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John Wyndham (1903-1969) |
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English science-fiction writer, who gained fame with his catastrophe novels The Day of the Triffids (1951), The Kraken Wakes (1953), and The Chrysalids (1955). The central theme in John Wyndham's major works is the struggle for survival in extreme situations. His heroes are often ordinary people, who try to sustain civilized values, when the normal social system has collapsed. "The way I came to miss the end of the world - well, the end of the world I had known for close on thirty years – was sheer accident: like a lot of survival, when you come to think of it. In the nature of things a good many somebodies are always in hospital, and the law of averages had picked on me to be one of them a week or so before. It might just as easily have been the week before that – in which case I'd not be writing now: I'd not be here at all. But change played it not only that I should be in hospital at that particular time, but that my eyes, and indeed my whole head, should be wreathed in bandages – and that's why I have to be grateful to whoever orders these averages." (The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham, London: Penguin Books, 2014, p. 1; first published by Michael Joseph in 1951) John Wyndham was born John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris in the
village of Knowle, in Warwickshire. His father, George Beynon Harris,
was a barrister, from him he got a talent for writing and invention.
Gertrude Parkes, Wyndham's mother, had been widowed shortly after her
first marriage. She came from a prosperous family. Wyndham's
grandfather and great-grandfather had gained wealth in industry. His early years Wyndham lived in Edgbaston, Birmingham, in one of the finest houses of in the area. When he was eight, his parents separated. Wyndham and his brother, Vivian Beynon Harris, who also became a writer, moved with their mother from place to place. However, their childhood was not unhappy; Gertrude was a loving mother and they were as close as it is possible for a family to be, Vivian said later. He also recalled that his brother's nose often bled and he walked in his sleep. The remnants of Gertrude's family's fortune kept them afloat during the many tough years. Reading H.G. Wells's The Time Machine
(1895) first aroused Wyndham's interest in science fiction. Moreover, in many
ways he could be called the natural successor to Wells. Wyndham
attended several private preparatory schools. He left in
1921 Bedales School in Petersfield, Hampshire, and then studied
farming. He also read for the Bar and tried advertising, before turning
to writing in the mid-1920s as John Beynon or John Beynon Harris. Living mostly on a small allowance from his
parents, Wyndham poured out stories, but it was not until 1929,
when rejection slips stopped coming. Inspired by the magazine Amazing Stories, he wrote from
1930 to 1939 almost exclusively for the American pulp magazines. Among
his early works was 'Words to Barter,' which appeared in Wonder Stories in 1931. Wyndham's short fiction from this period were assembled as Wanderers of Time (1973). The title story originally appeared in Wonder Stories
and was reprinted as a separate pamphlet. 'The Lost Machine' (1932),
one of Wyndham's most anthologized works, first published in Amazing Stories,
is a predecessor to Isaac Asimov's robot tales. Its narrator is an
intelligen
machine from Mars,
lost on the third planet, the earth, a world of madness. It perhaps the
first story in a robot commits a suicide. "This whole world is too
primitive," the visitor concludes
before dissolving itself. "It does not even know the metal of which I
am made. I am a freak . . . a curiosity outside comprehension." ('The Lost Machine,' in War with the Robots: 28 of the Best Short Stories by the Greatest Names in 20th Century Science Fiction, edited by Isaac Asimov, Patricia S. Warrick, and Martin H. Greenberg, New York: Wing Books, 1992, p. 49) The Secret People (1935), Wyndham's first novel, came out in a serialized from in the English magazine Passing Show, and then as a book. Set in the Sahara, where part of the desert has been flooded, the story tells of hero and heroine, who find in subterranean caves a race of pigmies. The "submerged nation" theme was derived from Wells's famous novel The Time Machine. Another Wells's novel which influenced Wyndham was War of the Worlds (1898). Planet Plane (1936), Wyndham's second serial, was a space opera about the first flight to Mars, where the Martians are a dying species. Foul Play Suspected (1935) differed from his other fiction – it was a detective story. Before World War II, Wyndham used several differed pseudonyms, most of which he derived from his own name. Some of his science fiction adventures and juveniles appeared also in British magazines. The war interrupted Wyndham's career. He wrote poetry and translated some French plays. When both science-fiction fans and writers were called up, the sales of SF books and magazines went down in Britain. From 1940 to 1943 Wyndham worked in censorship, and in 1944 he participated in the Invasion of Normandy, but was not involved in the early landings. Wyndham was a corporal cipher operator in the Royal Signal Corps. The dropping of the atom bomb, the beginning of the Cold War, and fears of Communism and nuclear war brought new seriousness into science fiction. After the war Wyndham's career as a writer was for a few years in a dead end. At the exclusive Penn Club in Beford Place, Wyndham met the publisher (Sir) John Lusty, who advised him on his next novel. It was The Day of the Triffids, which was immediately hailed as the "most terrifying as well as the best-written science fiction novel of the year, or for several years." The book was translated into numerous languages, among others into Finnish, and adapted into screen in 1963. Before published in hard-cover form in England, the story appeared in serialized form in the American magazine Colliers Weekly. The Day of the Triffids revised and updated the theme of
disaster. In the story, a rain of meteors, mysterious "green flashes,"
have caused mass blindness on earth. Triffids, mobile carnivorous
plants, on average 7 feet high, emerge from an agricultural experiment.
