Tuesday 30 October 2018

Poem: 'LAST POEM'



LAST POEM 


Beelzebub, take my legs
I’ve walked a million miles
I’ve done all the walking I need,
walked London, Rome and Central Park,
walked Malham Cove and Holy Island,
don’t need to walk no more…

Beelzebub, take my nose
I’ve inhaled the world and
breathed it back out again,
sniffed flowers, herbs and the
sweet moistness of women’s bodies,
don’t need to smell more…

Beelzebub, take my ears
I have the sound of worlds within me,
gulls circling above familiar harbours
guitar chords that haunt my memory,
the aching gasp of lovers
the cries of my babies,
don’t need to hear more…

Beelzebub, take my tongue,
I’ve said all I need to say
talked and argued with lovers and friends
sung and shouted and raved
at the madness of the world,
recited fairy-tales to children
and whispered soft eroticisms
while entwined in acts of love,
there’s nothing more to say…

Beelzebub, take my eyes
I’ve seen all I need to see,
the wine-dark seas of Crete
the gates of Graceland, the paint
and art and dance and sunrise,
the 9:11 towers falling,
don’t need to see more…

but Beelzebub, leave me my mind
so I can write
just one more poem…



Proud to renew my long-term association with,
and have my poem featured in the excellent new
'MINOTAUR #76' alongside fine writers such as
Ed Mycue, Ruth Moon Kempher, Geoff Bowman
& Jim Watson-Gove.
Issues $5 from: heartfirestudio@gmail.com


Sunday 28 October 2018

'MEAT IS MURDER': THE VEGGIE AND HOW TO BE ONE



“MEAT IS MURDER...!” 
THE VEGGIE: 
AND HOW TO BE ONE 

 Andrew Darlington gave up eating meat five years ago. 
(This feature originally published in 1999, and appears 
here in its original form). Are YOU still a Meathead? 
Why are Veggies on a demographic roll? Who says 
 by the middle of the next century we could all be Veggie? 
 Who are the radical outer fringes of the Paramilitary 
 Provisional Wing of the Vegetarian Society? 
And what is the hideous secret behind... Jelly Babies???? 

 “Believe me. Sooner or later all pigs get eaten. 
That’s the way the world works...” 
 Fly the Sheepdog to Babe the Sheep-pig (‘BABE’


MEAT IS MURDER.

The ad on the hoarding shows a cutely loveable little calf. And the cutely loveable little calf is saying ‘WHEN I’M A BURGER, I WANT TO BE WASHED DOWN WITH IRN-BRU’. Is that sick in the Benetton shock-outrage strategy of sick? Or is that inspired copywriting? Calves grow up to be cows. Cows become burgers. We know that. But we don’t want to be shown. We don’t want to be faced with the reality of it. Well – not quite so graphically anyway.

“To me, to eat meat would be like eating the flesh of a new-born baby” explains editor-publisher Michael Butterworth, forking Veggie tagliatelle in an alcove of the ‘Pig And Drum’ off Deansgate, Manchester. A friend, a lifetime veggie – and vegan too, we talk it over before I too quit my carnivore habits. “As soon as people find out you’re veggie they seem to feel the need to explain themselves. They go ‘Well – I don’t eat MUCH meat, to be honest. Only at weekends.’ Or ‘I only eat WHITE meat.’ Or ‘Sometimes I get a Margherita pizza instead of Meat-Feast’. I mean – hey, I don’t care. Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know. Don’t dump your guilt on ME. It’s as though deep deep down inside there’s something that’s telling them that YOU have the moral high-ground. That deep deep down inside they know that there’s something faintly obscene about meat. They know it. And they feel the need to apologise for it...”

I’d been tempted before by the idea. But then, why the hell? there’s no real reason, is there? I enjoy food. I love eating. And what do Veggie’s get? Go to most restaurants and that option with the Green Tick comes down to a meat-free Lasagne hidden away at the bottom of the menu, and that’s it! And even morally – everything on the planet eats something else. The world is an orgy of mutual cannibalism and always has been. Life is no respecter of life. Was it William Burroughs, Philip K Dick or Mick Farren who said ‘Life don’t give a rat’s arse who lives it’? Whoever it was, I second that emotion. And just how far down the food-chain can you go anyway? No-one talks about rights for slugs, woodworms and bacteria – do they? It’s not even as though the major religious belief systems condemn meat eating, except perhaps those that subscribe to the idea of some kind of reincarnation, in which case you have a certain vested interest in not eating something that you might later be incarnated as. There might be six million Veggie adherents of the Jain sect in India who refuse to eat anything after nightfall for fear of accidentally swallowing some living thing. But to most everyone else ‘god’ gave the animals of the field to us as a kind of four-legged larder. Cut here. Chew on this bit. It’s convenience food at its most convenient.

Then my daughter, Susan, quit eating meat. And a gesture of solidarity was called for. No, not that either. It was more a put up or shut up to myself. So – from New Year 1994, no more meat.

“The problem is, most people have never even seen a chicken that’s not plucked, frozen, and lying in the freezer with its legs in the air. When you buy your meat you steer that trolley with the misaligned front wheel to the Supermarket chiller cabinet where what you’re buying is just another item from a range of hygienic shrink-wrapped consumables. It’s just another product. It’s in no obvious way different to buying a packet of Honey-Nut Cornflakes or a Toilet Duck. It’s a Silverside or it’s a Sirloin, it’s not a bit of a dead animal. It’s not something that’s been cut from the corpse of a living being. I suppose way down you know. But on the surface it’s not something that’s immediately obvious”, a reflective pause. Ritchie is a musician, keyboardist with some bands you’ve probably heard of, and some you haven’t. He quit meat long before I did. It was Hey, a life-style thing! Know-what-I-mean?

“As a kid growing up through the late-1950s in Hull I remember there was a butchers on the corner of Whitefriargate where as a part of the display outside they’d festoon beheaded pheasants, unplucked with their feathers and everything intact. But where the heads had been they’d fix little cups on wires to catch the steady drip of blood. Except the cups were never quite big enough. They’d overflow and they’d drip down onto the pavement below where they’d form little rivulets of blood that ran down across the pavement and into the gutter. This is true. As a kid, hanging onto me Mam’s hand, I’d walk along that stretch of pavement carefully jumping over those little forking streams of pheasant-blood. And no-one thought twice about it then. I’d hazard a guess that opinion has changed slightly across the years since, people wouldn’t like that now, something like that would no longer be quite so acceptable. People eat meat. People enjoy eating pheasant in exactly the same way they did then. But they’d prefer not to know the precise details of how exactly it arrived on their plate...”

Performance Poet Nick Toczek does a routine about how he gave up eating meat. About the withdrawal symptoms that followed his decision. About walking through the precinct past McDonalds and being assailed by the seductive aroma of flame-grilled burgers. About almost giving in. ‘Hey, just one won’t hurt, will it? If no-one’s watching and I sneak in for just one Quarter Pounder McWhopper? Where’s the damage?’

It’s five years since I gave up eating meat. Five years since I made that decision. And I can honestly say I’ve never had any retrograde tendencies. Yet. Never had the slightest back-sliding ‘Hey – no-one’s looking, just one burger won’t hurt’ lapse back into carnivorism. Yet.


“The day may come when the rest of animal creation may 
acquire those rights which could never have been withholden 
 from them but by the hand of tyranny... the question is not 
 ‘Can they reason?’ Nor ‘Can they talk?’ But ‘Can they suffer?’” 
 (Jeremy Bentham, 19th Century philosopher) 

“There’s a very good argument for saying that eating other animals has been beneficial for people in the evolutionary sense.” Ritchie again, owl-eye glasses, and his long straggling hair slightly receding at the front. He’s getting a little more philosophical now, to a background of pre-release studio electronics. “Go back some millions of years. Watch the herbivores out on the great African savannahs. They spend every available moment of every day just eating. They have to do that. Only by eating continually do they get enough of the vital nutrition they need to stay alive. Then look at the predators. It’s the lions and tigers and stuff which lie around basking in the sun, frolicking and grooming themselves. Then once in a while they go out and kill something – a gazelle or a wildebeest, and they eat it. They get in that one neat package all the nutrients it’s taken that gazelle all day to eat! It’s energy-efficient. It’s a bit messy, all that blood and intestines and shit, but it’s convenient.”

“On that far-distant day in pre-prehistory when Fred Flintstone quit eating nuts and berries and went out trapping mastodons and sabre-tooth tigers or whatever it was, it was an important step forward. Between meals of concentrated dead-animal nutrition they could use all that extra spare time to sit around inventing things. Useful things like art, mathematics, nationalism, warfare, cities, religion, CD’s, genocide – stuff like that. And you have to consider that, at that time, the world was one vast wilderness of wildlife, a global safari-park, with tiny pockets of humans competing as just one minority species against continent-wide masses of other and often better-survival-equipped species. In a way, it was OK. It was Tarzan. It was one-on-one. And it continued that way, basically, through much of recorded history. Human expansion was slight, population expansion got regularly pruned back by wars, disease and famine. The graph of human proliferation stayed pretty much horizontal. That didn’t change significantly until the introduction of things like industrialisation, hygiene, medicine, sanitation, inoculation – and suddenly that population graph goes from the horizontal to the near-vertical.”

“It’s different now. It really is. Today we’ve got a situation where the world is one vast city with tiny safari-park pockets of wildlife surviving because we allow them to survive. Wildlife now survives on human whim. And it’s surviving precariously. It’s not Tarzan anymore. The old traditions of murderous manliness no longer add up. It’s not a macho-hunter thing to eat a steak cut from the body of a cow that’s been force-reared and shot full of growth hormones in some huge ‘Animal Belsen’ meat-factory. Killing animals is no longer a big-shot thing. At the start of this century William F ‘Buffalo Bill’ Cody was a big hero figure because he killed something like eight-hundred buffaloes in a single day. That was seen as admirable. In popular fiction – like Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘The Lost World’ (1912), the Big-Game Hunter Lord John Roxton is seen as being heroic because of all the elephants and tigers he’s shot. But now, people no longer see it that way. Nowadays, people like Buffalo Bill would be seen as walking eco-disaster areas. They’d be the villains, the bad guys pitted against the conservationist good guys. Killing animals is no big deal.”

