Everything about John Wyndham totally explained
John Wyndham (
July 10,
1903 –
March 11,
1969) was the
pen name used by the often
post-apocalyptic English science fiction writer
John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris.
In his earlier writings, Wyndham used various combinations of his names, such as
John Beynon 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
Life
John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris was born in the village of
Knowle in
Warwickshire,
England, but lived in
Edgbaston in
Birmingham until he was 8 years old. At this 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 was unhappy being shuttled through a series of English boarding schools, including
Blundell's School in Devon during the First World War. His longest and final stay was at
Bedales (
1918-
1921), which he left at the age of 18, where he blossomed and was happy.
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'd 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 Day of 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, whom he'd known for more than 20 years. He moved out of the Penn Club in London, and the couple lived near
Petersfield, Hampshire, just outside the grounds of
Bedales School.
Major works
The first four novels, written over a fairly short period in the
1950s, are widely regarded as the peak of his achievement.
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 1950s English middle-class setting.
Brian Aldiss, another British science fiction writer, has disparagingly labelled some of them as "
cosy catastrophes", especially his novel
The Day of the Triffids. The critic L. J. Hurst dismissed Aldiss's accusations, pointing out that in
Triffids the main character witnesses several murders, suicides, and misadventures, and is frequently in mortal danger himself.
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. In his longer tales he's more concerned with character development than many science fiction writers. Wyndham's science fiction may be considered trendsetting in its insistence that interplanetary catastrophes don't just happen to "other people" (for example 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. He consistently views man as part of the biosphere, and nature as "red in tooth and claw" (as
Tennyson put it).
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've 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. 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's 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 mini-series for children in 1985)
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
Sleepers of Mars (1973)
The Best of John Wyndham (1973)
Wanderers of Time (1973)
Exiles on Asperus (1979)
No Place like Earth (2003)Further Information
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