Word: epochally
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Philip Wylie, raucous critic of contemporary U.S. folkways (Generation of Vipers, An Essay on Morals), had thought up the title for his new book: Opus 21; Descriptive Music for the Lower Kinsey Epoch of the Atomic Age-A Concerto for a One-Man Band-Six Arias for Soap Opera-Fugues, Anthems and Barrelhouse...
...snoozing beside his wife in the "Late Christian Epoch" (the 20th Century) when the Goddess "evokes" him into an unstated time in the future. At first glance, he thinks New Crete looks wonderful. Money and machinery have been abolished; matriarchy has made everybody happy; poets, witches and magicians are thick as nuts and considered an elite class...
...soon finds out, when the Goddess herself appears in the form of an unscrupulous female named Erica-a "triple-faced, ash-blonde bitch" with whom Poet Venn-Thomas had had a gruesome love affair in the Late Christian Epoch. What Erica does to overcivilized New Crete is something awful. She plants some 20th Century cigarettes in the closet of a cute little nymph named Sapphire; she fouls up the witches, hexes the horses, mortifies the magicians. By the time she's through, New Crete is on the verge of collapse-at which point Poet Venn-Thomas sensibly decides...
...stand out-as another rich expression of Robert Graves's fantastical mind. To laugh in the face of his Goddess is only natural; but without this pure yet beastly muse Graves would probably not be what he emphatically is-one of the finest poets of the Late Christian Epoch...
...figures out the relationships between four basic values. Then, says Gamow: "We will be able to say that physical science has reached its end . . . and that all that remains is ... minor details . . . and adoration of the completed system. At that stage, physical science will enter from the epoch of Columbus and Magellan into the epoch of the National Geographic Magazine...