“You can argue that the creatures which will be allowed to survive into the next century and beyond will be only those creatures that we need to survive because we consume them, as human world-population – now tipping seven-billion, reaches crisis-point. You can argue that the survival of pigs, cows, sheep and chickens will be assured because they’re useful. We eat them. If you can get badgers, stoats and weasels shrink-wrapped and into the hypermarket chiller cabinets then you could cross them off the endangered-species lists and get them into the food-factories instead. You can argue it that way. You really can... or you can say instead that sure, meat-eating was an important and justifiable part of human evolution. But we know better now. We’ve grown beyond that. We know all about nutrition. We know all about alternative sources of protein which are just as nourishing and just as good to eat. Unlike cutely loveable little calves, soya-based Veggie-Burgers don’t mind being fried, or washed down with or without Irn-Bru. And they don’t involve the mass wide-scale suffering and holocaust-slaughter of millions of animals. Of other sentient beings.”


Going Veggie is essentially a personal choice. In every case it’s down to the individual. But the personal choice also has wide-ranging implications. There was a joke going around at the time of Linda McCartney’s death. Paul gets the kids together. He tells them ‘I’ve got some bad news and I’ve got some good news. The bad news is – Mummy’s dead. The good news is – we’re having a barbecue tonight with steaks and sausage and burgers and...’ It’s sick, of course. But an inevitable reaction to the deification process that followed her death. In life, as a musician, she’d been the object of ridicule. In death she suddenly became a kind of hallowed Princess Diana figure, a martyred champion of caring sharing animal-rights. To Linda, according to Paul’s eulogy, ‘all animals were Disney characters’. A tad over-sentimental perhaps? A bit too fluffy little lambkins, doe-eyed calves anthropomorphic? In the real world few people see every mouse as Mickey Mouse, or every duck as Donald. In fact, most people eat ducks and set traps for mice. Yet “what Linda has done is equal to the anti-Slavery campaign” claimed the ‘Observer’ obit (14 June 1998). Not so, her real achievement was to capitalise on her celebrity, use her Beatles-related brand-name to get veggie food out of the weird-beard whole-food lentils and sandals shops, and into the Supermarket where it could, and does, compete on equal terms with the Silversides and the Sirloins. Non-veggies eat Linda McCartney. To their surprise, they find themselves enjoying it.

But now, at century’s end, and a step beyond simply going or promoting Veggie, Animal Rights is a big deal. Following the large-scale fragmentation of Left-Wing politics a loose network of radical single-issue action groups – usually Green or Eco-Friendly, has taken its place. Anti-Road Protesters. Anti-Nukes. Anti-Animal-Testing. The Animal Rights Militia. The Animals Betrayed Coalition (ABC). And the twenty-thousand-strong National Anti-Vivisection Society. The Animal Liberation Front (ALF), founded in 1967, can be seen as the Provisional Wing of the Vegetarian Society, and its achievements are impressive. Direct Action through press campaigns, assaults, Molotov Cocktails, arson and bomb-hoaxes amplified by the public sympathy their propaganda-by-deed generates has forced the Fur Trade from the High Street stores, letter-bombs and threats have terrorised scientists involved in animal experiments, while they’ve burned down abattoirs and virtually destroyed the live-export industry. Thousands of butchers shops have been sabotaged, and all non-medical animal experimentation has ceased in University Labs through fear of ALF ‘retaliatory action’. Current flashpoints include the introduction of genetically-modified food through biotechnology companies such as Monsanto (interestingly, the same company responsible for the horrific Agent Orange defoliant used in Vietnam!).

A sprawling anarchic confederation, the ALF ‘organisation’ is decentralised, operating on a system of semi-autonomous cells, so ‘official spokesperson’ is something of a nonsense. But we talk anyway. “People tend not to think about these issues, they usually have neither the time, nor the inclination to do that – until they are directly confronted with them on a personal level.” No dark paramilitary balaclava with slit eye-holes. No flack-jacket either. Just some degree of reasonable intensity. He continues, “that state of mind tends to continue until people are forced by circumstances to sit down and think about it.

Consider this. 780-million chickens are slaughtered for food in the UK every year. They are largely caged and selectively bred to reach maturity in six, rather than twelve weeks. This means that although their muscles grow faster, their hearts and lungs do not, causing painful deformities and heart disease. Their lives are nasty, brutish, and above all – short. People might not like that, but they accept it. Yet BSE (Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy) ‘Mad Cow’ disease in dairy and beef herds started out pretty much like that. First identified in September 1985, it resulted in the slaughter of 3.85 million cattle. Then it was transmitted to humans in the form of CJD (Creutzfeldt Jakob Disease). Nineteen-year old Stephen Churchill, who died in May 1995, is now accepted as its first victim. And there have been twenty-seven confirmed human CJD deaths, so far. The whole thing is a direct and inevitable consequence of intensive livestock production techniques, specifically – infection passed on from diseased sheep fed as ruminant-bone-meal to cows. There can be no real disagreement with that finding…


“Oh for the wings of 
…any bird, other than a battery hen” 
 (“Spirit Of The Age” by Hawkwind) 

The process began after World War 2 when Governments realised just how dependant Britain was on food imports. So successive administrations of all political guises subsequently encouraged the intensivisation of agriculture to achieve self-sufficiency in food supplies – including the obscenity of factory-farming techniques. And it was successful, successful to the extent that Europe, the most densely populated and heavily industrialised region in the world is now also a net exporter of food, with the absurdity of EU milk lakes and beef mountains of excess produce. While the downside of all that is the price that has been paid, first through the horrific suffering inflicted on the creatures caught up in it, and finally down the food-chain to the infected human consumers. It was only then that public opinion accelerated radically away from the whole idea of battery-produced food, and switched to buzz-words like ‘organic’ which they’d previously ridiculed as faddy or eccentric. It’s the same with genetically-modified food. That is the current battle-ground on which the issues are being fought out. Agri-Business versus Compassion In World Farming.

But in a sense that’s also just a culmination of what’s been going on since the very origins of farming and what we call ‘animal husbandry’. People have been selectively breeding, cross-breeding, splicing and grafting plants and animals ever since the beginning of recorded history. The pigs we know and love through pop-Movies like ‘Babe’ (1995), are all descended from the wild boar, although they’re now virtually unrecognisable as even the same species. All the vast diversity of dog breeds are derived originally from packs of wolves. A Babylonian or an Egyptian from whatever-the-hell thousand BC would be confused by the wealth of apples, grain, and fruit that we take for granted. Because they’ve all been developed through generations of selective breeding. We live in a hugely artificial environment created by human interference in, and manipulation of, natural processes. Genetic modification of food takes that process into new realms of possibility. And people are understandably shit-scared of what the hell will come out of such drastic tinkering.

But ‘words are cheap. Only actions really count’ asserts ALF’s Barry Horne. He’s the guy who almost fasted to death in the final months of 1998 in an attempt to pressure New Labour into honouring its manifesto pledges concerning abuse of animals, protesting “this is not for me, it is for every animal in every torture lab. The souls of the tortured dead cry out for justice...” The pre-election document ‘New Labour: New Life For Animals’ claims ‘Labour is the only party to trust on animal welfare...’ It came to the attention of Barry, a Category A prisoner held at York’s Full Sutton Prison, serving eighteen-years for £3-million fire-bomb attacks on animal-abusing Boots and Halfords branches. He decided to bring media attention to what he describes (in a letter to ‘Arkangel’ magazine) as the ‘arrogant and indifferent attitude of the Labour Government’ by beginning his death-fast at midnight 6 October – and survived for sixty-eight days during which his weight dropped from 14 to 8st. IRA hunger-striker Bobby Sands, by contrast, died after just sixty-six days of starvation in the Maze in 1981.


The Animal Rights Militia issued a hit-list of ten vivisectionists it would assassinate in the event of Horne’s death. Spike Milligan and TV’s Carla Lane pledged support. Instead, at the point of death Barry withdrew, but only after he’d succeeded in splashing his grievances across the national press and TV. ALF’s Robin Webb went head-to-head with Home Office Minister George Howarth plus various defensive scientists on ‘Newsnight’. People talked about him, and what he represents, in offices and factories and boozers across the country. Two months, three months later, he’s largely forgotten. That would have been true even if he’d taken it all the way and died for his beliefs (he actually died 5 November 2001 of liver-failure). It’s not even as though he’s the first martyr for animal rights. Jill Phipps died during the Coventry Airport protests, crushed by a lorry exporting veal-calves to the Continent in 1984. Sound-bites and photo-opportunities have a habit of getting replaced by new sound-bites and new photo-opportunities. But things do change. Attitudes can make massive seismic shifts. Already Veggies are on a demographic roll – up to four million in the UK, from 2% in the mid-eighties to today’s 7%, a more impressive figure when you realise that the growth area occurs in the fourteen-to-twenty-four year old age-band – where it’s nearer 10%, and it’s among those with a greater investment in the future.

“It’s less than a century since women were being imprisoned, and died, to establish their right to vote. In the coming century, with an accelerating species-extinction and loss of natural wildlife habitats, the rights of non-human lives will inevitably become more highly valued. Scarcity alone will dictate that. This is not Science Fiction. This is already happening. It’s happening now. It will continue. By the middle decades of the next century people will look back on our intensive-farming and industrial abuse of animals with the same kind of gut-revulsion and horrified incomprehension that we feel about Nazi Concentration Camps. Perhaps, just perhaps, we’ll all be Veggie then... of course, right here, right now, it’s not always easy, and it’s not always obvious.”

“Non-Veggies delight in pointing out that ‘Na-na-ne-naw-naw, you’re wearing leather shoes and a leather belt!’ Stuff like that. Also, even with reasonably accurate food labelling it’s not necessarily easy to avoid certain animal-based elements used in food. I always enjoyed suet puddings, imagining suet to be some kind of a plant, until it was helpfully pointed out to me that suet is – according to the dictionary, ‘a hard waxy fat around the kidneys and loins of sheep and cattle.’ Suddenly it don’t seem quite so appetising any more. And Jelly Babies. What could be more innocent that Jelly Babies? But they contain gelatine which is a ‘water-soluble protein prepared by boiling animal hides and bones.’ Think about it. And just because the restaurant has Veggie-Burgers on its menu don’t always mean that they fry it in vegetable oils. It’s often difficult to define where the lines actually occur. Sometimes you just gotta be pragmatic. While at the same time you can never actually forget that ultimately, all meat IS murder. It is. Don’t be a meat-head all you life...!”

