John Wyndham

John Wyndham (July 10, 1903 – March 11, 1969) was the pen name used by the often post-apocalyptic British science fiction writer John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris.

In his earlier writings, Wyndham used various combinations of his names, such as John Benyon or Lucas Parkes. For one of his books, The Outward Urge, he actually used both the names "John Wyndham" and "Lucas Parkes", pretending to be two collaborating authors.

Biography

John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris was born in the village of Knowle just outside Birmingham, England.

He lived in Edgbaston until he was eight years old, at which point his parents, George Beynon Harris and Gertrude Parkes, separated. He and his brother, the writer Vivian Beynon Harris, had no settled home after this time. He grew up in a series of English boarding schools, including Blundell's School in Devon during the First World War. His longest stay was at Bedales (1918-1921), which he left at the age of 18. His brother Vivian has said that: "He had a wonderful childhood and teenage time."

After leaving school Wyndham studied farming for a while, changed his mind about going to Oxford University and tried several ways of earning a living, but mostly relied on an allowance from his family. He eventually turned to writing for money in 1925, but before he decided on this occupation, he had also tried a number of other careers, such as law, commercial art and advertising. Throughout the 1930s he wrote many stories, mainly for American periodicals. He wrote some detective stories as well as science fiction.

Between 1940 and 1943 Wyndham was a government official, working in the wartime censorship system. He then went into the army, serving as a corporal cipher operator in the Royal Corps of Signals, and participated in the Normandy landings.

He was inspired by the success of his brother (who had published four novels before Wyndham found fame) and altered his writing style for his book The Triffids.^* The book proved to be an enormous success and established Wyndham as an important exponent of science fiction. In 1963 Wyndham married Grace Wilson. The couple lived out their lives near Petersfield, Hampshire just outside the grounds of Bedales School.

Major works

The Day of the Triffids is his most famous book and gave the word "triffid" to English. Although it is now known that he had already done a significant amount of writing, this was the first time he used the name "John Wyndham", and at the time he was widely believed to be a new writer.
The Kraken Wakes was published in the United States as Out of the Deeps.
The Chrysalids was published in the United States as Re-Birth, and was adapted as a BBC Radio 4 play in the early 1980s.
The Midwich Cuckoos has been filmed twice as Village of the Damned.
Trouble with Lichen.
Chocky has been adapted as a Thames Television serial.

The first four novels, written over a fairly short period in the 1950s, are widely regarded as the peak of his achievement. Opinions are more varied on the later two, but they have their admirers.

He also wrote several short stories of variable content and quality, ranging from hard science fiction to the whimsical. Of particular note are Consider Her Ways, The Wheel, Pillar to Post, and Random Quest.

Style

Most of Wyndham's novels have a contemporary English middle-class setting, and thus when read now they have an old-fashioned Englishness, which is quaint, and implies a proper sense of rationality. Brian Aldiss, another British science fiction writer, has disparagingly labelled some of them as "cosy catastrophes". This approach by Wyndham (itself more than a little reminiscent of that taken by H. G. Wells in The War of the Worlds, etc.) was a reaction against what he described as the "galactic gangsters in space opera" style of much science fiction up to then. Wyndham's single major novel that does not have this setting, The Chrysalids, is regarded by some people as his best. In general, Wyndham's science fiction may be considered trendsetting in its insistence that interplanetary catastrophes do not just happen to "other people" (e.g. those best-equipped to face them) and would in fact be extremely difficult for our delicate and highly interconnected civilisation to deal with. Similarly ahead of its time is the emphasis that Wyndham put on disruptions to the biosphere as a whole, as when the aliens in The Kraken Wakes begin to engineer our planet for their own purposes without asking us first. The entire novel could be taken as a perfect allegory to the modern crisis of global warming, and environmental destruction.

Perhaps a reflection of his ideas are the similar characters he uses throughout his main novels. For example, in Midwich Cuckoos, Day of the Triffids and The Kraken Wakes, the main characters are a sensible man and woman. The similarities of these characters between the novels are great; a self-made educated man, a successful woman who is headstrong yet quite dependent on the man at times. These are a reflection of Wyndham's self-described style - that of "logical science fiction". In Triffids, Kraken, and Midwich Cuckoos, the characters and settings are all very reasonable, sensible, and in some sense, properly English. This is the theme at the heart of these works: take the "sensible" and rational society we have now, and introduce one (or in the case of Triffids, two) extraordinary factors. The works then take a very analytical approach to our reactions to these situations. The results are always grim, as we rational beings, most notably in Kraken, at every step attempt to rationalize extraordinary situations into our present day view of our planet (this is why the Russians are almost always blamed). In this sense Wyndham exposes our rationality as purely protective, and, in the end, detrimental. Only when no hope is left can we actually face facts - this is just when hope presents itself as one last flicker of the human potential.

When one considers the era in which John Wyndham was writing, he is remarkably pro-feminist, with much discussion within "Trouble With Lichen" of the effect of a prolonged lifespan on the gender roles. In most of his books women play a key intellectual and problem solving role, often being more practically minded than the men.

Bibliography

Novels

Foul Play Suspected (1935)
The Secret People (1935)
Planet Plane (also known as Stowaway to Mars, 1936)
The Day of the Triffids (also known as Revolt of the Triffids, 1951)
The Kraken Wakes (also known as Out of the Deeps, 1953)
The Chrysalids (also known as Re-Birth, 1955)
The Midwich Cuckoos (1957)
The Outward Urge (1959)
Trouble with Lichen (1960)
Chocky (1968, made into an ITV television series for children in the 1980s)

Posthumous novel

Web (1979 – published by the executors of his estate)

Collections

Jizzle (1954)
The Seeds of Time (1956)
Tales of Gooseflesh and Laughter (1956)
Consider Her Ways and Others (1961)
The Infinite Moment (1961)

Posthumous collections

External links

The John Wyndham Archive – Official Archive at the University of Liverpool
Guardian article on John Wyndham
"Vivisection": Schoolboy "John Wyndham's" First Publication?
Read "Consider her Ways" online.
Archive BBC TV interview of John Wyndham in 1960 Requires Realplayer
John Wyndham bibliography of first editions

1903 births | 1969 deaths | English science fiction writers

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