John Wyndham

1903-1969

"When a day that you happen to know is Wednesday starts off sounding like Sunday, there is something seriously wrong somewhere."

Birthplace

The village of Knowle, just outside Birmingham

Education

Bedales school, Hampshire

Other jobs

During the second world war, Wyndham worked as a civil servant in the censorship department and subsequently joined the army, where he served in the Royal Corps of Signals as a corporal cipher operator. He participated in the Normandy landings.

Did you know?

John Wyndham's full name is John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris. Throughout his career he wrote under a number of pen names derived from it, including John Beynon, John Beynon Harris, Johnson Harris, Lucas Parkes and Wyndham Parkes.

Critical verdict

Christopher Priest famously summed up the most frequently voiced criticism of Wyndham's work when he described him as "the master of the middle-class catastrophe". Brian Aldiss condemned The Day of the Triffids and The Kraken Wakes on the same basis, saying that the books "were totally devoid of ideas, but read smoothly, and thus reached a maximum audience, which enjoyed cosy disasters." While the tone of Wyndham's stories may occasionally strike modern readers as quaint, their "cosiness" serves a serious purpose. His innocuously English backdrops are central to the power of his novels, implying that apocalypse could occur at any time - or, indeed, be happening in the next village at this moment. The frightening plausibility of his writing led the Times's reviewer of The Day of the Triffids to describe it as possessing "all the reality of a vividly realised nightmare." Although Wyndham was writing at the height of the cold war, his anticipation of the rise of genetic engineering means that the story remains just as relevant - and terrifying - today. Wyndham was also redefining the science fiction genre. Up until the late 1940s, sci-fi was almost exclusively set in space and involved what Wyndham himself described as "the adventures of galactic gangsters". By choosing instead to write about situations that were rational extensions of the present day, Wyndham pioneered a form of sci- fi that he labelled "logical fantasy" but which is widely known now as "speculative fiction". With the recent inclusion of his work in Penguin's Modern Classics series, Wyndham is posthumously receiving the recognition he deserves.

Recommended works

The Day of the Triffids, Wyndham's first significant novel, has been permanently in print since its publication in 1951, and remains one of his most widely- read and highly acclaimed works. His vision of a world in which monstrous, carnivorous plants terrorise the population following a meteor shower has captivated readers for over half a century; the wry, dry tone which became a hallmark of his writing accounting at least in part for the novel's success. The Chrysalids (1955), set in a rigidly pious community in the future where genetic mutations from the "true image" are ruthlessly stamped out, paints a profoundly human picture of the world in the wake of a nuclear holocaust. In Chocky (1968), one of his last books, the parents of a young boy slowly realise that rather than talking to himself, their son is playing host to a being from another planet. The domestic scale allows Wyndham to concentrate on character development; the result is more personal, but just as intriguing.

Influences

Wyndham was a self-declared fan of HG Wells; direct echoes of Wells' obsession with catastrophe and its aftermath appear time and again in Wyndham's oeuvre.

Now read on

Try Brian Aldiss and Ray Bradbury for further examples of Wyndham's intelligent brand of social sci-fi. If your interest lies more towards the pure science end of the genre, Arthur C Clarke is the undisputed master. Kim Stanley Robinson's expansive trilogy on the colonisation of Mars incorporates both elements of science fiction to great effect. Aldous Huxley's tale of genetic technology, Brave New World, echoes some of the concerns raised in The Day of the Triffids. Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale draws similar conclusions about the role of hardline religion in the wake of disaster to those Wyndham explores in The Chrysalids, as well as reflecting elements of his novella, Consider Her Ways, in which women in a future female-only world are divided into breeders and leaders.

Adaptations

Director Steve Sekely turned The Day of the Triffids into a film in 1962, but it strays significantly and unnecessarily from the book and is less well regarded than the BBC's intelligent (if dated) 1981 TV serial. The most famous adaptation of Wyndham's work is The Village of the Damned, the 1960 film of his novel The Midwich Cuckoos; director Wolf Rilla delivered a fabulously eerie, claustrophobic film that quickly became a sci-fi classic. A 1995 remake by John Carpenter, set in the US, substitutes grisly violence for clammy atmosphere, and loses much of the original's subtlety as a result. At the other end of the scale, Chocky was made into a very well- received children's television series in the early 1980s.

Criticism

David Ketterer, professor of English and lecturer in science fiction at Concordia University in Montreal, is currently writing a critical biography of John Wyndham.

Useful links and work online

Work online
· Consider Her Ways

Background
· John Wyndham archive
· Wikipedia entry on John Wyndham