“do you know how animals die?/ ...the flesh you so fancifully fry/ 
the meat in your mouth/ as you savour the flavour/ 
 ...it’s sizzling blood and the unholy stench/ of MURDER, / 
 ...who hears when animals cry?” 
 The Smiths (“Meat Is Murder”

Published in:
‘HOT PRESS’ Vol.23 No.1
(Eire – February 1999)


Friday 26 October 2018

CD review: VINTAGE: THE VERY BEST OF MOBY GRAPE



GRAPE JAM 

 Album Review of: 
‘VINTAGE: THE VERY BEST OF…’ 
by MOBY GRAPE 
(Columbia Legacy/ Import 483958-2, 1993) 

While what passes for Rock now abandons its whizz-tech brave modern faith in novelty, and instead rearranges the hand-me-downs of the past – Moby Grape were once capable of stimulating more kinds of mucous secretions five times faster than any other leading Bay Area band. They were San Francisco, but while they had too much song-centred Pop-sensibility to be truly hippie, they nevertheless turned that Beat-life into myth, then encapsulated it onto record. Moby Grape could chew on razor blades, with solos as thick as liquorice, yet never exceeding precise singles-length play-times. And if their legacy is this forty-six-track span of cold Kool-Aid, warm jams and live wires, with the Byrds or the Airplane as the spectres who haunt the album, then there’s still plenty here for artful style-plunder by latter-day audio inadequates.

The Grape were always capable of surprise. They still are, even taken track by track. “Just Like Gene Autry: A Foxtrot” from ‘Wow’ (1968), the playful closing track on side one of their second album, is a nostalgic 1920s style ‘celestial melody’ supposedly done live at the ‘Fandango Hotel’, and it was originally designed to be played at 78rpm! Here it’s normalised to whatever rpm CD’s go at – but it’s still got an engaging off-the-wallness that throws your most casual preconceptions.

Singer-songwriter Alexander ‘Skip’ Spence hung out with the Grape between drumming for the aforesaid Jefferson Airplane’s ‘Takes Off’ (1966), and his subsequent cult solo work. But Moby Grape was obsessively co-operative. A fluid five-piece boasting five front-men and interchangeable roles. Each group member gets to write at least one song for their first, and best album, which is here intact. ‘Moby Grape’ (May 1967) was issued simultaneously as an LP – and also as five singles ‘A’s and ‘B’s. Even the sleeve – a straight personnel line-up shot, tells a tale. The Grape are grouped around a washboard, with Seattle-born drummer Don Stevenson holding the skiffle-instrument in a manner that makes it seem as though he’s inadvertently – or perhaps even advertently, ‘giving the finger’. A morally outraged CBS recalled all copies of the first pressings so the rudely offending digit could be airbrushed out. With ‘Vintage: The Very Best Of…’, not only is everything returned to its rightful place, but there’s more too, with live and studio outtakes aplenty.


There’s both the single AND the album edit of the high-energy whiplash-guitar “Hey Grandma”, ditto Spence’s intense-harmony “Omaha” with opening stereo phasing ripping left-right, plus a newly unleashed version of stand-out bass-and-percussive “Changes” – pronounced ‘Churngers’ by vocalist Peter Lewis, alongside its original incarnation. Diesel Park West did a cover of their 1:49-minute “Lazy Me (San Francisco)” on their twelve-inch vinyl EP ‘When the Hoodoo Comes’ (Food 12FOOD20, 1989). Here the Grape show how it should be done with the plaintive nervy-edge that only comes with raw first-taste invention. Subsequent Moby Grape albums are touched on more lightly, but can be even more eclectic. Stevenson’s “Murder In My Heart For The Judge” is a curiously-constructed song – hoarse verse, tongue-in-cheek chorus, later covered by Three Dog Night, with a storyline inspired by a drug bust. Then there’s lead guitarist Jerry Miller’s storming “Can’t Be So Bad” – first heard by many, including me, on the budget-price sampler ‘The Rock Machine Turns You On’ (CBS, 1968), punched home with solid horns. There are also two versions of Bob Mosley’s impassioned “Bitter Wind” taken both Folk-stark and full-group. All of which come from the more extreme and unpredictable ‘Wow’. Next there’s the simplified ‘Moby Grape 69’ (1969) providing the reflective country-clear “It’s A Beautiful Day Today” with Spence’s absence leaving them a four-piece. And finally the title track from ‘Truly Fine Citizen’ (1969) – a last-gasp after bassist Mosley’s walk-out to join the Marine Corps had further reduced them to a trio.

Never as important as Love or the Byrds, Moby Grape were nevertheless distinctively different from closer contemporaries such as Quicksilver Messenger Service or Buffalo Springfield, less instrumentally indulgent than the former, funkier than the latter, and mercifully unclogged by the milieu’s pretentions. Like they sing on Miller-Stevenson’s easy-rocking “Ooh Mama Ooh” from ‘Moby Grape 69’ they ‘had me a taste of the Big Time, lettin’ fools push me around… Now I’m coming home, back where I belong.’ This is a fun homecoming from a time when novelty and newness could still be exciting.


Thursday 25 October 2018

JOHN WYNDHAM: 'THE SECRET PEOPLE'



THE SECRET 
JOHN WYNDHAM 

 ‘THE SECRET PEOPLE’ 
by JOHN BEYNON HARRIS 
(JOHN WYNDHAM) 
 (1935 George Newnes, 1964 Lancer Book) 

The quirks of literary fashion are curious beasts indeed, witness Dan Brown, JK Rowling, and the ‘Fifty Shades Of Grey’ blip. Back in the 1950s Science Fiction was ‘that comic-book stuff’, regarded by the self-appointed critical guardians of proper literature with a sometimes deserved derision. Until the two legitimising escape clauses, admitted into the elevated status of respectability, Aldous Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’ (1932) and George Orwell’s ‘1984’ (1949) were grudgingly joined by a third. For it’s curious that once John Wyndham’s books were published within those distinctive orange Penguin covers they became the fashionable face of SF, the seriously reviewed acceptable chic SF, elevated into ‘the Wells tradition’. With the success of ‘The Day Of The Triffids’ (1951) and ‘The Kraken Wakes’ (1953) John Wyndham achieved a quirk of literary fashion.


Although he’d actually been around quite a while. Those same readers who saw fit to add a little daring to their Lit-approved book-shelves, were unaware that Wyndham, behind a spread of aliases taking advantage of his wealth of forenames, had been one of the British-invasion writers, along with William F Temple, Eric Frank Russell and John Russell Fearn during Pulps most extravagant years. His first sale, “Worlds To Barter”, appeared in ‘Wonder Stories’ as long ago as 1931. It was followed by “The Lost Machine” – as by John Beynon Harris, in ‘Amazing Stories’ (April 1932), in which Zat, a stranded coffin-shaped Martian robot on crab-legs, strives to make sense of these ‘animal structures’ of Earth. It attempts to talk to a stalled car, ‘I was lost – the only one of my kind upon this primitive world… an intelligent machine in a world of madness.’ Mixing comic satire about drunken human behaviour with the poignancy of Zat’s final self-termination, the tale’s clumsy energy is matched by “The Man From Beyond” (‘Wonder Stories’, September 1934) – also told in flashback, in which Morgan Grantz revenges himself on the International Chemicals corporation by sabotaging their ‘Nuntia’ expedition to Venus, but in doing so maroons himself in the ‘Takon’ Valley of Dur where toxic gases place him in a form of suspended animation, revived by the six-limbed Venusian Takonians at a time when Earth has blown itself into ‘a celestial cinder’. And then there’s “Perfect Creature” (‘Tales Of Wonder’, 1937) taking an absurdist nod at HG Wells ‘The Island Of Doctor Moreau’ as well as Mary Shelley, when Una, a hideously monstrous creation animated by Doctor Dixon at Membury Grange abducts the Society For The Maltreatment Of Animals inspector – Alfred Weston, with amorously reproductive intentions!

Written with more fanciful enthusiasm than technique, ‘The Secret People’, Wyndham’s first novel, is a thrill-a-minute adventure of the same dubious vintage. But following his mainstream breakthrough Lancer Books fortuitously rediscover this modest debut – published in 1935 under the cunning guise of John Beynon Harris. For its republication, Wyndham made a few minor amends to the text, and adds an amused introduction, writing about ‘Beynon’ in the third person, justifying the title-blurb ‘John Wyndham introduces…’


Here, dashing young Mark Sunnet is a playboy whose entrepreneurial obstinacy has turned around the declining fortunes of his uncle’s shoe business. He rewards himself with ‘Sun Bird’ – a silver ‘compact little bundle of power’ rocket-plane in which he plans to visit a friend who’s farming in ‘Southern Rhodesia’. As Margaret Lawn is a red-headed mistress of her own destiny, who anticipates meeting an acceptable ‘play-mate’. The two link up during a stop-over at the Hõtel de L’Etoile in Algiers, to which he’s been misdirected by a taxi driver.

‘You’re lovely’ Mark tells Margaret, ‘and you’re a brick.’ They take a flip in the ‘Sun Bird’ over the ‘New Sea’, a project first proposed in the nineteenth-century by the French-born architect of the Suez Canal, Ferdinand de Lesseps, and discussed in a ‘New York Times’ feature dated 16 September 1877. Wyndham adopts the idea, and develops it into a near-future reality, a vast desert irrigation scheme funded by a consortium of north African states, at the Gulf of Qabés, taking in parts of Southern Tunisia and a series of lakes – or ‘Shotts’, in Algeria. So that when the rocket-plane crashes, the couple find themselves in the bizarrely surreal crisis of being shipwrecked in the middle of the Sahara! They pick up a cat they name ‘Bast’ on a diminishing island, only for their craft to get trapped in a sudden whirlpool that draws them down into an underground cave system.


