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    The Answer: A Fable for Our Times
    The Answer: A Fable for Our Times
    The Answer: A Fable for Our Times
    Ebook54 pages44 minutes

    The Answer: A Fable for Our Times

    By Philip Wylie

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    About this ebook

    In this ingenious and unforgettable twentieth-century parable, a world on the brink of war is thrown into chaos when angels fall from heaven

    Major General Marcus Scott is a seasoned veteran of combat, a loyal American, and a skeptic in a volatile world. But amid the aftermath of a nuclear weapons test in the South Pacific, everything Scott believes—and refuses to believe—will be turned upside down.
     
    In a pool of clear water lies a single casualty of the blast, a beautiful winged being certainly not of this earth. And when a second celestial creature is discovered following a Russian H-bomb test, the military establishments of two major powers are thrown into chaos. Sworn enemies, each pledged to the other’s destruction, they must now deal with the unthinkable and the impossible: that the Cold War has transcended the boundaries of the world, reaching into heaven to bring down angels.
     
    A provocative tale as beguiling as it is disturbing, Philip Wylie’s The Answer is a captivating fantasy of the nuclear age. Set at the height of the United States–Soviet arms race, it is a page-turning thriller that taps into the anxieties and paranoia of a bygone era, offering a heartfelt plea for peaceful coexistence while decrying the suicidal insanity of war.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Media
    Release dateDec 9, 2014
    ISBN9781453202098
    The Answer: A Fable for Our Times
    Author

    Philip Wylie

    Philip Wylie (1902–1971) was a prolific writer whose work spanned a range of genres from men’s adventure and detective stories to science fiction and social criticism. Several of his novels, including When Worlds Collide, Night Unto Night, and Los Angeles: A.D. 2017, as well as the Crunch & Des stories, were adapted as movies and television shows, and his novel Gladiator is considered one of the inspirations for the iconic character Superman. Wylie was also a commentator on American society. In 1942 he published Generation of Vipers, a bestselling book of essays that attacked the complacencies of the American way of life. His novel The Disappearance presents a dystopia in which men and women vanish from the perception of the opposite sex, allowing Wylie to explore the issues of women’s rights and homosexuality. Wylie recognized early the potentially catastrophic effects of pollution and climate change and wrote both fiction and nonfiction on those topics.

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    • 4/5

      This (not very long novella) was separately published in hard covers back in 1955. It's an antiwar fable and has survived the passage of time quite well. After each of two US and Soviet H-bomb tests an injured angel flutters from the sky and dies. Two different political systems must endeavour to cope with the implications, and in the event both fail. In a way Wylie was doing the same sort of thing as I did more recently in my own novel Leaving Fortusa, using fantasy in a sciencefictional setting to work out moral/ethical questions, although otherwise the works are extremely different. I can't think why it took me so long to get round to reading this little book, which I bought nearly a decade ago.

    • 3/5
      I loved this as a kid, and rereading the ending now, I can see why. For a kid growing up in the Sixties, waiting for the bomb to drop, this was a very hopeful book. I suspect it would seem very dated now. -- Billie

    Book preview

    The Answer - Philip Wylie

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    Fifteen minutes!… the loudspeakers blared on the flight deck, boomed below, and murmured on the bridge where the brass was assembling. The length of the carrier was great. Consonants from distant horns came belatedly to every ear, and metal fabric set up echoes besides. So the phrase stuttered through the ship and over the sea. Fifteen minutes to the bomb test.

    Major General Marcus Scott walked to the cable railing around the deck and looked at the very blue morning. The ship’s engines had stopped and she lay still, aimed west toward the target island like an arrow in a drawn bow.

    Men passing saluted. The general returned the salutes, bringing a weathered band to a lofty forehead, to straight, coal-black hair above gray eyes and the hawk nose of an Indian.

    His thoughts veered to the weather. The far surface of the Pacific was lavender; the nearby water, seen deeper, a lucent violet. White clouds passed gradually—clouds much of a size and shape—with cobalt avenues between. The general, to whom the sky was more familiar than the sea, marveled at that mechanized appearance. It was as if some cosmic weather engine—east, and below the Equator—purred clouds from Brobdingnagian stacks and sent them rolling over the earth, as regular and even-spaced as the white snorts of a climbing locomotive.

    He put away the image. Such fantasy belonged in another era, when he had been a young man at West Point, a brilliant young man, more literary than military, a young man fascinated by the soldier poets of the first World War. The second, which he had helped to command in the air, produced no romanticists. Here a third war was in the making, perhaps a third that might put an end to poetry forever.

    Ten minutes! All personnel complete checks, take assigned stations for test!

    General Scott went across the iron deck on scissoring legs that seemed to hurry the tall man without themselves hurrying. Sailors had finished stringing the temporary cables which, should a freak buffet from the H-bomb reach the area, would prevent them from being tossed overboard. They were gathering, now, to watch. Marc Scott entered the carrier’s island and hastened to the bridge on turning steps of metal, not using the shined brass rail.

    Admiral Stanforth was there—anvil shoulders, marble hair, feldspar complexion. Pouring coffee for Senator Blaine with a good-host chuckle and that tiger look in the corners of his eyes. Morning, Marc! Get any sleep at all? He gave the general no time to answer. This is General Scott, gentlemen. In charge of today’s drop. Commands base on Sangre Islands. Senator Blaine—

    The senator had the trappings of office: the embonpoint and shrewd eyes, the pince-nez on a ribbon, the hat with the wide brim that meant a Western or Southern senator. He had the William Jennings Bryan voice. But these were for his constituents.

    The man who used the voice said genuinely, General, I’m honored. Your record in the Eighth Air Force is one we’re almost too proud of to mention in front of you.

    Thank you, sir.

    You know Doctor Trumbul?

    Trumbul was thin and thirty, an all-brown scholar whose brown eyes were so vivid the rest seemed but a background for his eyes. His hand clasped Scott’s. All too well! I flew with Marc Scott when we dropped Thermonuclear Number Eleven—on a parachute!

    There was some laughter, they knew about that near-disastrous test.

    "How’s everybody at Los

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