The Years Of Madness

"Un-Man."

"'I remember the tail-end of the Years of Hunger, and then the Years of Madness, and the Socialist Depression...'" (IV, p. 51)

We understand "Hunger" and "Depression" and indeed "madness" but what are "Years of Madness"?

Robert Heinlein's Future History Time Chart begins with "Crazy Years" which include:

"...mass psychoses in the sixth decade, and the Interregnum."

-Robert Heinlein, The Man Who Sold The Moon (London, 1963), p. 7.

By "the sixth decade," he really does mean the 1960s, not the 2060s or etc! 

So far, Poul Anderson's Psychotechnic History continues to have some parallels with its inspiration, the Future History.

Etienne Fourre had fought:

"...with the gendarmerie against the atomists in the Years of Madness..." (V, p. 54)

"Most people looked at the surface of things. They saw that the great upheavals, the World Wars and the Years of Hunger and the Years of Madness and the economic breakdowns had been accompanied by the dissolution of traditional social modes, and they thought that the first was the cause of the second." (VI, p. 64)

"The rising incidence of neurosis and insanity among the intelligent and apathy among the insensitive had to be checked before other Years of Madness came." (X, pp. 94-95)

There is a Brian Aldiss story where everyone is insane.