Washed up in an artificially-illuminated cavern they enter a weird mushroom forest. To discover they’ve stumbled into a subterranean realm, with its pygmy inhabitants, threatened by inundation by the expanding New Sea above them. ‘Do you know what it reminds me of?’ says Margaret. ‘Pictures in story books when I was a kid – only this technique’s more modern. Enormous toadstools under which gnomes lived. There was one just like that in one book… but I never thought I should see the real thing.’

The ‘Lost Race’ or ‘Hidden People’ idea was an already familiar fantasy sub-genre, at least since Jules Verne’s ‘Journey To The Centre Of The Earth’ (1864, and 1971 in English). But even before him, as early as 1818, John Cleves Symmes had propounded a fanciful concept of polar openings leading to a succession of inner worlds, leading to Edgar Allan Poe making use of the idea in “Ms Found In A Bottle” (1833) and “The Unparalleled Adventure Of One Hans Pfaal” (1835). Then both William N Harben’s ‘The Land Of The Changing Sun’ (1904) and Willis George Emerson’s ‘The Smoky God’ (1908) use subterranean settings. Stanton A Coblentz’s ‘Hidden World’ (1957) – originally serialised in ‘Wonder Stories’ (Mar, April and May 1935) as “In Caverns Below” features the accidental discovery of the underground civilisations of Wu and Zun beneath Nevada. While Richard Sharpe Shaver created ‘The Shaver Mystery’ cult sequence of stories – commencing with “I Remember Lemuria” (‘Amazing Stories’ March 1945), as purportedly ‘thought records’ of ancient civilisations using fantastic technologies in caverns beneath the Earth’s surface. But the sub-genre probably reached its apotheosis with Edgar Rice Burroughs’ ‘Pellicidar’ tales set at the centre of a hollow Earth, the first being ‘At The Earth’s Core’ (1914).

The highly excitable blurb to the Lancer edition of ‘The Secret People’, ‘Rocket To The Earth’s Core’ seems to inaccurately imply such an ERB comparison. ‘It was an ultra-scientific machine – but it plunged Mark and Margaret into the weirdest of primitive worlds… a land beneath the Earth’s surface and forgotten by time.’ Wyndham’s working title – ‘Sub-Sahara’, had been discarded by the publisher, who were equally dubious about the viability of his futuristic rocket-plane, but were grudgingly persuaded to go along with it. The story was published in serial-form in the weekly tabloid ‘The Passing Show’ (20 July to 14 September 1935), amid a mix of mystery, adventure-fiction, anecdotes and cartoons, where it was illustrated by Fortunino Matania ‘a man with a grand-opera approach to story illustration’ according to Wyndham. Later, for a one-off reprint in ‘Famous Fantastic Mysteries’ (April 1950) it came with art by the wonderful Virgil Finlay.


Subterranean life in the system of linked caves, corridors and caverns – illuminated by ancient Cold Light technology, is lengthily detailed, with Mark confined with others who had wandered by various routes from the surface to be apprehended, some for many years, with ‘native’ children born in the caves knowing no other existence. Factions scheme against each other, with a secretive escape tunnel project that has been underway for years. And devious gangster Manuel who tries to intercede with their pygmy captors in order to gain personal advantage.

There’s a carved pantheon of gods, ‘like and yet unlike their Egyptian counterparts’ which offer clues to the origins of these ‘secret people’. There’s an over-long theoretical history of the troglodyte’s origins – which includes a brush with Piltdown Man! Simpler surely to suggest that the creeping desertification that followed the last receding Ice Age, resulted in migration east towards the Nile valley, while a remnant population sought subterranean refuge? But Wyndham seems determined to draw Central African pygmy tribes into his scheme too. Perhaps their mournful melancholy expressions were based on photographs he’d genuinely seen in some geographical magazine, or – like Mark, ‘a travel film’, which left an enduring impression on him? A doomed race caught up in the modern world’s inexorable conquest. For the battle beneath the Sahara, as Mark shrewdly observes, is a war for the very survival of their realm too.

Because Mark arrives in time for the triggered confrontation between pygmy captors and prisoners, who barricade their caves with immense ramparts of felled mushroom stalks. A prison within a prison, in which the rebels are besieged. Beside him there’s American action-man John Smith, with leadership charisma. Mahmud el Jizzah, and skilled African carver Zickle. While, a dialogue with thoughtful English archaeologist Charles Gordon, takes a right-wing slant when Gordon argues that democracy, Socialism and Communism are not evidence of the triumph of reason, but simply modern religions. As Mark argues back, Gordon insists that the ‘fantastic idea that all men are equal’ is not logical, and that laws based on ‘Lower Common Denominator force brilliant intellects to abide by them.’ That even preserving the weak and unfit is not rational. The reader assumes this to be Wyndham’s ventriloquism, opinions assumed to provoke debate? What Wyndham himself self-deprecatingly terms ‘indications of the author’s later style… notably the character’s propensity towards continual chatter.’

Margaret meanwhile – as accidental handmaiden of sacred Bast, has put her time to more constructive use by learning the pygmy language sufficient for conversations with wise old Garm. While meeting, and deflecting the ruthless intentions of Miguel, who then murders Garm. There’s some gratuitously nasty torture when Manuel kidnaps Margaret in order to force her to reveal the location of the ‘Sun Bird’, even as the prisoner’s escape tunnel inadvertently punches a hole in the bed of the New Sea and so begins to flood the entire Secret Realm. Bast – the cat, survives Miguel’s vindictive cruelty to join the reunited lovers and their friends. First using the part-wrecked ‘Sun Bird’, and then climbing vents and shafts, to escape the doomed subterranean world with the Cold Light secret that will make their fortune… and a wedding to bring the novel to a suitably romantic close.

According to Damon Knight, after his war service, John Wyndham ‘in 1949 broke a bottle over his bows… and started in afresh’ (‘In Search Of Wonder’, 1956), evolving from such early playful extravagances to fine-tune ‘that astonishing, compelling gift of pure story-telling.’ Leaving ‘The Secret People’ as what Wyndham himself terms ‘this slightly period piece.’


Wednesday 24 October 2018

JOHN WYNDHAM: 'THE CHRYSALIDS'




CHRYSALID: 
THE TWO LIVES OF 
JOHN WYNDHAM 

 ‘THE CHRYSALIDS’ 
by JOHN WYNDHAM 
 (Michael Joseph 1955, Penguin Paperback 1308, 1958)



‘BLESSED IS THE NORM’

‘When I was quite small I would sometimes dream of a city.’ The dreamer is David Strorm, a ten-year-old boy with a burning secret that could destroy him. Born in Waknuk, a small-town frontier place of austere farmland, ‘an orderly, law-abiding, god-respecting community of some hundred scattered holdings’, the world he grows up in extends little further than this. While beyond lies the Wild Country. And beyond that, the Fringes. The rest of the continent is ‘Planet Of The Apes’ Badland, poisonously irradiated and crawling with mutants. For David, known history stretches back no further than three centuries. Before that – maybe a thousand years, no-one knows for sure, was the global disaster they call the ‘Tribulation’. And David experiences haunting dreams of a fantasy city. As gradually the all-pervasive unease underlying the seemingly robust ‘Tom Sawyer’ life-style emerges, he befriends a secretive girl – Sophie Wender, who has six toes. He receives a vicious parental beating as punishment for concealing her minor deformity. Sophie’s forced flight to the hazardous refuge of the Fringes intimates a dire warning about his own ‘blasphemy’, maturing his unease into horror. Making them both victims of the ever-vigilant scrutiny and exclusion of differences.

‘Triffid’, the word John Wyndham added to the language, rapidly became part of the national vocabulary – if predominantly through TV and movie adaptations. But the gentler child’s-eye view of ‘The Chrysalids’ has added charm. The writing is direct, uncluttered, personable. It flows easily. Almost a kid’s book that communicates, and is readily understood, as a kid’s book, and it continues to be a set discussion-and-analysis text for schools. But that is not to limit its appeal. To Brian Aldiss, both characters and settings are ‘beautifully realised’. I first read the book during my school years. And it retains its seductive appeal across the intervening decades.


On first publication in 1955 it represented the first wave of Cold War post-apocalypse fear. Although not exactly unprecedented, the world David inhabits carries the shock of relevance, the creepy-crawl of superpower confrontation snatched from the daily news. There was George R Stewart’s ‘Earth Abides’ (Random House, 1949), in which the survivors of global viral-pandemic rebuild their stern shattered world. And Walter M Miller Jrn’s ‘A Canticle For Leibowitz’ (JB Lippincott & Co, 1960) – originally serialised from April 1955 in ‘The Magazine Of Fantasy & SF’, in which a repressive future-religion outlaws technology as the tools of destruction following what he terms the ‘Flame Deluge’ of World War III. There are elements of both futures in ‘The Chrysalids’. The distinction being that George R Stewart and Walter M Miller Jrn appeared through genre SF sources and were only grudgingly conceded respect by sniffy reviewers. Wyndham was published by Penguin, and hence won over the literary world as a ‘proper’ writer. He’d established a beachhead outside the SF ghetto, and became a name to be defensively brandished by geeky fans to deflect elitist scorn. It had not always been so.


Born in Knowle, Warwickshire, on 10 July 1903, his given name – John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris, was complex enough to contain an abundance of pseudonyms, which he adopted to advantage across a varied career. In many ways archetypically English, he was a lean and undemonstrative figure, quietly unassuming, mild-mannered but capable of rising to anger and moral indignation when his sensibilities were offended. Failing his entrance exam to study law at Oxford, intent on following his father’s profession, he fell into commercial art and advertising instead, all the while distracted by the luring fiction of HG Wells. His own first short story sale, a time-travel conundrum called “Worlds to Barter”, appeared as by ‘John Beynon Harris’ in the May 1931 issue of ‘Wonder Stories’, a big thick-paged American pulp magazine.