Rapidly, taking advantage of a world struck blind, the plants rise to
the top of the food chain in the chaos. A small group of people try
to cope with the deadly vegetables. The chief protagonist is Bill
Masen, a horticulturist and triffid expert. He still has his sight,
because he was in a hospital and was blindfolded during a treatment.
With his newly acquired family, he tires to avoid being enslaved by the
blind. In the Isle of Wright, their haven, they hope to establish a new
society. According to an anecdote, Wyndham overheard in a pub two
gardeners discussing their weeds. One said: "There's one by my tool
shed – a great monster. In reckon it's a triffid!" (Trillion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction by Brian Aldiss & David Wingrove, London: House of Stratus, 2001, p. 279) After the
publication of the book, the word "triffid" has come to mean almost any
kind of imaginary hostile and dangerous plant, which threaten to take over the world. Wyndham's species refers
to the three roots, on which the plants move – "trifidus" is Latin for
"divided into three." Steve Sekely's film version from 1963 was written by the blacklisted scenarist Bernard Gordon, who did not get screen credit. Gordon ended his script on a positive note of humanity. "For me," he recalled, "the problem of the book was that the story meanders through many episodes and never comes to a meaningful end." William Faulkner's speech to the Nobel Committee gave Gordon a clue how finish the picture with the idea that "mankind will have a way of triumphing over all odds, that at the end, when the sun has grown cold and its last rays are touching the peak of our highest mountain, even then, a human being will be there representing all mankind, representing the triumph of mankind." (Hollywood Exile, or How I Learned to Love the Blacklist by Bernard Gordon, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1999, p. 111) In the screen adaptation the Triffids come to the Earth on the meteor shower that blinded humanity. And they have a weakness: the monstruous plant is vulnerable to the seawater. Although Wyndham did not invent the English disaster novel, he
reestablished the genre and examined its themes and possibilities with
the fresness of a pioneer. Wyndham's down-to-earth attitude made his
stories so believable, that he was marketed in the UK as a mainstream
writer. Wyndham himself never loved the term "science fiction."
Starting from a fantastic premise, he logically developed situations,
in which the effects of his idea are set against a comfortable English
background. The tone of his stories is calm and practical. His style
led one reviewer to describe him as "the Trollope of science fiction."
