In Praise of John Wyndham - An Underrated Master
I've just spent a pleasant couple of weeks re-acquainting myself with the writings of John Wyndham. A once celebrated practitioner of science fiction, back in my 1950s childhood, his books (apart from the classic The Day of the Triffids ) are now rarely seen outside of second-hand bookshops, and even there infrequently. For me, he rates alongside his American contemporaries like Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein and Ray Bradbury, and his fellow Englishman Arthur C. Clarke in defining a once niche form of writing and bringing it to acceptablilty as a respected genre. ----------------------------------------------------------- Brian Aldiss, another English contemporary, once damned Wyndham's books with faint praise: "He wrties about cosy catastrophe", he wrote somewhat disparagingly about Triffids . Many other critics and sci-fi authors have contested this and cited Wyndham as an influence in their own writing. Without trying to criticise Aldiss, a revere