Alongside a generation of pioneering but largely forgotten British fantasists such as George C Wallis, Benson Herbert, Festus Pragnell and John Russell Fearn, he continued writing almost exclusively for the American newsstand market with tales featuring a robot intelligence from Mars (“The Lost Machine”, 1932), conflict with the bat-like inhabitants of an asteroid (“Exiles On Asperus”, 1933), a lost subterranean civilization beneath the Sahara (“The Secret People”, 1935), and a dumb Martian ‘wife’ called Lellie who I watched as part of ABC-TV’s ‘Out Of This World’ series on 24 June 1962 (dramatising a story from the July 1952 issue of ‘Galaxy’). The memorably lurid cover of the first, and only issue of ‘Ten Story Fantasy’ magazine (Spring 1951) shows a voluptuously bikini’d blonde menaced by a villain with a whip-fetish, while our caped hero strives to intervene, armed with his own whip. It illustrates “Tyrant And Slave-Girl On Planet Venus” by John Beynon, a story that captures something of Leigh Brackett’s wistful beauty set among ancient Martian cities and gentle canals. So there’s a wide and diverse catalogue of tales covering most of the SF tropes, with little cohesive character uniting them to make them distinctively ‘Wyndham’.


This first career-phase lasted clear through to his service as a corporal with the Royal Corps of Signals during World War II, in which he participated in the Normandy D-Day landing. It was while in France he witnessed for the first time the reality of burning cities and roads clogged with refugee-columns, the stuff his stories had so lightly dealt with. He was demobilised with a radical new perspective on his writing, and on the genre. This post-war readjustment was also partly provoked by the serious success of his younger brother, novelist Vivian Beynon Harris. He made a hard critical evaluation of what he’d achieved, and determined to lever his work upwards, striking out under a purely English style, while taking advantage of another reconfiguration of his multiple names.

He spelled out his dissatisfaction with the state of SF in a 1948 article attacking what he saw as the sex and violence that had become its selling point (a review ‘Why Blame Wells?’ in ‘Fantasy Review’). His answer was to reset the standards, turn it back to the chillingly credible, deceptively simple narrative skills of his earliest model, HG Wells. Writing ‘a simple story, simply told, with an art which conceals art.’ The results were immediately rewarding, with ‘The Day Of The Triffids’ (1951) and, when they were defeated, ‘The Kraken Wakes’ (1953) – both typifying what Aldiss terms the ‘school of cosy catastrophe’, scoring accolades from mainstream critics who would never have wasted their measured words on garish pulps. To his literary agent, Walter Gillings, the maxim ‘that the story is more important than the concept on which it is based’ made him ‘the most popular writer of fantastic fiction since HG Wells’.


Naturally, this convenient career fire-break theory is not exactly as precise as that. In fact the new approach is embodied in just three novels (the third being ‘The Midwich Cuckoos’). But before it, he was already conceded a degree of access through his inclusion in the British general fiction periodical ‘The Passing Show’. And afterwards, he could still write for clique markets too. For this second life of John Wyndham, characterised by familiar, recognisable – if disrupted, Home Counties landscapes and solid middle-class protagonists imperilled by sinister vegetable monsters, the future setting and social strangeness of ‘The Chrysalids’ (1955) forms a pleasing anomaly. Albeit one better received within the SF community than it was in the wider literary world beyond. In a September 1955 editorial John Carnell tells how Wyndham ‘stopped by’ the ‘New Worlds’ office only to be ‘over-powered’ by his enthusiasm for what Carnell considered ‘without doubt his most outstanding novel and far superior to either ‘The Day Of The Triffids’ or ‘The Kraken Wakes’’ (‘New Worlds’ no.39). Anthony Boucher’s praise was equally fulsome in his review of the American edition in ‘The Magazine Of Fantasy & Science Fiction’.

Within a decade of its publication the SF New Wave would reconfigure the novel’s post-apocalypse angst into a new Wild West theme-park of comic-book mutie-thrills in a new rad-land wilderness for pioneer adventuring. Until it becomes the stuff of computer games and ‘Judge Dredd’. But for the first readers of ‘The Chrysalids’ it carried the sting of current events, and all our shared tomorrows. Awareness that atomic radiation causes chromosomal damage that induces foetal abnormalities legitimised a new kind of fictional monster, although the ‘Mad Max’ creature-fest that later ensued had little bearing on the sad victims of Hiroshima. David’s telepathic special abilities, by way of Harlan Ellison’s “A Boy And His Dog”, are now pretty much a ‘Strontium Dog’ cliché. Even then, it was not without precedent. For there are other SF tales where anatomical definition has been lost and various mutant species wage fierce wars of purity over which is the true image.


‘ACCURSED IS THE MUTANT’ 

‘When I was quite small I would sometimes dream of a city. Which was strange, because it began before I even knew what a city was’. The first lines draw you in. As Brian Aldiss comments, ‘so powerful are the associations here that we are immediately prepared for a novel of visionary intensity’ (an essay ‘The British Contribution To SF’ in ‘Maya’ no.14). In the geography of ‘The Chrysalids’ there’s a nominal administrative centre based in Rigo (Rigolet), climate-shifted Labrador. The big island of Newf corresponds to Newfoundland, with ‘Waknuk’ – (Wabush) at its western-most tip. Founded by David’s grandfather, Elias Strorm drawing six pioneering wagons, Waknuk is an agrarian post-apocalypse society, with its own version of what Walter M Miller called ‘the simplification’. Women are forced to endure living under Taliban-style repression. David’s strict unwavering father and austere mother adorn their home with slogans such as ‘Keep Pure The Stock Of The Lord’ defined by a book called ‘Repentances’. These are the ‘ancient and wrathful prophets of doom’, the ‘venomous and puritanical old men’ who strive to impose stability and changelessness in a land where only some fifty-per-cent of plants, animals, or humans, breed ‘true’. Warnings against ‘Offences’ or ‘Blasphemies’ enforce an inflexible morality with roots in their dark incomprehensible fear of an unknown past. 

David has a sympathetic sea-faring Uncle Axel who relates garbled semi-understood accounts of his voyages around the radioactive American mainland. His tales of city-ruins that glow faintly in the dark, and tribes of strange mutants, carry all the charge of Odysseus’ trips to mystical islands, or Gulliver’s Travels, or the playfully imaginary cartoons of Lunarians. ‘It was odd’ muses Uncle Axel, ‘how many people seem to have positive, if conflicting, information upon god’s views.’ Clear through into his mid-teens David shares his secret connection only with a clique of fellow telepaths, half-cousin Rosalind Morton, with Michael, Mark, Rachel, Sally & Katherine, Anne & Walter Brent. A kind of benign version of ‘Midwich Cuckoo’ (in which mutant children menace the adult population). Anne tries to reject her ‘gift’ by marrying a ‘norm’, then commits suicide when her denial becomes intolerable. The story of this secret gang of paranormally-gifted teens, outsiders by their very nature, is a gift to alienated teen readers who already feel themselves misunderstood and out-of-step with a dull conformist world. They are the New Breed living ‘a life of perpetual deception, concealment and lying’. But their secret is accelerated by the arrival of new sister Petra, whose abilities are of an amplified intensity. The city David dreamed of in moments when his mind is most open and vulnerable, exists. But what he’d been able to pick up only as fleeting hints, Petra has the power to reach out and talk to. It’s she who first picks up emanations of other ‘thought-shapes’ from far beyond the restrictions of Newf, from the far side of the world, from unknown Sealand (New Zealand).


Time is running out for the group. Rosalind, David with Petra, escape on great-horses – which may or may not be deviational. For them, fleeing into the Fringes is ‘like going over the rim of the world, into the outskirts of hell’. Once there David mistakes unfamiliar plants for mutations, in much the same way that Uncle Alex’s seafarers had mistaken monkeys for severely malformed people. But even as they progress deeper, things are complexifying. Back in Waknuk, others of their kind are being rounded up, and Katherine is being tortured with hot-irons. If Wyndham has been accused of writing ‘cosy catastrophes’, there’s nothing cosy about this. The forces for Racial Purity are reacting with an urgency driven by fear. Fear of the secret deviants they realise have been living amongst them unnoticed for nigh on twenty years. A punitive expedition of Norms is despatched into the Fringes intent on pursuit. Events converge on a mutie-town of cave-hovels where the fugitives find David’s resentful spider-limbed mutant uncle, harbouring lost Sophie. Sophie conceals the three escapees in her cave, away from the Spider-man’s predatory designs on ‘breeder’ Rosalind.


Sophie is poorly ill-served by Wyndham. Sterilised and cast into the Fringes, only for her continuing loyalty to David to be used as an instrument to free them from mutant captivity. To provide a fleeting erotic pulse as she casually tugs off her blouse to wipe it free of blood, gifting David a glimpse of her breasts. Only to be killed off in a single line of text with David barely expressing pain or remorse. Nevertheless, although the developments unfold through David’s eyes, unusual for the SF of its time, this is very much a book of strong decisive women, from Rosalind and Petra through to Aunt Harriet, who gives birth to a flawed daughter, presenting an impossible dilemma that drives her to suicide. And the Sealand women. As Kingsley Amis observes, in general ‘science-fiction writers are evidently satisfied with the sexual status quo – the female-emancipation of a… Wyndham is too uncommon to be significant’ (‘New Maps Of Hell’, Victor Gollancz, 1961).

Doomed Aunt Harriet had prayed to ‘send charity into this hideous world’. But the novel’s outcome brings nothing of the sort. ‘Her prayers as futile as her hopes.’ For Wyndham, the resolution is certainly not one of tolerance. At the same time that David, Petra and Rosalind are cowering in Sophie’s cave, a rescue-mission of Sealand folk are slowly travelling across the wilderness-continent of vast desolation, of fused black glass and cinders towards them. These Sealand People are not proposing an enlightened inclusive equal-opportunities programme for mutants, norms and telepaths to integrate into one caring sharing community. Far from it. In a quite shocking sequence, as the pursuit party from Waknuk invades the village, the Spider-man kills his brother – David’s intolerant vindictive father, and then is himself killed. Then, the Sealand airship appears in the sky above the final battle, ‘the strange fish-shaped craft I had dreamt of in my childhood’. It emits eddies of ‘queer mist’ that inundates both sides in a deluge of sticky cobweb-like threads. Does it pacify or anaesthetise the combatants? No, it kills them all. These are brutal, unforgiving times. The Sealanders creed is a Darwinian survival of the purest, just as ruthless as the one imposed upon Waknuk to burn crops and slaughters cattle that betray the slightest signs of deviation. To rescue Petra – and their target is Petra above all the other lesser talented telepaths (not Rachel who is left to her fate back in Waknuk), they have few qualms about killing off all opposition. It’s a price they’re quite prepared to pay for the triumph of their kind.


