November's theme was dystopian fiction. I decided to let the voting run an extra day since the top two nominations were neck and neck yesterday, looking today, Wyndham's The Chrysalids pulled away a little and so we are going with it. This one has been on my list for quite a while, so it will be good to finally have an excuse to get to it!
This is the spoiler friendly discussion post!
From Goodreads:
>A world paralysed by genetic mutation
>
>John Wyndham takes the reader into the anguished heart of a community where the chances of breeding true are less than fifty per cent and where deviations are rooted out and destroyed as offences and abominations.
I'm looking for books for Christmas. Looking for authors that have a similar vibe to John Wyndham, JG Ballard, or Philip K Dick.
Really enjoyed The Chrysalids, The Day of the Triffids, High Rise, The Drowned World, and The Penultimate Truth, Flow my Tears the Policeman said.
This post is primarily to draw attention to the legendary John Wyndham and particularly the remarkable novel The Kraken Wakes. It's worth drawing a comparison between this novel and the much better-known The Midwich Cuckoos to understand what makes both special, and what they have in common despite being very different takes on the classic alien invasion trope.
Both Midwich Cuckoos and Kraken Wakes, written in 1957 and 1953 respectively, exemplify the dour nature of most British SF. The aliens aren't man-sized bugs that could be punched or ray-gunned into submission, like something from an early cover of Astounding magazine. The protagonists of the books aren't muscular space captains in charge of rocket ships. There are no battles, and no victories worth celebrating.
In the case of Midwich Cuckoos, the invaders are beautiful, golden-eyed human children with a hive mind intelligence and telepathic powers. The ethical implication of how such an invasion might be resisted is one of the themes of the book; the children are human children, with human mothers, their parents are (mostly) fiercely protective, and they aren't malicious in any way; they just calmly explain, when questioned, that they're destined to replace homo sapiens in the same way we replaced homo neanderthalis. Of course, if you do raise your hand against them, they'll telepathically command you to cut your own throat.
Cuckoos is way better known than Kraken, thanks probably to numerous screen adaptations (Village of the Damned) and interpretations. It's easy to turn into a tv show; the only special effects you need are some contact lenses and some kids who aren't terrible actors. The Kraken Wakes is probably unfilmable without being totally rewritten.
The story starts with bright flashes of light descending to the sea being seen from ships in the Pacific. Years later, boats start sinking. Shipping lanes are threatened. The book's protagonists are journalists, a married couple in England: they report on attempts to defend the ships with torpedoes, robot decoys, depth charges. One nation, at one point, detonates an atomic bomb underwater, producing "a lot of dead fish".
Then the horror starts. Metal domes (they call them sea-tanks) slide up onto beaches and into coastal communities, where they spray everything and everyone with thick adhesive tendrils; any humans caught by these disgusting biological ropes are **bundled up into giant twitching balls which roll into t
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I'm posting this to draw attention to a possibly almost forgotten classic of British SF that's also an almost perfect embodiment of the tropes of zombie horror despite not actually featuring any zombies.
The Day of the Triffids is a typically British SF novel from 1951. British science fiction of the Golden Age has a very different feel to contemporary SF from the US. The themes and ideas are the same - space flight, alien invasion, robots, atomic war and so on - but where American writing was generally adventurous, bold and optimistic, British SF tends to be very pessimistic, dour, and wary of the technological advances and innovations it incorporates.
John Wyndham is no exception to this tradition (a heritage perhaps begun by H. G. Wells, whose main novels were quite miserablist) and wrote a handful of very bleak SF novels including The Chrysalids, and The Kraken Wakes, both of which are superb, though Triffids is the one that people are perhaps still dimly culturally aware of due to attempts at TV and film adaption.
