Quote about the source material's author --

Sam Moskowitz said this about M. P. Shiel who wrote the 1901 novel "The Purple Cloud" from which this 1959 end-of-the-world drama was adapted --
"It is indeed ironical that a man (flawed but occasionally brilliant) who was an anti-Oriental, ardent believer in Aryan superiority, and a war lover is to be posthumously ennobled as an apostle of peace and racial tolerance every time The World, the Flesh and the Devil is shown, as it will be for many years to come."

This quote appears in David Kyle's great book, "Pictorial History of Science Fiction" (pp 37, 38). Kyle went on to say, "When Matthew Phipps Shiel, the strange, often brilliant man, died after still writing sf in his old age, he left behind a strange, often brilliant body of works. One would be tempted to feel that if you ignored his incredibly intolerant comments they would somehow go away."

Needless to say when they adapted a film from his book 58 years later, extensive reworking was done. The last "good" man is now black instead of white; the last "bad" man is white; a white woman is caught between them.

Shiel's intolerance was all over the map. Another 1901 novel, "The Lord of the Sea", was a "complicated plot about floating fortresses controlling the seas. It was violently anti-Semitic, yet paradoxically it had a Jew for the hero and a Jewess for the heroine, and ended up with the establishment of a Jewish homeland very much like Israel."




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