3583One of the novels that I have loved since I started reading SF is that classic of American SF literature,
When Worlds Collide.
It is an odd bird, this book.
It is, arguably and as far as I know, the first mass-market work of prose or literature that has as its main event the physical annihilation of the planet. It's influence has rung down through the years: it's cited as the inspiration for
Flash Gordon (in as much as the rogue planet Mongo is on a collision course with Earth) and
Deep Impact, the comet-hits-earth flick from 1998, the year with not one but
two asterism-threatens-to-hit-Earth-and-everyone-dies-movies (this was the one that didn't suck).
The broad outline of the plot, for those who don't know, is that a binary rogue planet, the Bronson Bodies (named for their discoverer) are discovered hurtling toward the Solar System, and scientists quickly determine that they are going to interact, not in the good way, with Earth. One planet, known as Bronson Alpha, is a gas giant world similar to Uranus or Neptune in appearance and size. The other, Alpha's moon, is Bronson Beta, a world almost identical to Earth in size and, as it turns out, environment.
A scientific clique, the League of the Last Days, is formed to address the threat. The first-amongst-equals is an American physicist, Cole Hendron. He and his group of scientist-engineer survivors drive most of the plot in their endeavor to construct a ship to escape our doomed world and make a landing on Bronson Beta, for it is predicted that the Bronsons, after making a close and catastrophic pass on Earth will round the sun and return in sixteen month's time to finish the job; Bronson Alpha to collide with and physically demolish the Earth and Bronson Beta to be captured by the Sun and bereft of gravitational influence from Alpha by Alpha's collision with Earth.
The novel was written by two well-known and popular novelists and writers of the day, Philip Wylie and Edwin Balmer (Balmer, who mostly wrote SF and for the pulps, has been largely forgotten while Wylie, who wrote in more than one genre and famously wrote a mainstream novel
Generation of Vipers and another classic of speculative fiction
The Disappearance, still has something of a legacy footprint). It was written and first published in 1933 and has been in and out of publication ever since. So it has staying power.
It has, unlike the novels frequently touted as its equal on the covers (
Nineteen Eighty-Four and
Brave New World) not aged well. Tied into the current events of the day of its writing and laced with soft versions of the sexism, racism, and elitism of the day, it's a literal period piece, dated as dated can be, despite being apparently regarded as one of the seminal works of the modern form of the genre.
So, last night at Powell's, I found a particularly luridly-covered vintage copy of this book. I found it interesting in that way, especially the incongruence of the two imperriled people to the catastrophe unfolding literally at their feet, the handsome man and the beautiful woman as stylishly on-point as their world is chaotically disheveled, as well as the melodramatic tagline
Out of the horror of doomsday comes hope for life, for love. In a dark way, hilarious.
The real hook for me? In the lower right hand corner of the book, there is a dark blue flag with white letters reversing out the legend NEW REVISED EDITION.
Here, see:
On the right, a more modern version of the paperback, one I've owned for many years. Grim, blocky type made more intimidating by the atmospheric and effective Vincent DiFate cover art. On the left is the oddity I found last night, sardonically-hilarious art and all. Isn't that a scream, really? It's almost unfair to make fun of it, it's so obviously silly.
That's not the real treat here, though. Remember NEW REVISED EDITION? Well, the original text, written in the 1930s, is so full of anachronisms it's amazing that anybody's using it as an inspiration anymore other than wistful rememberances of That Was The World that Was (and if you are, you're almost certainly Caucasian; the only character that got any development that wasn't white was the Japanese manservant of the pivotal character Tony Drake, and when he was regarded, the text is leaden with benevolent, kindly patriarchal condescension). When I read the first few pages of this edition though, I almost fell over myself in bewilderment; the book starts off chapter one with the supporting character Dave Ransdell, a war veteran and aviator entrusted to courier the precious photographic plates to Dr. Hendron in New York, waiting to pass through customs at an airport, receiving urgent pleas to sell his story to the papers first.
Hold up. I've read this novel dozens of times. I knew he approached New York on a fast cruise ship from France. In this version, though, he voyages on a transatlanic flight from Lisbon.
It was then it sunk in just what NEW REVISED VERSION really meant. And I went looking. This edition was released in 1952 and sections of the text were revised to reflect more accurately the then-current geopolitics. A resurgence of the Nazi party in Germany was referenced. A reference to Mussolini was deleted. The Iron Curtain is referred to. East Germany is mentioned.
The truly odd thing on top of all the other odd things is that the version you're most likely to pick up today is the more anachronistic one,
not the NEW REVISED VERSION which, while still anachronistic, is less so than the original. The version on the left, the more modern edition, was copyrighted in 1962 and was probably published sometime in the 1970s (all a guess as it's not documented in the book itself when it was published) but it's the original Thirties text, not the updated version, which came out in about 1952. It's not unprecedented; the Patrick Tilley novel of ET invasion and conquest,
Fade-Out, was originally published in 1975 with reference to then-recent military events and geopolitics and republished in the 1990s with Gulf War references.
I think this would be worth a series of articles here about each chapter and what got changed and the book in general. It's still, though hoary and old, a part of what I informally think qualifies as an American modern SF canon, and it continues to inspire works of not only comics and literature but also popular music. And it's always useful to confront what's expired in our culture and winnow the bad out or at least call it by its name.
Oh, and just to be complete, here's the back covers, complete with more melodramatic text, some of which never actually occurred in the work itself.