The premise of the book is simple, creating its nightmare scenario through two "what if?" innovations:
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The book's preface explains a new species of plant was recently discovered - perhaps from the Amazon jungle - a sort of six foot stalk of rhubarb, but capable of movement by flexing its roots, and also possessing a sting that can lash out rather like a chameleon's tongue. The plants dubbed "triffids" are widely farmed despite the hazard of their stings, as they're a source of fantastic natural oil.
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One night, there's a gigantic meteor shower. All over the world, people flock outdoors to witness this amazing cosmic phenomenon. The next morning, everyone who witnessed the meteor shower is struck blind. Permanently.
That's the set up. What follows is an remarkably grim zombie apocalypse novel, with triffids substituted for zombies. Like zombies, they are slow, mostly mindless, and inexorably seek out human flesh to prey on. Individually they're not much of a threat - but there are millions of them - and everyone is blind. John Wyndham's dry, matter of fact style of writing actually emphasises the horror of the scenario, as his narrator describes the utter bedlam of city streets filled with weeping, screaming blind people, fighting over cans of food they can't open, clawing at anyone they believe to still have their sight - and lashed to death by the poison-dripping stings of the plants. A drunk leads a conga line
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I'm thinking horror scifi series on HBO. HBO needs a new good one...
I have always enjoyed the tone and speed of John Wyndham's stories like The Day of the Triffids, The Kracken Wakes, and athe Chrysalids because they usualy get right to the action, and keep you guessing the whole time, but aren't necessarily deep dives on any individual character. Any similar novels not just in the science fiction or apocalyptic sf genres, but also maybe mystery or other genres?
When I was ~15 I had to read The Chrysalids by John Wyndham in English. I loved the post apocalyptic setting and the critique of society and religion.
I read Day of the Triffids next and loved the global scope of the novel and in the middle there is a scathing diatribe about traditional gender roles, which I think was ahead of its time.
Since then I read Web and a few other Wyndham books and short stories and I think he deserves to be up there with Asimov/Clarke/Orwell/Huxley but I don't seem to see his name mentioned as much.
Iβve also read The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham and enjoyed that too, I havenβt read any other John Wyndham books but Iβm open to suggestions either by him or other authors in a similar vein.
Edit: also pls keep this spoiler free as I havenβt finished The Chrysalids yet!!
So far I have read The Chrysalids, The Kraken Wakes, Midwich Cuckoos, and Iβm currently reading The Secret People. Iβve noticed a couple of notable reoccurring themes:
β’giant mushrooms
β’aliens/not quite humans
β’telepathy/hive mind
I know itβs not much but Iβm really enjoying these themes, especially the random giant mushrooms. I will report back later when Iβve read more of his works and have more reoccurring themes to report and hopefully more giant mushrooms (maybe giant mushrooms that grant telepathic powers who knows).
>I wonder if a sillier and more ignorant catachresis than "Mother Nature" was ever perpetrated? It is because Nature is ruthless, hideous, and cruel beyond belief that it was necessary to invent civilisation. One thinks of wild animals as savage, but the fiercest of them begins to look almost domesticated when one considers the viciousness required of a survivor in the sea; as for the insects, their lives are sustained only by intricate processes of fantastic horror. There is no conception more fallacious than the sense of cosiness implied by 'Mother Nature.' Each species must strive to survive, and that will do, by every means in its power, however foulβunless the instinct to survive is weakened by conflict with another instinct.
β John Wyndham, The Midwich Cuckoos (1957)
November's theme was dystopian fiction. I decided to let the voting run an extra day since the top two nominations were neck and neck yesterday, looking today, Wyndham's The Chrysalids pulled away a little and so we are going with it. This one has been on my list for quite a while, so it will be good to finally have an excuse to get to it!
This is the spoiler-free announcement post. Look for the spoiler-friendly discussion post around November 17.
From Goodreads:
> A world paralysed by genetic mutation
>
>John Wyndham takes the reader into the anguished heart of a community where the chances of breeding true are less than fifty per cent and where deviations are rooted out and destroyed as offences and abominations.
