a516  2348  09 Apr 83
BC-APN--Future History, adv 24-1st add,530
$adv 24
AGENCIES AND RADIO OUT
For release Sun., April 24
VESTAL, N.Y.: productive lives.
    He predicts that computers will extend thought capacity in the 21st
century the way the Industrial Revolution extended muscle power,
giving humanity access ''to more knowledge than ever before.''
    ''The big problem is how man applies that knowledge, and I happen to
be optimistic. I believe there is more original good in the world
than original evil, so I come down on the side of the future that will
offer great opportunities for young and old,'' Griffith says.
    Wagar was profoundly influenced by Wells during his studies, reading
all of the English author's 120 books by the time he left Yale in
1959.
    He went on from Wells to the study of various utopians,
science-fiction writers (most futuristic) and sacred texts. The idea
for his latest book grew out of a seminar he developed while teaching
at the University of New Mexico.
    ''I'd always been interested in science fiction, in any little
apocalyptic overtones, and it seemed like the natural topic of a
seminar dealing with the end of the world,'' he says.
    ''Terminal Visions'' is the result of Wagar's study of more than 350
novels, plays and short stories.
    Early in the 241-page work, Wagar takes a swipe at critics of
science fiction and ''the invidious distinction'' they make between
speculative writing of the future and other types of literature.
    ''It is dangerous to build walls in criticism between 'real'
literature and 'genre' literature for which the rationale is a
difference of subject matter. It is equally wrongheaded to engage in
wholesale condemnation of any sort of fiction because of its
relationship to the marketplace. In a capitalist society . . . any
writer . . . becomes entangled to some degree in the forces of the
marketplace,'' Wagar wrote.
    He says he underwent a kind of mental transformation while writing
the book, starting with a gloomy outlook which increasingly
brightened.
    ''I found that in writing about last things, I was also writing
about first things,'' says Wagar, who discovered only one writer in
six viewed the end of the world as a dead end. Most believed in a
transformation or renewal of cultures, morality or humans.
    ''The insight may, of course, be entirely wrong,'' Wagar says near
the end of the book. ''In the early 2080s, our descendants may be
living with the same chaos of Coca-Cola, fundamentalist Islam,
suburban shopping malls, starving East Africans, Eurocommunism and
H-bombs crouching in their silos that we know so well in the early
1980s. But it is not bloody likely.''
    Wagar says he doesn't try to sway students to his belief in the
nuclear cataclysm he envisions.
    But the number of students who enroll in his courses indicates the
widespread concern with what the future holds, he says.
    Most students are optimistic, he says.
    ''Last year, 30 percent of students who took a poll indicated that
they felt the world would destroy itself; this year, the same poll was
given and it turned out that only 10 percent felt the same fear. I
don't know what to make of that; I would have expected just the
reverse,'' he says.
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