This book may change your life. It may save it. It is one of the most important—and most shocking—books ever written.

 

Tomorrow! is a story of average, nice Americans living in the neighboring cities of Green Prairie and River City in Middle America. It is—until the sudden blitz—the story of the girl next door and her boyfriend; of the accountant who saw what was coming, and the rich old lady who didn’t; of engaging young kids, babies, “hoods,” a bank official who “borrowed” from a customer’s account.

 

Then, at the height of the Christmas shopping season, Condition Red is sounded, and this down-to-earth story of America’s Main Street becomes a shattering, vivid experience of the nightmare that human beings have cooked up for themselves.

 

Tomorrow! can be read as a novel of pure suspense—if you dare. It is a thriller in which the apocalyptic technology of today is superimposed on the future. But the novel is also designed to show Philip Wylie’s conclusions about America’s dangerous vulnerability to dread, hysteria, and panic, as well as his recommendations about what must be done.

Philip Wylie (1902–71) was a prolific writer of fiction and nonfiction whose earliest books exercised great influence in twentieth-century science fiction pulp magazines and comic books: Gladiator was the inspiration for Superman, The Savage Gentleman was the forerunner of pulp hero Doc Savage, and When Worlds Collide inspired Flash Gordon. Wylie’s Gladiator, The Disappearance, Triumph, and When Worlds Collide are all available in Bison Books editions.