I can't remember when I first read The Midwich Cuckoos, but it was certainly within 30 years of the end of World War II. Now, almost 40 years later, the postwartime feel is even more present in this short novel, despite the book itself being published in 1957. The way the army moves in immediatel...
Chocky was the last novel John Wyndham wrote before his death (although a semi-finished one called Web was published posthumously) and for some reason I never read it while I was in high school – although I remember flicking through a copy at the library and not being intrigued enough to properly...
'Consider Her Ways': *NO SPOILERS*A very intriguing story indeed.Apart from being somewhat Kafkaesque being a kind of metaphysical journey, where the protagonist is constantly questioning her own lucidity, it is Wyndham at his core. The insomnia being experienced by Mother Orchis lends easily to ...
'Web' is a surprisingly pleasing addition to the career of John Wyndham. Published some ten years after his death, it follows similar themes to several of his better known works.It is another familiar premise. After an episode of PTSD, our protagonist purchases an island in the south Pacific in o...
The next stop in my end-of-the-world reading marathon was The Day of the Triffids, the 1951 man-versus-plants tale by John Wyndham. After an apocalyptic journey across the United States in The Stand and Swan Song, it was fascinating to read about how the U.K. might tackle doomsday and I have to s...
Originally published on my blog here in December 2011.John Wyndham's most famous books, The Day of the Triffids and The Midwich Cuckoos (filmed as Village of the Damned) are fairly serious stories of disasters, a theme also followed in The Kraken Wakes. The Trouble with Lichen, a later novel, is ...
I feel trite saying it, because i say it after every Wyndham book i read, but there is nothing this man writes that i don’t love. I’m sure i’m not capable of fully explaining why, either. There is just something in a combination of his writing style and the subject matter that are just perfect to...
comprising: The Lost Machine (1932) The Man from Beyond (1934) The Perfect Creature (1937) The Trojan Beam (1939) Vengeance by Proxy (1940) Adaptation (1949) Pawley's Peepholes (1951) The Red Stuff (1951) And the Walls Came Tumbling Down (1951) Dumb Martian (1952) Close Behind Him (1952) The Emp...
This collection includes the following stories:"Jizzle""Esmerelda""Heaven Scent""Look Natural, Please""Reservation Deferred""Affair of the Heart"
Aircraft designer Dale Currance undertakes a journey to Mars in an effort to capture the prize being offered to the first man to complete an interplanetary journey, but a female stowaway throws his plans into disarray.
The 'outward urge' was a factor in the Troon inheritance. Successive generations of Troons, looking up at the stars, heard the siren voices that called them out into Space. And, as the frontiers of Space receded, there was usually one Troon, if not more, out there, helping to push them back. The ...
Give it a moment’s contemplation, and then read this tingler by one of England’s best-known modern science fantasists. An A\NN/A Preservation Edition. Notes BY the time Janet had been five days in the hospital she had become converted to the idea of a domestic robot. It had taken her two days to ...
Probably I should have run across them just a little later, anyway, but the results could have been quite different. It simply happened that I turned into the cross-corridor when they were up the other end of it, with their backs towards me, and I noticed them peering up and down the far main-pas...
But the decisive factor in establishing that exhilarating 'sense of wonder' in my youthful imagination was the discovery about that time of back numbers of American science fiction magazines to be bought quite cheaply in stores like Woolworths. The happy chain of economic circumstances by which A...
Frances paused to look into the showcase that was fastened to the wall between the pastrycook's and the hairdresser's. It was not a novelty. Passing it a hundred times, she could not fail to be aware of it, or of the open door beside it, but until now it had not really impinged. There had been no...
Before him, on the table, stood the tape-recorder, an amplifier, and small sundries. A wandering network of leads connected them to one another, to the mains, to a big loudspeaker in the corner, and to the pair of phones on his head. Lengths and snippets of tape littered half the floor. ‘Another ...