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Underground > Books, Criticism & Writing >

John Wyndham

  
 
Hydra vs Leviathan
20:32 / 30.05.06
John Wyndham is one of the authors i have "rediscovered" in the last couple of years, since getting back into sci-fi...

Anyone here a fan of his stuff, or got any thoughts/critiques of it? He's probably best-known for "The Day Of The Triffids" and "The Midwich Cuckoos", due to the film adapatations thereof (the latter as "Village of the Damned"), but also reasonably well known are "The Kraken Wakes", "The Chrysalids", and probably a few others i can't remember...

"Triffids" was one of the very few books that genuinely scared me as a child (the opening scene in the hospital, where he doesn't know if he can see and has no idea what's going on), and re-reading it as an adult i realised how satirical it actually was - both of the Cold War science/weapons race (and presciently of GM crops), and of middle-class British society trying to cope with social collapse...

More recently i re-read "The Kraken Wakes", which had a broadly similar concept (collapse of civilisation again, this time by deep-sea-dwelling alien invaders rather than man-made weapons and plants), but if anything was even more satirical, particularly stabbing at celebrity, journalism and TV, and "The Midwich Cuckoos", which tbh i was less impressed with, but still helped to spawn a sci-fi subgenre (alien impregnation and hive-minds).

Right now i'm reading a collection of his stories called "Consider Her Ways and others" - the title story, about a woman "mind-switched" into a future where there are no men and women are dividsed into reproductive and non-reproductive classes like ants, could be seen as a precursor in form of Marge Piercy's "Woman On The Edge Of Time" (altho with probably very different politics)... he seems to explore the mind-switch/time-dislocation concept in quite a few stories...

Also recently pickied up "The Chrysalids", which i need to re-read properly, but which i remember as a classic example of the "post-catastrophe-regression-to-religious-barbarism" theme in science fiction...

Anyone else read (and liked or disliked) much Wyndham? One i've not read, but have seen mentioned in a few "cult classics" type lists, is "Trouble with Lichen" - not sure if that's a novel or a collection of stories? (I do remember another collection of short stories which i think was by Wyndham that i read as a kid, with another present/future mind-switch story in it, involving a future in which most people are born without human minds, and those who do become effectively immortal by using the bodies of the "feeble-minded" to switch into whenever they start getting old... sort of reminiscent of Lovecraft's "The Thing On The Doorstep"...)

Also, i think the film adaptations deserve mentioning, as being IMO the main thing that i think gets Wyndham underrated or seen as a trashy "pulp" writer rather than the intelligent and witty satirist he was, particularly the awful 1960s "Day of the Triffids" (in which, IIRC, the "happy ending" is that the triffids are found to be allergic to... salt water)...
 
 
Bed Head
21:53 / 30.05.06
FWIW, Trouble With Lichen is a (slim) novel, and I don’t remember it as being particularly bad, although I may well be wrong about that - it’s been a decade and a bit since I read it. It’s about a scientist who discovers a form of lichen that will prolong human life for hundreds of years - he suppresses knowledge of it altogether, while sneakily dosing his kids with it, whereas one of his former employees decides to ‘market’ the lichen as a super-exclusive beauty treatment for the very very rich - not that any of her clients realise that this is an anti-aging treatment that actually works. As I remember, there’s lots of stuff in there about who in society really *deserves* to live forever. Not that I can remember how Wyndham shakes any of this out, of course. Just that that’s the Big Theme. But that's always his sort of his big theme, isn't it? Populations being pruned and pared down.

Also, I think Midwich Cuckoos is being dramatised on Radio 4 some time this week. Or next week. I’m pretty sure I just heard the trailer, anyway. But I might have imagined it. In which case, ignore this last bit.
 
 
All Acting Regiment
00:39 / 31.05.06
I love Day of the Triffids, it's so simple and nasty, like Quatermass. I just love that whole Dr Who/Triffids/Quatermass triangle so much that I'm not sure I can provide a particularly good criticism of it. I'll re-read DotT and get back to you.
 
 
Cat Chant
09:44 / 31.05.06
Bah. I have bad associations with John Wyndham, who was one of the writers I was reading as a transition from children's/YA SF into adult SF. I read his book Chocky as an 8yo girl after I saw the telly adaptation, and was put off by the fact that the main character (a plucky, life-risking 10yo boy) was lumbered with a pointless 8yo sister who read nothing but Magical Ballet Pony Academy or similar, and basically functioned as something for the boy to be better and more clued-in than. And that pretty much felt like Wyndham putting a big sticker on the book going THIS IS TOO HARD FOR PEOPLE LIKE YOU, LITTLE GIRL, GO AWAY UNTIL YOU HAVE GROWN A PENIS. Which was clearly nonsense, unless he thought his book was on a par with Magic Pony Ballet Academy.