With the fugitives safely aboard the ship, the Sealand woman explains that those with telepathic power are the New People who will build a new kind of world. The unhappy Fringes people are condemned, through no fault of their own, to a life of squalor and misery. While it was the Old People who brought down Tribulation, precipitated by the fact that ‘often they were shut off by different languages and different beliefs’, and they were broken into fragments by it. The people of Waknuk are part of those fragments, attempting to perpetuate ‘living shut off from one another, with only clumsy words to link them’. They are history. The Tribulation was an instrument of evolution. The ‘Norms’ will ‘attain the stability they strive for, in the only form it is granted – a place among the fossils’. Like the dinosaurs, they have been superseded, and will pass away. For the telepaths, ‘we have a new world to conquer, they have only a lost cause to lose’.

Odd that in the Sealand woman’s declaration that ‘in loyalty to their kind they cannot tolerate our rise, in loyalty to our kind, we cannot tolerate their obstruction’ musician Paul Kantner would see connections with the emerging crash-pads of San Francisco’s psychedelic counter-culture. He lifted the quote intact as lyrics to theme Jefferson Airplane’s “Crown Of Creation” (1968). Because the Haight-Ashbury hippie movement also saw itself as a New Breed rising from the chaos and debris of a jealous outmoded failed culture. As though Wyndham was an early adapter tapping into the millennial mood of change, which saw exploding the world’s first nuclear device as a fire-break in history, after which everything was different, and social evolution was being jolted upwards. That, or be exterminated in the attempt. For Kantner it was chemicals, not telepathy, that expanded his consciousness, his lyrics striving to reach the state Wyndham expressed as ‘words exist that can, used by a poet achieve a dim monochrome of the body’s love, but beyond that they fail clumsily’.

Old flesh, and new flesh. The fugitives from the repressions of Waknuk will live out their lives in the city that, when he was quite small, David would sometimes dream of. If the fortuitous intervention of the Sealand culture is something of a deus-ex-machina, one of a variety of sanctuaries towards which SF rebels from dystopic future totalitarianisms invariably gravitate, beyond the rad-wasted badlands, it is also confirmation that the abilities they share are not just as random a mutation as an additional toe. They are the chrysalis form of a new evolution towards an advanced mentally interlinked human species. Old world, and new world. For those who associate the name John Wyndham with a particular kind of cosy-nostalgia Home Counties fiction, no, reading ‘The Chrysalids’ will provide a corrective expansion to the spectrum of his work. While oddly enough, the urgent need to resist the vindictive restrictions imposed on society by irrational religious superstitions is now more vital than it was when John Wyndham wrote the novel.



‘JOHN WYNDHAM: 
THE TWO LIVES OF…’ 

Worlds To Barter”, appeared as by ‘John B Harris’ in ‘Wonder Stories’ May 1931) – the cover art taken by Jack Williamson’s ‘Through The Purple Cloud’, reprinted in ‘Tales Of Wonder no.10’ (March 1940), later collected into ‘Sleepers Of Mars’. “From the Men of Earth’s Last Days to the People of the Twenty-Second Century came the Order for the Evacuation of A World!’, ‘a refugee from 2145’ – ‘a world in which Mr Wells ‘Sleeper’ might awake’ tells his great-great-great-grandfather, Professor Lestrange, of the forced population transfer through time that he’d escaped… with the romance subplot that Mary, feared lost in time, joins him in 1945


The Lost Machine” (in ‘Amazing Stories’, April 1932) later collected into anthology ‘Machines That Think’ edited by Isaac Asimov with Warrick & Greenberg. Also collected into ‘The Best Of John Wyndham 1932-1949’, where Leslie Flood says it ‘was possibly the prototype of the sentient robot later developed by such writers as Isaac Asimov’

The Venus Adventure” in ‘Wonder Stories’ (May 1932), then ‘Tales Of Wonder no.7’ (June 1939), and collected into ‘Exiles On Asperus’. On 21 November 2133 Scottish fundamentalist Joseph ‘Noah’ Watson, financed by ‘richest man in the world’ Henry Headington, build a space ‘Ark’ to escape the ‘end of the world’. Centuries later – 19 June 2923, brilliant young Hal Newton’s spaceship the ‘Fyra’ – using Jonite fuel invented by wife Vida, reaches Venus, ‘a ghostly world of pale horrors’ to find the native monotreme Gorlaks facing rival tribes descended from the Ark, the civilised Dingtons (from Headington) with their ornithopters and city called Chicago, and the savage devolved Wots (from Watson) of Ararat. After much intrigue and confrontation the Wots are defeated

 
Wanderers Of Time” in ‘Wonder Stories’ (March 1933) collected in ‘Wanderers Of Time’. A non-stop Ripping Adventure Yarn. With his time-machine damaged by a policeman’s bullet as he rendezvous with the lovely but feisty Miss Betty Mordan, Roy Saber and Betty from 1951 – via 1941, travel into the far post-human future where they meet time-travelling dwarf Del Two Forty-A from 10,402. Attacked by ‘scuttering’ six-legged machines – which tear Betty’s red frock away (as a gift to the magazine’s artist!), they are imprisoned in a towering spike with other temporal castaways from 3902 and 2200, plus two giant Numen, all drawn to this ‘dead spot’ in the time-stream. Betty escapes with hunky Hale Lorrence back to his 3902, as they discover the white machines and hive-city are ant-powered, and are at war with red biped war machines. Escaping using heat-beams, the new object of Roy’s romantic interest, Jessica, is snatched. They commandeer a robot-insect to mount the rescue as Del and Kal repair a stolen time-traveller. Roy stays with Jessica in 2200, but is still drawn towards other adventures in time…

The Third Vibrator” in ‘Wonder Stories’ (May 1933), then ‘Tales Of Wonder no.4’ (October 1938) and collected into ‘Sleepers Of Mars’. David Hixton, inventor of the death-ray Vibration weapon, experiences flashbacks to Kis-Tan of Lemuria whose vibration-weapon decimates central Australia, creates the Sahara and Gobi deserts, then Xtan of the city Zapetl, whose vibration weapon destroys Atlantis. There’s some dubious racial references to ‘yellow race of slant-eyed men to the east’ and ‘blacks of a very backward type’. Hixton destroys the weapon, and tells the tale from the madhouse he’s confined to

Spheres Of Hell” aka “The Puff-Ball Menace” in ‘Wonder Stories’ (October 1933), Wyndham’s first Cosy Disaster, anti-imperialist Prince Khordah of Ghangistan strikes back at the West via very English gardens and allotments seeded with a saprophyte-parasitic fungus hybrid – ‘an army of vegetable invaders’, spores carried by strong winds east from the Cornish coast town of St Brian. Ralph Waite hunts for Dorothy Forbes through the militarised devastation, in protective asbestos suit. But as a hybrid, after two or three generations it reverts to a harmless form

Invisible Monsters” aka “Invisible Monster” in ‘Wonder Stories’ (December 1933) as by John Beynon Harris, then ‘Tales Of Wonder no.11’ (July 1940) as by John Beynon, collected into ‘Sleepers Of Mars’ (Coronet Books, 1973) Breathless ‘Boys Own’ style as a weekend fishing trip is interrupted by the explosive return of ‘The Hurakan’, first spaceship to Venus. Dirk and David try to explain to a sceptical desk-constable how their friend Toby was ripped apart by an invisible entity within the wrecked ship. Part ‘Quatermass’ and part ‘The Blob’ – although this precedes them both, the creature expands despite the army’s attempt to blow it up

Exiles On Asperus” in ‘Wonder Stories Quarterly’ (Winter 1933) with Frank R Paul interior artwork, collected into ‘Exiles On Asperus’. A full-blooded space-adventure romp, when convict-ship ‘Argenta’ is holed, Martian rebel prisoners led by Sen-Su take control. Maybe in a metaphor for the Indian Raj the ancient Martian race resents controls imposed by imperial Earth. Due to human sabotage both parties are marooned on ‘pocket planet’ Asperus where they’re assisted by survivors of an earlier ‘Red Glory’ spacewreck and menaced by ‘flying screechers’ called Batrachs. Earthmen and Martians find common cause against the subterranean-dwelling Batrachs and free their human slaves, but for the psychologically-treated New Generation who remain in the caves, unable to break their conditioning and emerge

The Moon Devils” aka “The Last Lunarians” in ‘Wonder Stories’ (April 1934), reprinted in ‘Wonder Stories Annual’ (Summer 1950) and ‘Tales Of Wonder’ (no.3, 1938). Stephen Dawcott, survivor of ‘The Voyage Of The Scintilla’ to the Moon, leaves a manuscript, the spaceship puts down for repair in Mare Serenitatis – the Sea of Tranquility, where rock carvings lead them into a tomb. Despite being sponsored by the Lunar Archaeological Society they begin irresponsibly looting and plundering, opening the coffins. But the Moonmen and women are not dead, simply in suspended animation. Anticipating the 1958 movie ‘It! The Terror From Beyond Space’, the Lunarians emerge from the cabinets in the ship’s hold to kill the crew as they return towards Earth, surviving the crash into the Ocean close to the Solomon Islands


The Man From Earth” in ‘Wonder Stories’ (September 1934), then in ‘Tales Of Wonder no.10’ September 1940, reprinted in ‘Fantastic Story Quarterly Vol.1 no.2’ Summer 1950 as ‘The Man From Beyond’. Collected into ‘The Best Of John Wyndham 1932-1949’ where Leslie Flood says it ‘is remarkably outlined for its time’ with ‘the poignancy of a man’s realisation, caged in a zoo on Venus, that far from being abandoned by his fellow-explorers, he is the victim of a far stranger fate’

