When Worlds Collide
© 1933 by Philip Wylie and Edwin Balmer
I can’t imagine a more difficult set-up to write about. Face it, the destruction of the Earth and the near-total sum of all its inhabitants, intelligent and sentient as well as all the lesser members of the biosphere, the annihilation of the incredible beauty of the natural world – Niagara Falls, the Himalayas, the deserts, the ice-blocked oceans, the Grand Canyon to name only a few – as well as the Beauty created by man himself – the pyramids, Jerusalem, all the treasures in the Louvre and all the museums and libraries of the world containing all the histories and biographies and great discoveries and thoughts of Man – this destruction is an existential crisis of the ultimate degree, for after it is gone, after it is obliterated in cosmic cataclysm, there’s absolutely nothing left to show even the un-guaranteed existence of other species that We Were Here and Did This.
What would you do if you had privileged information that the earth would be destroyed in a collision with a random stellar object just happening to be passing by in a year or so? Don’t laugh – there are asteroids called Near Earth Objects, grouped into three broad families based on their orbital radii, which regularly cross Earth’s path and do pose the potential of danger. Certainly not of complete disintegration as threatened in this novel, but definitely of a catastrophe comparable to that which eliminated the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. There is even an international arrangement called Spaceguard which is tasked with cataloguing all such objects in an effort to have plenty of warning should such a collision seem immanent.
So, now, seriously, what would you do? Well, there’s not much you or I can do. Wylie and Balmer don’t focus on the ordinary man, for the simple reason that in such a terrifying situation there’s not much the powerless can do. At first society is maintained at the butt of a gun, but soon it all breaks down. What happens in Hindu India unnerved me in its finality. Back home not every person, but large segments of the populace shed their humanity, roaming in gangs, pillaging, murdering. While not a morally preferable choice, it’s an expected one, given man’s fallen nature. Our heroes must cope with the self-destructive rage of a humanity that is under a death sentence.
But what would you do if you did have power? There is the story. A group of top scientists, in America, at least, formulate a plan and put the bestest and brightest men and women to work. It seems two objects are heading Earthway: Bronson Alpha, a Neptune-sized gas ball whose gravitational tug will destroy our world on its second pass, four or five months after destroying our moon on the first go round. But this invader has a companion: an earth-like class M planet which might – just maybe! – be able to sustain human life once its orbit round the sun, where Earth’s once was, is stabilized. So a thousand young, courageous, brilliant and fertile scientists of both sexes roll up their sleeves and get to work building a Space Ark.
The science and mechanics of it sound hokey and unsound to me, but this was written in 1933, so I guess it was plausible back then given what they knew at the time. I thought the program details to build a ship and launch it was fascinating. Even more so the inevitable “there’s only room for a hundred people, and there’s a thousand of us working on it” dilemma. How its resolved as well as the answer to the question of “how do you rebuild civilization, and what do you bring with you, given limited space” was compelling and intriguing. For instance, the head egghead stuffs books in between the ship’s dual hull to act as insulation as well as maintaining the continuity of human thought on Bronson Beta.
It showed its age in a couple of places (“he’s a good egg!” “the ship’s propulsion will harness the energy of the atom!”) but that’s part of its charm. The years have turned this book from a doomsday scenario to a tale of alternative history. And that’s how you gotta read it to fully enjoy it. The unabashed religious expression; a social strata where men were men and women were women, with well-defined and established roles; the slang; the weird spellings, such as “cañon” for “canyon”; saying someone was “gay” with absolutely no sexual-socio-political connotations – you just gotta read it with those things in the back of your mind. And you know what? It kinda works.
How does it compare to the 1951 movie of the same name? Hmmm. I liked the book better, I think, but only slightly. There is a fairly blunt personal conflict between the two protagonists and the dame scientist they both are keen on that’s not done as well in the book, and there’s the conflict with the wealthy industrialist who bankrolls the Space Ark project just so long as he’s allotted a spot in the passenger compartment that’s not in the book at all. So it’s almost two different takes on the same story, both of which I’d give a solid B. Nothing earth-shattering, pun possibly intended, but a good read or a good watch that will keep you involved throughout its duration.
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