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.

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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 revered name himself, I can only speak of what I've found in my own reading of both his and Wyndham's work - give me John Wyndham any day.  I read Aldiss' Hothouse many years ago, and while finding the story set in the steamy jungles of a dying planet an interesting idea (and some of his biological mutations quite clever and scary) I found much of the prose turgid and dull.  Then a few years ago, I bought his award winning Helliconia trilogy - it had been recommended to me some years before, and I felt it worth having a read when I finally spotted it in Waterstone's at Kings Cross station.  I started it on my journey, and found it impossible to absorb, so I left it for a few months and had another go - the same result.  I shelved it again and tried one more time a year or so later.  Nope.  If Hothouse was dull and turgid, it seemed bright and breezy in comparison.  I could not get beyond about page 50 and gave it up as a bad job: I left it in my hotel room when I checked out from wherever it was - perhaps someone else found it and enjoyed it, but it simply wasn't for me.

It seemed to me then - as it still does - that inventing and writing a believable story set in a totally alien culture, biosystem, time or whatever takes a very special writer indeed to make it work.  Tolkien, of course, managed it exceptionally well - I've read The Lord of the Rings a dozen times and find new stuff every time.  The same goes for Frank Herbert's original Dune trilogy (and probably in the raft of follow-up novels that I never read).  Asimov's Foundation series pulled off a similar trick successfully in creating a whole new Galactic civilization thousands of years in the future, and many of Heinlein's books, with their alternative timelines delineated by who was the first man on the Moon, and the many and varied adventures of Lazarus Long, enthralled me too.  This is to ignore the entire Culture series from the brilliant Iain M. Banks, and the Star Wars and Star Trek and Marvel Comic Universe cannons.  Somehow, despite his undoubted popularity Aldiss (a multiple Hugo and Nebula award winner and a Grand Master of Science Fiction) never quite managed it - at least for this reader.

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But back to John Wyndham.

He was a prolific writer from the late 1920s through to his death in 1969, and published hundreds of short stories in a variety of magazines and under a variety of pen names (his full name was John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris, and all were incorporated at various times).  Most were science fiction stories, but with a light mix of detective tales, and proved popular in many countries.  His collection The Seeds of Time (1956) acknowledges a debt of gratitude to magazine editors in Australia, France, Britain, Holland, Italy, South Africa, Sweden and the U.S.A.  But despite the geographical spread of his publication, the stories remain quintessentially English - and 1950s English at that.

Perhaps this is what Aldiss was referring to with his "cosy" reference, because the language and writing style, characterisation and dialogue are all clearly from that specific place (England, and Middle Class England at that) and time (post-War1950s), and hence a comfortable read for his audience then - and indeed anyone coming to the books later but with memories of the era.  In this decade, he found his mojo, and published half a dozen books that I would suggest are classics of the British sci-fi genre.

There are similarities than run through all of them, to the extent that if you had only read, say, Triffids as a Wyndham book, and then many years later read The Midwich Cuckoos without knowing who the author was, I would suggest you would recognise it as another Wyndham book with little difficulty.  The same could be said interchangeably for the other books in this peak era: The Kraken Wakes, The Chrysalids, and Trouble with Lichen.  The Seeds of Time was also published in this decade, but as a collection of his short fiction the stories are culled from slightly earlier and on a wider variety of plot arcs (some are clearly written for American sales, for instance, and feature an American slang that at times comes close to parody) and hence - for me at least - is a less enjoyable volume.

But across the other books, with Trouble with Lichen the exception, all the Wyndham tropes that Aldiss seems to have disliked are there.  The stories are all what would now be labelled apocolyptic (or post-apocolyptic) fiction: the world and civilization as known at that time is ending or is in the distant past, and the story follows groups of characters through their survival struggles.  Apart from The Chrysalids (set in a distant post nuclear holocaust age) the main individual characters and groups are invariably English Middle Class: that is, comfortably well off, well spoken and well educated, in good jobs that often involve writing in one form or another.   Where "lower class" characters appear, especially in Triffids, they are virtually caricatures: they speak in a kind of mangled Cockney Gor' blimey, guv'nor voice, tend to be dockers, manual workers or simply thugs, and generally meet a sticky end that, even in the worst of circumstances, arouses little sympathy.  There is generally a heroic game changing scientist-cum-writer, usually with ideas at odds to everyone else (but invariably correct in the final analysis) with whom the tale's hero can indulge in often long philosophical musings.  There is a mild love interest that is always very chaste but ends happily ever after (yes, I know: that's cosy too).

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The "catastrophies" themselves, for all those comfortable familiarities, could never be considered cosy, however.  The end of civilization, however imagined and described, could surely never be that!  The ways they are plotted and described show that Wyndham's ideas were often ahead of their time.