THE SECRET PEOPLE as by JOHN BEYNON. Originally serialised in nine parts by Odham’s ‘Passing Show’ illustrated by Fortunino Matania (from Summer double-issue 20 July 1935), reprinted in ‘The Toronto Weekly Star’ (1936) and in US ‘Famous Fantastic Mysteries’ (April 1950). (George Newnes Ltd, hardback, 1935) US Lancer Paperback edition, 1964, alternate text, as by JOHN BEYNON HARRIS. UK Hodder, and Coronet Paperback edition 1972 ISBN 0-340-15834-4

FOUL PLAY SUSPECTED Detective novel, as by JOHN BEYNON (Newnes, 1935), the hero, Detective-Inspector Jordan, is also featured in two further unpublished novels, ‘Murder Means Murder’ and ‘Death Upon Death’

PLANET PLANE (STOWAWAY TO MARS) as by JOHN BEYNON. Originally serialised in Odham’s ‘Passing Show’ illustrated by Chester (May-July 1936), (George Newnes, hardback, 1936 as ‘Planet Plane’). Adapted as ten-part serial ‘The Space Machine’ for boy’s magazine ‘Modern Wonder’ (from 19 May 1937). Then, as ‘Stowaway To Mars’, Nova Publications, 1953. Hodder, & Coronet Paperback edition, 1972, ISBN 0-340-15835/2. With a 1981 million-pound international prize offered for the first interplanetary journey, millionaire adventurer Dale Curtance blasts off from Salisbury Plain in the ‘Gloria Mundi’ with a handpicked crew, only discover a woman stowaway aboard. Her extraordinary story helps prepare them for the dangers they encounter on a Mars of canals and robotic machines. An American ship makes a disastrous landing, while the fate of the Russian ship ‘Tovarich, is picked up in ‘Sleeper Of Mars’ after its unfriendly encounter with Curtance’s crew…

Perfect Creature” (in ‘Tales Of Wonder no.1’, 1937) edited by Walter Gillings. An earlier variant called ‘The Female Of The Species’, with the creature’s gender switched, appeared in ‘Argosy’ (October 1953). Reprinted in ‘Magazine Of Fantasy & SF’ (January 1953) as by John Wyndham, and retitled again – as ‘Una’, for inclusion in ‘Jizzle’. Collected into ‘The Best Of John Wyndham 1932-1949’

Sleeper Of Mars” sequel to ‘Stowaway To Mars’, in ‘Tales Of Wonder no.2’, Spring 1938 as by John Beynon. ‘On Their Dried-Up Planet The Martians Slept On, Cheated Of A New World That Had Died Long Since…’ Will Mars be claimed by the British Empire, or become the eighth Soviet Republic? Gordonov is a Clydeside engineer whose ‘passionate desire for equality and opportunity’ led to him becoming a Soviet citizen. Wary of contamination, the living Martians of Hanno designate abandoned Ailiko – ‘a dead city upon a dying planet’ for the Russians, as sentient machines repair their ship they discover tens-of-thousands of Martians in suspended animation vaults beneath the city and wake one called Yauadin, who begins waking the rest. With the ship repaired, and throngs of vengeful awakened Martians, there’s last-minute betrayal, and no-one escapes alive…


Beyond The Screen” aka “Judson’s Annihilator” in the UK ‘Fantasy no.1’ (1938), then ‘Amazing Stories’ (Vol.13 no.10, October 1939). Impressive novelette, with Wyndham showing a bleak resignation about impending war, ‘at home this kind of fatalism was growing’ and name-checking Mr Baldwin, Tommy ‘Juddy’ Judson invents a kind of force-field that does not repel, but appears to annihilate whatever passes through its invisible screen. Following military trials on Salisbury Plain units are set up across Britain, and decimate an aerial attack by the totalitarian United States Of Central Europe. When Judson’s sister Sheilah is abducted, Martin Stalham uses Sherlock Holmes dictum ‘eliminate the impossible and that which remains, however improbable, must be the solution’ to deduce that the screen is actually a portal. Stepping through it he finds a Dark Age of endless forest and primitive people – ‘survivors of a shipwrecked civilisation’, alongside stranded German airmen. Not the deep past, but a regressed post-war ‘disease-bombs, air-born bacilli’ future. He rescues Sheilah and escapes back through the screen, turning it off to maroon the unfortunate Germans! She agrees to marry him, but never ‘to bring children into this kind of world’

The Trojan Beam” (in ‘Fantasy no,2’, March 1939) Collected into ‘The Best Of John Wyndham 1932-1949’. A future-1965 Sino-Japanese war fought by magnetic-beam weapons, explained to double-agent George Saltry, until the ‘biggest magnetic disturbance ever known’ draws a lethal storm of Leonid meteorites down to completely obliterate Japan


Derelict Of Space” (in ‘Fantasy no.3’) as by John Beynon. A lot of procedural detail as an error of judgement by space-salvage sailor Captain Belford, returning the derelict ‘Excelsis’ to Earth, results in the seeming destruction of the German town Pfaffheim. With murder, political wranglings and cover-up by the Reich as the explosions were not caused by the cargo of ganywood, gold, patchatal oil or Ganymede-grown tillfer-fibre, but by secret Nazi munitions. Our fake-news era reflected in ‘nobody paid serious attention to an evening paper’s headlines’! The issue also includes his “Child Of Power” as by Wyndham Parkes. In industrial Irkwell in Derbyshire – with broken regional dialect, young Ted Filler ‘the boy who saw sound’ has an ‘electro-sentient’ sixth sense. He hears radio broadcasts… and detects voices from other worlds. It references Olaf Stapledon’s “Odd John” and JD Beresford’s 1911 wunderkind novel “The Hampdenshire Wonder”, while perhaps prefiguring his own ‘Midwich Cuckoos’

Vengeance By Proxy” (in ‘Strange Stories’, 1940) Collected into ‘The Best Of John Wyndham 1932-1949’. Macabre. Tourists Walter and Elaine Fisson travelling Yugo-Slavia sixty miles from Belgrade, run over a wounded Kristor Vlanec, his dying consciousness mind-transfers to her, so she wakes speaking Serbo-Croat and adopting male characteristics. She’s arrested when she kills Vlanec’s original attackers in revenge. Then Vlanec escapes by taking over Walter… whose spirit transfers to Elaine!

Phoney Meteor” (in ‘Amazing Stories’, March 1941)

LOVE IN TIME as by JOHNSON HARRIS (published by Walter Gillings and Benson Herbert through Utopian Publications, 1945) a separate edition of the 1933 story ‘Wanderers In Time’, with racy nude cover

The Living Lies” (in ‘New Worlds’, October 1946, reprinted in ‘Other Worlds Science Stories’, November 1950) as JOHN BEYNON

Why Blame Wells?” article in ‘Fantasy Review’ (1948)

Jizzle” (in ‘Colliers’ magazine, 8 January 1949) as by JOHN BEYNON. Reprinted in ‘Fantasy & SF’, February 1952

Technical Slip” (in ‘Arkham Sampler’, Spring 1949, reprinted in ‘Imagination’, December 1950) as by JOHN BEYNON. Collected into ‘Jizzle’

Adaptation” (in ‘Astounding Science Fiction’, Vol.43 No.5, July 1949) as by JOHN BEYNON. Collected into ‘The Best Of John Wyndham 1932-1949’. Seriously-themed planet-hopping saga covering a spread of time. Colonists ‘adapt’ to drier lower-gravity Mars of mysterious ancient ruins and ‘delicately complex’ plants that grow along waterway margins. Due to ill-health, Mars’s first-born child – Jannessa, is returned to Earth in 1994 in the ‘Aurora’ but there’s a mutiny and the ship is lost, marooned on Europa she’s rescued by kindly subterranean slaty-blue aliens who ‘adapt’ her to living on their world. Yet, feeling herself a freak, she finally returns to Earth to her father, Franklyn Godalpin, where her ‘adaptations’ – she’s ‘twenty-five inches tall,’ mean she’s still a misfit! ‘If the conditions are in some way beyond our control, one of two things happens: either it becomes adapted to the conditions it finds – or it fails to adapt, which means that it dies’

Time To Rest” (in ‘Arkham Sampler’, Winter 1949, then reprinted in ‘New Worlds’, September 1949) as by JOHN BEYNON HARRIS

The Eternal Eve” (in ‘Amazing Stories’, September 1950), first short story to appear as by JOHN WYNDHAM


THE DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS (Michael Joseph, 1951, hardback. Penguin Paperback no.993, 1954) serialised in five parts in ‘Colliers’ as ‘Revolt Of The Triffids’ from 6 January 1951. Also in ‘The John Wyndham Omnibus’, 1964. And as ‘The Revolt Of The Triffids’ Popular Library (US), 1952. Filmed in 1963 with Howard Keel, and adapted as a BBC-TV serial in 1981

The Red Stuff” (in ‘Marvel Science Stories’, February 1951) reprinted in ‘Tales From The Galaxies’ anthology edited by Anabel Williams-Ellis and Michael Pearson (Pan) and ‘The Best Of John Wyndham 1951-1960’

Tyrant And Slave-Girl On Planet Venus” as by JOHN BEYNON in ‘Ten Story Fantasy’ magazine (Spring 1951) – with totally inaccurate James Bama cover-art replacing the silver-furred Venusian griffa with a bikini-clad girl! reprinted as “No Place Like Earth” (in ‘New Worlds’, Spring 1951) then in ‘Exiles On Asperus’. A reflective sequel to ‘Time To Rest’ (1949), quoting Walt Whitman, with Bert torn between surrendering to the peaceful long drawn-out senility of Martian canals and dead cities, plus the lure of the lovely Zaylo, or the vital new tyranny of rain-soaked Venus. Earth has been shattered into a new asteroid belt

And The Walls Came Tumbling Down” (in ‘Startling Stories’, May 1951) collected into ‘The Best Of John Wyndham 1951-1960’

Bargain From Brunswick” (in ‘Fantasy & SF’, June 1951) collected into ‘Jizzle’

Operation Peep” (in ‘Suspense’, Summer 1951), reprinted as “Pawley’s Peepholes” in ‘Science Fantasy’, Winter 1951) then in ‘Seeds Of Time’ and ‘The Best Of John Wyndham 1951-1960’

Pillar To Post” (in ‘Galaxy’, December 1951) collected into ‘The Seeds Of Time’

The Wheel” (in ‘Startling Stories’, January 1952) collected into ‘Jizzle’

