Author Profile · Science Fiction
John Wyndham
1903–1969 · British
Who was John Wyndham?
John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris had enough names to supply several pseudonyms, and used most of them on undistinguished pre-war pulp before reinventing himself in 1951 with The Day of the Triffids and the form Brian Aldiss waspishly dubbed the 'cosy catastrophe' — a label that rather undersells how uncosy Wyndham's disasters actually are. His England ends quietly: a meteor shower, an inexplicable pregnancy epidemic, fog-horns in the deeps, all met with tea, committee meetings and slowly failing decency. The horror is in the reasonable voices working out, calmly, what survival now permits.
Why they matter
The defining British SF novelist of the 1950s, who made catastrophe respectable reading for people who'd never touched a pulp magazine. Triffids and the Midwich cuckoos are permanent residents of the national imagination.
Essential books — and where to start
The Day of the Triffids
1951 · Science Fiction · Post-Apocalyptic
Bill Masen wakes in hospital with bandaged eyes to a silent London: a spectacular meteor display has blinded everyone who watched, which was nearly everyone. Unfortunately civilisation had also been farming triffids — seven-foot ambulatory plants with a lethal sting, tolerated for their oil — and they are no longer waiting politely. Wyndham follows the survivors through the moral arithmetic of collapse: who do you save, what do you owe the blind, which new society deserves joining? The triffids get the title, but the humans supply the horror.
The Chrysalids
1955 · Science Fiction · Post-Apocalyptic, Dystopia
Generations after a nuclear Tribulation, the farming communities of Labrador wage permanent war on deviation: blasphemous crops are burned, mutant livestock slaughtered, and human 'deviations' sterilised and banished to the Fringes — all in the name of the true image of God. David Strorm, son of the district's fiercest zealot, harbours the invisible deviation of telepathy, shared with a scattered handful of children whose discovery is only a matter of time. Wyndham's sharpest book: a study of fundamentalism, difference and flight, with an ambivalent rescue that questions its own rescuers.
The Midwich Cuckoos
1957 · Science Fiction · First Contact, Supernatural Horror
For one day, everything within a circle around the village of Midwich sleeps. Nine months later, every woman of childbearing age delivers a golden-eyed child. The Children grow fast, think as one, and punish harm with lethal compulsion; the village, being English, copes mainly by not talking about it. Wyndham stages the cuckoo-parasitism premise as a chilly ethical debate — the Children are innocent, dangerous and incompatible with human survival, and the schoolmaster Zellaby's final solution to the trolley problem is one of SF's most quietly ruthless endings.
1904–1988 · American
The genre's great humanist.
1925–1991 / 1933–2012 · Russian (Soviet)
The defining SF writers of the Soviet world and among the most influential anywhere: Roadside Picnic seeded Tarkovsky's Stalker, the S.T.A.L.K.E.R.
1925–2017 · British
The bridge between British SF's catastrophe tradition and the New Wave he helped detonate.