Anyway, then I was trapped in a small expat town in Bahrain and I'd read my way through most of the English library, so I gave him another go when I was about fourteen. Unluckily, I chose The Trouble with Lichen which IIRC actually has a woman scientist who is Unfulfilled because of having Foolishly Chosen a Career, but luckily she gives all that nonsense up and chooses to marry and tend a boy scientist instead, which is a much better way for women to contribute to Science and makes them much more Fulfilled.

This is all years and decades ago now, but it was probably the first time I felt, like, 'Hang on, I'm one of those 'women' things, and I'm reading your book! Stop telling me I'm too stupid to understand it!' Or actually, the first time, when I was eight, I thought he just didn't know that eight-year-old girls could read proper books like what he wrote, and perhaps I should write to him and tell him. By the time I was fourteen I was a bit more aware that there might be something more to it than that.

Presumably some of those problems are due to his context and not just his own personal take on things, but I was too young to read past his context (and not very motivated to, anyway). I read some Brian Aldiss and some Isaac Asimov about the same time, and they weren't any better, so I stopped reading SF by men and never really started again. Interested to hear the Marge Peircy comparison, though - I'll try and check that story out!
 
 
All Acting Regiment
14:46 / 31.05.06
Oh, I second that Deva. I kind of have this "product of it's time" filter running quite a lot for reading stuff fro mthis period. I wonder if that's such a good idea...
 
 
Quantum
18:12 / 31.05.06
Christ, don't read Heinlein then... but perhaps try 'Dumb Martian' (1952) which apparently explores the issues of racism and sexism.
H2G2 says of Trouble With Lichen; Wyndham also casts light on the situation of women in the middle years of the 20th century: Diana Brackley is presented as an intelligent, forward-thinking scientist and a resourceful and successful businesswoman but, significantly, she is unmarried. Her mother and most of her customers seem content to give up their own power in order to take the rôle of supportive wife and helpmate.

I think in the fifties sci-fi very rarely had any female characters that weren't paper thin, passive and pretty prizes for the protagonist. Anything that commented on that (or racism) was relatively radical IMHO, and my favourite Harry Harrison book 'Star Smashers of the Galaxy Rangers' satirises that period really well.

My favourite Wyndham is Web, 'a tale concerning intelligent, co-operative spiders which inevitably come into conflict with mankind. The book contains many of Wyndham's most persistent themes - two intelligent species in conflict with one another, a species with a hive mind, the role of women in society, mankind's folly - and while it is not as polished as the novels published during his lifetime, it is generally held to stand up well alongside his other work.'
 
 
rizla mission
09:17 / 01.06.06
John Wyndham was one of my earliest favourite writers when around 10/11/12? years old.. I remember my dad telling me the story of 'Day of the Triffids', and it having such an effect on me I forced him to find me a copy of the book. Thereafter I spent a couple of years obsessively re-reading the Triffids / Kraken / Cukoos trilogy.. which, whilst undoubtedly firing my imagination and launching a lifelong obsession with apocalyptic weirdness, probably hasn't done me many favours psychologically speaking.

As such, it's difficult to discuss the books objectively and I'm not sure what I'd make of them these days, but one central thought that comes to mind is; why is the English disaster-SF tradition which Wyndham defines & epitomises so bizarrely *comforting*? For all that he's been claimed as a satirist, isn't it great the way he presents '50s British society as such a solid, orderly structure that even with all hell breaking loose and alien carnage in the streets, nobody will really do anything that, you know, brutish, and at the end of the day there'll be no shortage of soft-spoken, steadfast chaps who'll say "oh dear.. doesn't look good does it?", and put their heads together to come up with a cozy survival plan..?

Funny how he defined the territory on which John Christopher, JG Ballard, Christopher Priest, even Nigel Kneale, all built far nastier and more disturbing apocalypses..

My favourite Wyndham book as a kid though was actually The Chrysalids, which is quite a long way removed from that tradition. Somehow my 12 year old self found it a very exciting and inspiring story... mutant psychic kids discovering each other in a post-apocalyptic wilderness and rebelling against a puritanical, patriarchal regime..? Set up some good groundwork for the sort of stuff I got into later I suppose!

Again, it's difficult to say what I'd make of it these days; quietly subversive masterwork or hackneyed kids sci-fi guff?
 
  
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