Brian Aldiss and David Wingrove have characterized him as the "master
of the cosy catastrophe." As a number of other Cold War writers, Wyndham constantly contrasted individualism and collectivism and the breakdown of established social order. Thus the end of the civilization can come in the form colonies of telepathic children, who do not have individual spirits, or spiders start to cooperate, hunt in packs, or quasi-intelligent plants threaten the very existence of mankind. The famous American writer Stephen King has called Wyndham "perhaps
the best writer of science fiction that England has ever produced." (Danse Macabre by Stephen King, New York: Berkley, 1983, p. 39) It is generally regarded, that his most memorable novels Wyndham wrote in the 1950s. The Kraken Wakes (1953) repeated the
formula of The Day of the Triffids, but this time the civilization is threatened by invaders
from space, who melt down the polar ice caps. The aliens live at the bottom of the oceans. Eventually
its is discovered, that they can be killed with the help of ultrasound probes. Wyndham's protagonist,
who narraters the story with a kind of stoic humor, is more an observer than participant of
the events. The word "kraken" comes from Norwegian; in Natural History of Norway (1752-54) the Dane Erik Pontoppidan, Bishop of Bergen, said that the Kraken's back is a mile and a half wide and its tentacles are capable of encompassing the largest of ships. The title of Wyndham's book refers to a sonnet by Alfred Tennyson, which begins: "Below the thunders of the upper deep, / Far, far beneath the abysmal sea, / His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep / The Kraken sleepeth..." (The Book of Imaginary Beings by Jorge Luis Borges, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1980, pp. 88-89) A new version of the theme was introduced in Frank Schätzing’s international bestseller Der Schwarm (2004, The Swarm), in which an unknown intelligent creature, living in the ocean bed, defends itself against the destruction caused by mankind. The Chrysalids (1955; US title: Re-Birth) was set in the future world, devastated by nuclear war. Unsually for Wyndham, the events do not take place in Britain but in North America, Labrador, where survivors in puritanical communities kill all mutants, human and non-human. Through the fate of novel's young protagonist, David Storm, Wyndham exemplifies the conflict between official inner beliefs and outer reality. "Dreams are funny things, and there was no accounting for them; so it might be that what I was seeing was a bit of the world as it had been once upon a time – the wonderful world that the Old People had lived in: as it had been before God sent Tribulation." (The Chrysalids, London: Penguin Books, 1958, p. 5) David has a limited form of telepathy, which he tries to hide. At home he is surrounded by a plaques: "ONLY THE IMAGE OF GOD IS MAN," "KEEP PURE THE STOCK OF THE LORD," "IN PURITY OUR SALVATION," "BLESSED IS THE NORM," and "WATCH THOU FOR THE MUTANT!" (Ibid., p. 18) The Midwich Cuckoos (1957) set the theme of disaster inside
families – world peace is not threatened by aliens but children. Like in The Chrysalids, they are auguries of new epochs, good and bad. Margaret Atwood, who read the novel at the age of 17, considers it
Wyndham's chef d'oeuvre: "a graphic metaphor for the fear of unwanted
pregnancies as experienced by the teenage girls of that
pre–birth-control era." ('Afterword' by Margaret Atwood, in Chocky, New York: New York Review of Books, 2015) In a
small English village, some eight miles west-north-west of the town of Trayne, aliens mysterious impregnate the entire female
population. Their golden-eyed children, the "cuckoos" of the title, are
superior beings, and create a moral dilemma: on the other hand, the
authorities want to liquidate them because they will eventually
extinguish human culture, but on the other hand, "it is our culture
that gives us scruples about the ruthless liquidation of unarmed
minorities." The story was adapted to screen twice in the 1960s. Wolf Rilla's Village of the Damned (1960) was faithful to the original work. "Blond kids with glowing eyes wreaking havoc is one of the classic
horror-movie images. Indeed, film is an intelligent meditation on intelligence
(the full use of brain's potential), a trait that has always been held
low esteem in horror movies. Impressive atmospheric direction by Wolf
Rilla, who never made another important film and turned to making
sleazy sex comedies." (Guide For The Film Fanatic by Danny Peary, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986, p. 457) Anton Leader's re-make Children of the Damned
(1963) transported the children to London. In 1995 the American
director John Carpenter made his own version the novel, starring Christopher
Reeve, Kirstie Alley, and Linda Kozlowski. The settings of the purely
Hollywood production were far from the sleepy English village of
Midwich, with a green, some sixty cottages and a small church. Ralph Thomas's movie Quest for Love (1971), starring Tom Bell, Joan Collins and Denholm Elliott, was based Wyndham's 'Random Quest' (1961), not among his best short stories. Bell played a scientist, who is transported after a scientific experiment into a parallel world, where he falls in love with Joan Collins, the wife of his alter ego. When she dies, he tries to find her counterpart from our own world, hoping to save her. The story has been adapted to TV in 1969 and 2006. The Web (1979) came out posthumously. Wyndham had
submitted the work to his UK publishers in 1965, but there were doubts
about its quality. In the characters of Walter Tirrie, Esq., "persistent setter-right of the world," and Lord Foxfield, a millionaire idealist, he mocked those who ignore the forces of nature. Foxfield argues that an Utopian society can be built, if we can get rid of our false doctrines, superstitions, obsolete standards, and misconceived ambitions. However,
his Enlightened State Project on the South Pacific island of Tanakuatua
is
stopped by spiders and local tribesmen who worship
them. Foxfield's mindset is that of a colonialist. He has used his
political connections to obtain the island at a cheap price (£30,000).