In The Day of the Triffids, the catastrophe comes in the fom of bio-weapons maintained in orbitting sattelites malfunctioning to cause blindness in the vast majority of the population.  Simultaneously huge plants, the result of apparent Russian bio-technology, bred and used profitably for some years because of their cheap and efficient high quality oil products, break loose and wreak further havoc - as does an appalling "plague" that causes a death similar to typhoid or ebola.  The first half of the book details the carnage, with suicides, murder, and sickness killing off blind survivors as society collapses, while the second half details the struggle for survival by the few remaining sighted survivors.  Published in 1951, long before any rocket had attained Earth orbit (never mind being able to place orbitting weapons) and bio-technology was a science still in its infancy, it's a thrilling story - with precious little cosiness in it.

By contrast, The Kraken Wakes (published in 1953) kills off mankind not with the devastating suddenness described in Triffids but slowly and inexorably over a period of years.  In this case Wyndham postulates an invasion of extra-Terrestrials, never seen or described in the book, who take over the deepest parts of the world's oceans and set about patiently taking over the planet for themselves. The final section of the book postulates the final demise of most of humanity by the device of melting both polar icecaps and drowning us under rising sea levels.  Again, there is much violence particulalry in that final section, and again little that could be described as cosy.  There is also a degree of prescience in using meling polar ice as the final and unstoppable weapon, but in this case the melting is the result of alien science rather than mankind's own stupidity - as we are seeing now - and happens much quicker.  But then 67 years ago, climate science too was a new discipline and no-one knew exactly how much ice was involved, nor how much water would be produced, nor how much the seas would rise.  Again, Wyndham's descriptions of a collapsing society are both moving and scary.

The global catastrophe has already taken place in The Chrysalids (from 1955) - a nuclear war an unspecified time before the narrative takes place (but reckon a few hundred years).  The remnants of humanity live in Canada, in Labrador and Newfoundland, and venerate the True Image of everything, from themselves, through farm animals and crops, down to the trees and wlld animals in the surrounding woodland.  Anyone or anything that differs in the slightest is slaughtered or burned in an effort to maintain "purity".  The book follows a group of children who discover they too are mutants - they are powerful telepaths, and thus there is nothing to distinguish them physically as mutants. But suspicion eventually falls on them and they are faced to run for their lives.  Cosy?  Nope.  But it's a gripping story for all that.

The Midwich Cuckoos (published in 1957) again takes us into the realms of alien invasion by stealth, in this case a mysterious event where an entire English village is "put to sleep" for a night and every woman of child bearing age left pregnant.  There is little suggestion how this may have happened, but there is ample scope for discussion on some of 1950s England's sexual mores and proclivities.  The resultant group of 50-odd kids, both boys and girls, not only share identical physical characteristics (slight build, blond hair, golden eyes) but "share" brains - what we would now term a hive mind.  As they grow, they exert an ability to control everyone else in the village mentally, and their plan to link up with similar groups elsewhere in the world to take it over and destroy humanity becomes evident.  Again, there is little cosiness in this yarn either - but it's a clever tale nonetheless.

All of the above are first person narratives, but Trouble with Lichen (from 1960, the last book in this cycle) takes on a more common third person story, and equally effectively.  It also differs in that this time there is no collapsing civilzation, no global catastrophe, and no suicides, murders or widespread civil disobedience as personified in Triffids or Kraken.  There is no common enemy, extra-terrestrial or religious fanatic (Chrysalids) to threaten our heroes or the global population either.  But the philosophical meanderings and moral dilemas as in the rest of the books are there, as is the science.  In this case, we go back into the area of bio-technology, and the accidental discovery of something that looks initially like an anti-biotic, distilled from an exceptionally rare lichen, but turns out to provide a safe means of extending life expectancy for three hundred years or so.  Here the catatrophe is merely implied: with availability restricted to only a few thousand doses by the slow growth and rarity of the lichen, how can the anticipated global demand for the drug, once made public, be met?  How can society cope with the changes this lengthened life expectancy would bring about?  Again, Wyndham shows some prescience: similar conversations are happening now, not because of a drug that extends iife but due to the increased use of AI, bots and other technology potentially reducing the job marketplace, coupled with longer life expectancy caused simply by advances in health care and normal medical science.

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So there we are.  My collection of Wyndham's works comes in a single volume I bought from a book club a good 30 years or more ago, and it's getting very tatty now, but still for me remains a good read.  The thing is, or so it seems to me, to get the best out of each one you have to consider on each page just when they were written - Lichen is the most recent and it's now 60 years old - and accept the society as it existed in England is being quite faithfully described.  Everyone smokes, for a start.  Few people swear, and when they do it's a mild "bloody" or "bugger".  Little mention is made of television or the movies but radio features strongly.  Long distance travel involves ocean voyages, and there are no motorways spoiling the English countryside.  There is little traffic at all on the roads, even in London, and there are still horse and carts plying their trade there.

I see visions from my childhood when I read these books, a time that despite the global fear of nuclear war and a very real class war in England that I was only dimly aware of (my family was proudly working class and apart from my doctor I never came across the kind of Middle Class characters so beloved by Wyndham at all) everything seemed so much simpler and safer somehow.  Wyndham has taken that whole society and woven it into some clever sociological and scientific speculations in a way that I haven't come across elsewhere.  As a story teller, he was inventive and erudite, and very readable.  His popularity in my youth was well deserved and it seems a shame that he has faded from the public eye.  But I guess that's what happens in a changing world.