2001: A Space Odyssey
Half of the most influential SF artefact of the twentieth century.
Book Entry · Science Fiction
What is The Midwich Cuckoos about?
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.
Why it matters
Filmed twice as Village of the Damned (the 1960 version a classic) and the source of the 'creepy psychic children' archetype that horror has never put down since.
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