Ade Couper blames Jon Pertwee for his life-long interest in Science Fiction & Fantasy, having started watching Doctor Who back in the early 70's. An avid reader, he is on the Bristolcon committee, is studying a part-time English degree at Bristol University, and campaigns for Amnesty International. When he's not doing any or all of those, he works as a nursing assistant on a mental health unit.
You can find Ade on Facebook ("Ade Couper"), or on twitter as @bigade1665.
Many thanks to Ade for his post on the work of John Wyndham - A very English Apocalypse....
“A Very English Apocalypse....”
The Dystopian Fiction
of John Wyndham
There
has been a recent upswing of interest in dystopian fiction lately, due perhaps
to the deserved popularity of the “Hunger Games” books & movies (and also
the forthcoming “Divergent” series), but I would like to look back through the
mists of time to the days of a particularly English dystopian fiction....
John
Wyndham has fallen out of fashion these days, which frankly, IMHO, is a shame.
As well as writing a superb collection of science fiction short stories (“The
Seeds of Time”, which is well worth a look), he wrote some superb dystopian
novels.
“Day
of the Triffids” is probably his best-known work; it tells of mutant plants
(the titular Triffids), who effectively take over the world after a meteor
shower blinds a large percentage of humanity, and only those who avoided seeing
the meteor shower are able to avoid them. The imagery of this has been used to
good effect since Wyndham wrote it, appearing to have influenced pieces such as
“Doctor Who & The Dalek Invasion of Earth”, as well as “28 days later” (the
start of this is almost a carbon copy of Triffids- read the scenes of Bill
Masen waking up in the hospital & compare them to the beginning of “28 Days
later”....). This also generated a sequel, “Night of the Triffids” by Simon
Clarke, written in the style of the original- highly recommended.
“The
Midwich Cuckoos”, filmed as “Village of the Damned”, is another excellent
dystopian work- it tells of the artificial insemination of the female
population of a typical English village by creatures unknown (& never
referred to or identified in the text), & the subsequent birth, growth
& development of these strange children, all of whom have strange unearthly
powers, & who are all identical. Wyndham makes much of the amorality of the
children, who are subtly identified as a possible future development of
humanity- if you like, a “bad” version of the homo superior of the original TV version of “The Tomorrow
People”.... (Although Alfred Bester gets credited with being the inspiration of
The Tomorrow People”, Wyndham would appear to have also been a major influence,
as we will see shortly.....)
“Trouble
with Lichen” also has a dystopian flavour, but is different in that it is also
a biting satire on the quest to look younger & retard the effects of aging.
When Diana Brackley, a scientist investigating a rare form of lichen, discovers
it has the ability to stop the aging process, much trouble ensues: this is a
powerfully satirical (& incredibly funny) look at the whole “anti-aging”
fad still prevalent today, which has some very interesting points to make.
It’s
a mystery to me why nobody has ever filmed “The Kraken Wakes”, which is an
excellent end-of-the-world story. Mysterious meteors fall from space into our
oceans: soon shipping is under attack, then island populations mysteriously
disappear.....before long the sea level starts rising....
I
will come clean and admit that this is one of my favourite novels- it reads
like a war story, &, bearing in minds when it was written, this may be
Wyndham’s take on a possible invasion by the USSR and China. As with “The
Midwich Cuckoos”, the alien protagonists are faceless, only seen in their
“sea-tanks” during attacks on islands- Wyndham may well have been inspired by
anti-soviet propaganda, which made communists out to be amoral, inhuman, &
incomprehensible to the “civilised” West. The novel even has a comic-relief
character, Tilly, who automatically blames everything on Russia, & comes across
as a spot-on caricature of a Daily Mail reader.....
The
four novels above are all set in a world that would have been recognisable to
Wyndham’s readership, and it may well be that the familiarity to readers of the
setting helped make the stories so memorable (Jon Pertwee’s “Yeti on a loo in
Tooting Bec” theory of why Doctor Who worked well in contemporary settings
springs to mind....): the portrayal of a recognisable society deeply affected
by hostile events would have been incredibly unsettling to people who had just
survived the 2nd World War & were now living under the threat of
the Cold War. However, the last work I want to look at is very different....
“The
Crysalids” is set much further in the future. It tells the story of a
post-apocalyptic world, where civilisation has effectively collapsed.
(Interestingly, Wyndham does not directly specify what caused the apocalypse,
although there are hints, such as the fear of mutations, that this is a post
nuclear holocaust novel....)
![The Chrysalids [play by David Harrower] by…](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/P/0748742867.01._SX140_SY224_SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg)
The
Crysalids tells the story of a group of teenagers who are developing telepathic
powers in a world where mutations are ruthlessly rooted out and dealt with (the
story of the tail-less cat that was destroyed because people had no records of
Manx cats is quite chilling)- the adults in the novel have a profoundly
puritanical outlook, and the feeling throughout is of such horrible events as
the Salem witch trials...Will the children manage to hide their powers? Can
they escape to the welcoming community of Zealand?
This
is a really powerful look at a post-apocalyptic nightmare scenario-again,
Wyndham’s readership were “living in the shadow of the bomb”, & as the
world lurched closer to crisis, this would have seemed like a very real vision
of the future. The telepathic children may well have inspired the original
version of “The Tomorrow People”, particularly their need to keep their
abilities secret.
In
conclusion, John Wyndham is, I feel, unjustly neglected & under-rated these
days, seen mainly as writing about how inconvenient the apocalypse is for nice
middle-class people in the Home Counties. However, his tales do present a
gripping, often doom-laden, & occasionally incredibly funny look at the
future as seen half a century ago. Definitely worth a revisit.
Many thanks to Ade for this post. I do like me some Wyndham! And am now looking longingly at my shelves where all the books mentioned by Ade reside, worth a revisit indeed...
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