Word: dooms
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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There is more to that gloss than the sort of shoe polish applied during the twenties under the name of Normaley. And despite the uncertainties and vigorous predictions of doom hatched by a limited war, this glimmer gives a liberal education more meaning and purpose. At least, those who spend four years here studying, seeking agreement on broad issues without resort to staves or oratorical orgies, can take hope from it that the wall separating them from the world at large is not so thick as it seems...
Every so often the prophets of doom begin mumbling darkly that people have satisfied all their big postwar demands and the boom is ending. Last week, hard at work with slide rule, questionnaire and adding machine, the busy statisticians showed that a vast reservoir of demand still remains...
...respect. In earlier assaults on it, they had been beaten by a rockslide and a five-day snowstorm. This time hunger and thirst stopped them about 650 ft. from the summit after they had scaled an obstinate dièdre, a rock ledge jutting out like the edge of doom. Forced to return to their base camp, the mountaineers picked up more food and an extra supply of pitons, the big spikes with eyelets through which climbers string safety ropes...
...high noon climax in a crescendo of ticking clocks, shots of the railroad tracks stretching long and level into the distant hills and of the hushed, deserted streets of Hadleyville. Throughout the action, Dimitri Tiomkin's plaintive High Noon Ballad sounds a recurring note of impending doom...
Because of this doom and gloom atmosphere the scientists produce whenever they apply pencil to paper, I would not suggest reading ASF in one concentrated dose. It becomes dull after a while when the veneer of scientific plausibility and shrewd story telling loses its novelty and only the tears remain. But for all that, ASF is produced for more than just the science-fiction devotees, and taken with restraint, is a welcome relief from the heavy tomes of reading period...