John Wyndham – Interesting Literature

The Best of Early Wyndham

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle enjoys some vintage science fiction courtesy of The Best of John Wyndham, 1932-1949

I’ve blogged before about my discovery of John Wyndham’s science fiction in a local charity shop, which had a number of old paperbacks for 99p each. That initial book haul yielded, among others, The Seeds of Time, one of a number of short-story collections published by the master of what Brian Aldiss called (perhaps a tad unfairly, if not reductively) the ‘cosy catastrophe’. But John Wyndham had served a long apprenticeship by the time he became a household name in the 1950s thanks to The Seeds of Time, The Midwich Cuckoos, The Chrysalids, The Kraken Wakes, and, first and chief of all, The Day of the Triffids. The Best of John Wyndham, 1932-1949 showcases the best of John Wyndham’s early stories.

Starchild’s Play: John Wyndham’s Chocky

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle reads a classic story of alien possession by the master of British science fiction

What if your son had an imaginary friend with whom he often conversed, answering questions that nobody had apparently asked, and behaving as though this invisible and seemingly immaterial Other were the most natural thing in the world? Many parents will probably have observed such a thing with their own children.

Wells’s Heir? John Wyndham’s The Seeds of Time

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle dusts off the half-forgotten science-fiction stories of John Wyndham

A good many of the books that feature in this weekly Friday column are found in charity shops while I’m looking for something else. So it was with this week’s featured book, or rather pile of books, by John Wyndham, who has been called the most successful British science-fiction writer after H. G. Wells. In his lifetime, Wyndham was a bestselling novelist. How many people read his novels and short stories now, I wonder?

Like many people, I knew the titles before I picked up the books: The Day of the Triffids, The Midwich Cuckoos, The Chrysalids. A number of Wyndham’s novels have been successfully adapted for film, with The Midwich Cuckoos being made into a feature film titled Village of the Damned on not one but two occasions. ‘Triffid’ has even made it into the Oxford English Dictionary, which defines it as follows: