His parents gave him more names than any person could usefully handle so John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris usually wrote under the pen name of John Wyndham. But, also wrote under a number of variations on his given name: John Beynon, John Beynon Harris, Johnson Harris, Lucas Parkes, Wyndham Parkes.
His books took the science fiction genre in a new direction, that of the effect of the post-apocalypse disaster on the lives of ordinary people in ordinary settings. He turned his back on the cowboys of the Wild West in spacecraft themes that had dominated the field for several years. He called his style “logical fantasy.”
Day of the Triffids
Under the name John Beynon, Wyndham published his early work in the 1930s. His first big success came in 1951 with The Day of the Triffids; it remains his best-known work and has never been out of print.
An appreciation of Wyndham’s writing that appeared in The Guardian describes the plot as a “vision of a world in which monstrous, carnivorous plants terrorize the population following a meteor shower…” The story anticipates the growth of genetic engineering and the public concern that the science might inadvertently create some sort of uncontrollable monster.
The BBC has produced several radio and television adaptations of the book. A recently discovered companion novel to The Day of the Triffids, called Plan for Chaos, was by Penguin in 2010.
The Kraken Wakes
Wyndham’s second major work was another story about a catastrophe striking Earth from afar. The Kraken Wakes was published as Out of the Deeps in the United States and chronicles an invasion of Earth by aliens from space.
The aliens splash down into deep parts of the oceans and send “sea tanks” ashore to harvest humans from coastal communities.
Both this book and the Day of the Triffids have been seen by critics as reflections of the Cold War during which they were written. The triffids and sea monsters can be viewed as surrogates for the Soviet Union.
The Chrysalids
Another Cold War theme was explored in The Chrysalids, published in 1955. Like Nevil Shute’s On the Beach (1957), the setting is a world destroyed by a nuclear holocaust. The community of Waknuk is under the strict control of religious zealots who decree that any life-form born with abnormalities must be banished or destroyed.
Several children discover they can communicate telepathically, but know they must keep this “anomaly” secret from the community and even their parents.
A review of the book at Science Fiction Reviews notes that, “Wyndham here uses the setting as a framework to address the even more immediate and relevant issues of xenophobia, intolerance, bigotry, and the dangers of holding to strident and inflexible fundamentalist dogmas and ideologies.”
It’s easy to see parallels in today’s society when we hear the creationist babblings of someone such as Michelle Bachman, the anti-Islamic rants of Rev. Terry Jones, and the rampant bigotry of the Westboro Baptist Church.
John Wyndham Was a Prolific Writer
Before his death in 1969 at the age of 65, John Wyndham turned out several more books and scores of short stories.
Critical opinion varies, as it does with most writers, about the quality of his work. Brian Aldiss, a contemporary science fiction writer of Wyndham’s opined in Billion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction (1973) that The Day of the Triffids and The Kraken Wakes “were totally devoid of ideas, but read smoothly, and thus reached a maximum audience, which enjoyed cosy disasters.”
Stephen King, today’s writer of mega-best sellers, called John Wyndham “perhaps the best writer of science fiction that England has ever produced.”
Sources
- “John Wyndham.” David Ketterer, The Guardian, July 22, 2008.
- “John Wyndham.” D. C. Wands and L. E. Dickinson, Fantastic Fiction, December 2, 2011.
- “The Chrysalids.” Thomas M. Wagner, Science Fiction Reviews, 2004.
- “Seeds of Destruction: The Day of the Triffids.” Gerard Gilbert, The Independent, December 21, 2009.
Rupert Taylor - Rupert Taylor is the editor of a magazine that provides background to current events.
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