Tirrie is the purchaser of Tanakuatua. And again, behind the disaster
is human
foolishness, a nuclear test and a mutation caused by the radioactive
contamination. Wyndham's book owes much to the Darwinist ideas of Wells's The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), but his conservative arguments reflected the political change in the United Kingdom – The Web was published in the same year, when Margaret Thatcher was appointed prime minister. In
1963 Wyndham married Grace Wilson, a teacher and a member of the Penn
Club,
whom he had met already in the 1930s. They had no children. Reserved
and private people, the Wyndhams lived a quiet life in a country house
near Petersfield. "My life has been practically
devoid of interest to anyone but myself," Wyndham said, "though I have
quite enjoyed
it, of course, in those moments when I did not seem to have been sent
to occupy a largely lunatic world." ('"Wyndham, John" (pseudonym of John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris),' in World Authors 1950-1970, edited by John Wakeman, New York: H. W. Wilson, 1975, p. 1574) Chocky (1968)
was the last of Wyndham's novels published during his lifetime. Again
the narrative gimmick on which Wyndham hangs much of the light
toned
story
is telepathy: a benevolent alien invader, Chocky, communicates with the
mind of
a young boy, Matthew. However, the narrator is Matthew's adoptive
father, whose reasoning adds to the amusement of the this "domestic
comedy," as Margaret Atwood defined the novel. John
Wyndham died on March 11,
1969, in Petersfield. Decades after his death, his books still appeared
regularly on school syllabuses in the UK. Vivian Beynon Harris's
memoirs of his brother (Jack and Me: Growing up with John Wyndham; My Brother John Wyndham 1903-1969) are in the University of Liverpool's Special Collections Archive. Grace Harris died in 1991. For further reading: '"Wyndham, John" (pseudonym of John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris),' in World Authors 1950-1970, edited by John Wakeman (1975); The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, edited by Peter Nicholls (1979); Twentieth-Century Science-Fiction Writers, edited by Curtis C. Smith (1986); John Wyndham, Creator of the Cosy Catastrophe by Phil Stephensen-Payne (1989);'Wyndham, John' by JC [John Clute], in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, edited by John Clute and Peter Nicholls (1993); ''A stiff upper lip and trembling lower one': John Wyndham on screen' by Andy Sawyer, in British Science Fiction Cinema, edited by I.Q. Hunter (1999); '[My Brother] John Wyndham: A Memoir,' edited by David Ketterer, in Foundation 75, (Spring 1999); 'A part of the ... family [?]': John Wyndham's The Midwich Cuckoos as Estranged Autobiography' David Ketterer, in Learning from Other Worlds: Estrangement, Cognition, and the Politics of Science Fiction and Utopia, edited by Patrick Parrinder (2000); Trillion Year Spree: The History of Sciece Fiction by Brian Aldiss & David Wingrove (2001);'Triffid,' in The Ashgate Encyclopedia of Literary and Cinematic Monsters, edited by Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock (2016); A Critical Study of John Wyndham's Major Works by Matthew Moore (2007); Hidden Wyndham: Life, Love, Letters by Amy Binns (2019); 'Women and Children First! John Wyndham and Second-Wave Feminism' byDavid Curcio, in Dangerous Visions and New Worlds: Radical Science Fiction, 1950 to 1985, edited by Andrew Nette and Iain McIntyre (2021) Selected works:
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