto writing about nuclear destruction (The Paradise Crater, 1945 and others). His early guesses about nuclear bombs got him arrested by the government just before the creating of the atomic bomb. Later he was instrumental in the creation of the Atomic Regulatory Commission. After this he wrote detective novels but also an early examination of feminism, and finally, the last theme that dominated his life, ecological disaster. Los Angeles 2017 A.D. is one of these works.