Survival” (in ‘Thrilling Wonder Stories’, February 1952) collected into ‘The Seeds Of Time’

Dumb Martian” from the July 1952 issue of ‘Galaxy’, dramatised as part of ABC-TV’s ‘Out Of This World’ series on 24 June 1962. Collected into ‘The Seeds Of Time’ and ‘The Best Of John Wyndham 1951-1960’


THE KRAKEN WAKES (Michael Joseph, 1953, hardback. Science Fiction Book Club, 1955, hardback. Penguin Paperback no.1075, 1955) serialised in ‘Everybody’s’, and also featured in ‘The John Wyndham Omnibus’, 1964. And as ‘Out Of The Deeps’ for Ballantine US edition, 1953

Time Stops Today” (in ‘Future SF’, January 1953)

Close Behind Him” (in ‘Fantastic’, February 1953) collected into ‘The Best Of John Wyndham 1951-1960’

Reservation Deferred” (in ‘Fantastic’, June 1953) collected into ‘Jizzle’

More Spinned Against” (in ‘Fantasy Fiction’, June 1953) collected into ‘Jizzle’

Confidence Trick” (in ‘Fantastic’, August 1953) collected into ‘Jizzle’

A Stray From Cathay” (in ‘Fantasy Fiction’, August 1953)

How Do I Do?” (in ‘Beyond Fantasy Fiction’, September 1953) collected into ‘Jizzle’

Never On Mars” (in ‘Fantastic Universe’, January 1954)

Perforce To Dream” (in ‘Beyond Fantasy Fiction’, January 1954) collected into ‘Jizzle’

Opposite Number” (in ‘New Worlds’, April 1954) collected into ‘The Seeds Of Time’

Chronoclasm” (in ‘Science Fantasy’, September 1954) collected into ‘The Seeds Of Time’

Compassion Circuit” (in ‘Fantastic Universe’, December 1954. Reprinted in ‘New Worlds’, May 1955) collected into ‘The Seeds Of Time’

JIZZLE short story collection (Dennis Dobson, 1954, hardback. Science Fiction Book Club, 1961, hardback. New English Library, 1962) Includes ‘Jizzle’, ‘Technical Slip’, ‘A Present From Brunswick’, ‘Chinese Puzzle’, ‘Esmerelda’, ‘How Do I Do?’, ‘Una’, ‘Affair Of The Heart’, ‘Confidence Trick’, ‘The Wheel’, ‘Look Natural, Please!’, ‘Perforce To Dream’, ‘Reservation Deferred’, ‘Heaven Scent’, and ‘More Spinned Against’ ISBN 0-234-77645-5


THE CHRYSALIDS Originally serialised in ‘Argosy’ magazine September-October 1955. (Michael Joseph, 1955, hardback), with cover art by Spencer Wilson. Also in ‘The John Wyndham Omnibus’, 1964. US title ‘Re-Birth’, Ballantine, 1965. Penguin Paperback no.1308 (1958). Radio Play adaptation by Barbara Clegg (1982). Stage Play adaptation by David Harrower (1999)

Wild Flower” (in ‘Fantastic Universe’, November 1955) collected into ‘The Seeds Of Time’

THE SEEDS OF TIME short story collection (Michael Joseph, 1956, hardback. Penguin Paperback no.1385, 1959) includes ‘Chronoclasm’, ‘Time To Rest’, ‘Meteor’, ‘Survival’, ‘Pawley’s Peepholes’, ‘Opposite Number’, ‘Pillar To Post’, ‘Dumb Martian’, ‘Compassion Circuit’ and ‘Wild Flower’

TALES OF GOOSEFLESH AND LAUGHTER short story collection. Ballantine, US, 1956. Combines eleven stories from ‘Jizzle’ and ‘The Seeds Of Time’

SOMETIME, NEVER ‘Three Tales Of Imagination’ by John Wyndham (‘Consider Her Ways’), William Golding (‘Envoy Extraordinary’) and Mervyn Peake (first publication of Titus Groan story ‘Boy In Darkness’) (Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1956. US Ballantine Books 215, 1957)

THE MIDWICH CUCKOOS (Michael Joseph, 1957. Penguin Paperback no.1440, 1960) And as ‘The Village Of The Damned’ for US Ballantine, 1960. Filmed at ‘Village Of The Damned’ (MGM, 1960) with George Sanders, Barbara Shelley, Michael Gwynn and John Phillips. With sequel ‘Children Of The Damned (1964) with Ian Hendry and Barbara Ferris.

For All The Night (aka ‘The Space Station AD 1994’)” (‘New Worlds no.70’, April 1958) by John Wyndham, a ‘Troons’ story collected into ‘The Outward Urge’

Idiot’s Delight (aka ‘The Moon: AD 2044)” (‘New Worlds no.72’, June 1958) as by John Wyndham and Lucas Parkes, a ‘Troons’ story reprinted in ‘Moonrise: The Golden Age Of Lunar Adventure’ edited Mike Ashley 2018, collected into ‘The Outward Urge’

The Thin Gnat-Voices (aka ‘Mars AD 2094’)” (‘New Worlds no.73’, July 1958) as by John Wyndham and Lucas Parkes, a ‘Troons’ story reprinted in ‘Fantastic Vol.8 no.1’ (January 1959), collected into ‘The Outward Urge’

Space Is A Province Of Brazil (aka ‘Venus AD 2144’)” (‘New Worlds no.75, September 1958) as by John Wyndham, a ‘Troons’ story collected into ‘The Outward Urge’

THE OUTWARD URGE (Michael Joseph, 1959, hardback. Science Fiction Book Club, 1961. Penguin Paperback no.1544, 1962) Billed as ‘with Lucas Parkes’ as technical collaborator, in reality another pseudonym. Chapter 1 (‘The Space-Station: AD 1994’) and Chapter 4 (‘Venus: AD 2144)’ first published by Michael Joseph in 1959. Chapter 2: ‘The Moon: AD 2044’ Chapter 3: ‘Mars: AD 2094’. An additional Chapter 5 (‘The Emptiness Of Space: The Asteroids AD 2194’) added for the Science Fiction Book Club edition in 1961.

TROUBLE WITH LICHEN(Michael Joseph, 1960, hardback. Science Fiction Book Club, 1962. Penguin, 1963)

The Emptiness Of Space (aka ‘The Asteroids 2194)” specially written for the 100th issue of ‘New Worlds’ (November 1960), then gathered into ‘The Outward Urge’ and ‘The Best Of John Wyndham 1951-1960’

CONSIDER HER WAYS short story collection. (Michael Joseph, 1961, hardback. Penguin, 1965. Also as ‘The Infinite Moment’ for US Ballantine, 1961) Includes ‘Random Quest’, adapted as an episode for TV’s ‘Out Of The Unknown’ with Keith Barron and Arnold Ridley (11 February 1969), as a 1971 film (as ‘Quest For Love’ directed by Ralph Thomas, from a screenplay by Terence Feely) with Joan Collins, Tom Bell and Denholm Elliott, then as a November 2006 BBC4 TV-film starring Samuel West

THE JOHN WYNDHAM OMNIBUS collection (Michael Joseph, 1964) made up of ‘The Day Of The Triffids’, ‘The Kraken Wakes’ and ‘The Chrysalids’

A SENSE OF WONDER anthology containing John Wyndham (‘Exiles On Asperus’), plus Jack Williamson (‘The Moon Era’) and Murray Leinster (‘The Mole Pirates’) (Sidgwick & Jackson, 1967)

CHOCKY (Ballantine, US 1968. Michael Joseph, 1968, hardback. Penguin, 1970) adapted as a BBC radio ‘Saturday Playhouse’ by John Constable in March 1998


WANDERERS OF TIME (Hodder hardback, and Coronet Paperbacks, 1973) Collection of short stories from 1933, 1934 and 1939 as by JOHN BEYNON. With new introduction by Walter Gillings. Includes ‘Wanderers Of Time’, ‘Derelict Of Space’, ‘Child Of Power’, ‘The Last Lunarians’ and ‘The Puff-Ball Menace’ ISBN 17306-8


SLEEPERS OF MARS (Hodder hardback, and Coronet Paperbacks, 1973) Collection of short stories from 1931, 1933, 1934 and 1938 as by JOHN BEYNON. With new introduction by Walter Gillings. Includes ‘Sleepers Of Mars’, ‘Worlds To Barter’, ‘Invisible Monster’, ‘The Man From Earth’ and ‘The Third Vibrator’ ISBN 0-340-17326-2

THE BEST OF JOHN WYNDHAM 1930-1960 (Sidgwick & Jackson, 1973, hardback. Sphere, 1973. Re-issued as ‘The Man From Beyond’ Michael Joseph, 1975 ‘THE BEST OF JOHN WYNDHAM 1932-1949’ edited by ANGUS WELLS (Sphere Books Ltd, 1973. ISBN 0-7221-9374-4) With Introduction by Leslie Flood, and Bibliography. Includes ‘The Lost Machine’ (‘Amazing Stories’, 1932), ‘The Man From Beyond’ (‘Wonder Stories’, 1934), ‘Perfect Creature’ (‘Tales Of Wonder’, 1937), ‘The Trojan Bean’ (‘Fantasy’, 1939), ‘Vengeance By Proxy’ (‘Strange Stories’, 1940), ‘Adaptation’ (‘Astounding Science Fiction’, 1949) + THE BEST OF JOHN WYNDHAM 1951-1960 edited by ANGUS WELLS (Sphere Books Ltd, 1973. ISBN 0-7221-9374-2) with ‘Pawley’s Peepholes’, ‘The Red Stuff’, ‘And The Walls Came Tumbling Down’, ‘Dumb Martian’, ‘Close Behind Him’ and ‘The Emptiness Of Space’

EXILES ON ASPERUS (Coronet Paperbacks, 1979) Collection of short stories from 1932 (‘The Venus Adventure’ from ‘Wonder Stories’), 1933 (‘Exiles On Asperus’ from Gernsback Publications) and 1951 (‘No Place Like Earth’ from ‘New Worlds’) as by JOHN BEYNON

WEB (Michael Joseph, 1979. Penguin Books, 1980 ISBN 0-1400-5338-7)