Greer’s ‘Twilight’s Last Gleaming’ sees end of empire — Transition Voice.
Apparently, people who write titles for politico-military thrillers about nuclear brinksmanship find the language of The Star Spangled Banner just too good to resist.
Twilight’s Last Gleaming is a 1977 drama starring Burt Lancaster as a renegade air force general who takes over a nuclear missile silo and threatens to start World War III unless the president, played by Charles Durning, releases a document to the public demonstrating the U.S. government’s bad faith in conducting the recently ended Vietnam War.
By Dawn’s Early Light, a made-for-TV film from 1990, spins a similarly Strangelovian tale, where the president played by Martin Landau tries to get control of the military from renegade officers seeking a pre-emptive strike against a late-Cold War Soviet Union.
And earlier this year novelist Greg Dinallo published Rockets’ Red Glare, a techno-thriller that imagined a connection between the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 and a potential nuclear war at sea in the late 1980s.
Now, we can add to the list another Twilight’s Last Gleaming — this one a new novel of America’s decline and fall by John Michael Greer.
– See more at: http://transitionvoice.com/2014/12/star-spangled-collapse/#sthash.APjU6po4.dpuf
