Nightmare age Book

How did our parents think the world would end?

JDN 2456168 EDT 21:18.

Nightmare Age is a collection of short stories from the 1960s (edited by Frederick Pohl in 1970). I found it at a yard sale for 50 cents, which is probably about what it would have cost nominally in 1970. The theme is "the end of the world," though some of the stories are more apocalyptic than others. In some the crisis is averted, in others it's just a mild dystopia. And then, in some, everyone dies.

It's an interesting experience, reading what our parents' generation thought about the coming end of the world.

The first story is by far the most realistic, and also by far the most boring. I don't think those two necessarily go hand-in-hand, but in this case the story has no real characters, and reads like it's a series of news reports. This becomes unbearably dry after only a few pages, and yet the story goes on. The plot? Environmental catastrophe.

The second story may be where we get the idea of 'grey goo,' because it's about nanotechnology threatening to take over the world and turning it into, well, grey goo. The characters aren't that interesting, but at least they are characters.

The third story is about overpopulation, but a very weird sort of overpopulation where the census takers go around deciding who is least fit to live and killing them to make room for everyone else. You'd think they'd just mandate contraception, or sterilize people if it's really that bad; but no, they shoot you in the face.

The obverse occurs in the fourth story, in which a eugenic crisis has made humanity composed of utter morons, except for a tiny minority who are still intelligent enough to run things. This problem is solved by tricking millions of people into killing themselves; how this is heroic I am not sure.

The next story is also pretty realistic: It's about nuclear war, which understandably was on a lot of people's minds in the 1960s. It's told from the perspective of a robot, which I rather enjoyed. Why did everyone just become shiny and fall down?

At story six, it's not an apocalypse. It's hardly even a dystopia. They just have a very high rate of traffic casualties, and have special teams on every highway to heal the injured and clean up the dead as a result. I honestly don't understand why this story was even written, much less why it was included. It's basically Truth in Television, but it's not really that bad, now is it?

Story seven is just silly: It's about an ongoing war between drivers and pedestrians. This is so stupid I see no need to discuss it further (or really ever again).

Story eight is marginally better: It's about a war between poor youth and rich elders in suburbia. A real war, that is, with guns and Molotov cocktails and razor wire. Still, pretty ridiculous.

Story nine breaks this awful trend with something more interesting and more reasonable. As transportation costs fell, people began to move out of cities, and the cities were left to decay. This is to some extent already happening, especially in Detroit.

Story ten is also about nuclear war, which made it seem realistic'and then, alas, it's nuclear war between individual cities, "Denv" (Denver) and "Ellay" (LA). I don't even mind the name changes; they follow pretty good linguistic principles. But the idea that nuclear war'continuous nuclear war, with missile defense shields'could possibly occur between individual cities is profoundly bizarre. The characters are interesting in this one however, and there is a lot of good political intrigue.

Story eleven is about post-scarcity, and it's sort of a dystopia except that it would be much better than the world has ever been. The culture is bizarre mind you: "Poor" means you have to buy and consume huge amounts of stuff, while the "rich" aren't required to consume nearly as much. But aside from that, everyone in the world has enough food to eat, water to drink, clothes to wear, shelter to live in, transportation to get around. It is in short, materially a paradise. And once that ridiculous notion of economics is removed (by a clever move involving hyper-Keynesian robots), the world becomes quite well and truly a paradise. I can only hope the world ends so well!

The penultimate tale is about crumbling infrastructure, a shortage of skilled labor as unskilled laborers are laid off, an education system falling apart, all while the stock market rises, corporate profits soar, and there are ever more advertisements everywhere. In short, Truth in Television. It does make one very silly mistake: There are only 3 television channels, mostly ads, where of course what actually happened was we have 3000 television channels, also mostly ads.

And finally, the last tale is Heinlein and quite bizarre. It opens with a young woman who randomly strips naked in the street, and no, her motivation is never explained. Indeed, hardly any motivations are explained, as we are treated to Heinlein's bizarre theory of statistics on which "statistics" mean that things don't actually need to have reasons behind them and just happen because the statistics demand it. (Maybe he read a quantum physics textbook while high on marijuana or LSD? Seems probable.) The apocalypse is when all the statistical patterns line up and everything bad happens at once. It's definitely a full-scale apocalypse though. In fact, the final thing that happens pretty much renders the rest of the story completely irrelevant. (And frankly, could have been the plot by itself, if Heinlein were a better scientist.)

In all, it made for interesting reading, learning about what did and didn't frighten people in the 1960s, which made me think about what should and shouldn't frighten us today. (Hint: Global warming? Definitely. Terrorism? Probably not. Solar event? Maybe.) But it wasn't exactly good reading, especially those bizarre and ridiculous stories in the middle. It was worth the 50 cents at current prices. Not much more.