John Wyndham

For other people named John Wyndham, see John Wyndham (disambiguation).

John Wyndham
Born	10 July 1903(1903-07-10) Knowle, Warwickshire, England
Died	11 March 1969(1969-03-11) (aged 65)
Nationality	English
Other names	John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris
Occupation	Science fiction writer

John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris (10 July 1903 – 11 March 1969) was an English science fiction writer who usually used the pen name John Wyndham, although he also used other combinations of his names, such as John Beynon and Lucas Parkes. Many of his works were set in post-apocalyptic landscapes.

Biography

Early life

Wyndham was born in the village of Knowle in Warwickshire, England, the son of George Beynon Harris, a barrister, and Gertrude Parkes, the daughter of a Birmingham ironmaster.

His early childhood was spent in Edgbaston in Birmingham, but when he was eight years old his parents separated and he and his brother, the writer Vivian Beynon Harris, spent the rest of their childhood at a number of English preparatory and boarding schools, including Blundell's School in Devon during the First World War. His longest and final stay was at Bedales School in Hampshire (1918–1921) which he left at the age of 18, where he blossomed and was happy.

After leaving school, Wyndham tried several careers including farming, law, commercial art and advertising, but mostly relied on an allowance from his family. He eventually turned to writing for money in 1925, and by 1931 was selling short stories and serial fiction to American science fiction pulp magazines, most under the pen names of 'John Beynon' or 'John Beynon Harris', although he also wrote some detective stories.

World War II

During the Second World War Wyndham first served as a censor in the Ministry of Information, then joined the army, serving as a Corporal cipher operator in the Royal Corps of Signals. He participated in the Normandy landings, although was not involved in the first days of the landings.

Postwar

After the war Wyndham returned to writing, inspired by the success of his brother who had had four novels published. He altered his writing style and by 1951, using the John Wyndham pen name for the first time, wrote the novel The Day of the Triffids. His prewar writing career was not mentioned in the book's publicity, and people were allowed to assume that it was a first novel from a previously unknown writer.

The book proved to be an enormous success and established Wyndham as an important exponent of science fiction. He went on to write and publish six more novels under the name John Wyndham, all of which appeared in his lifetime. In 1963 he married Grace Wilson, whom he had known for more than 20 years; the couple remained married until he died. He moved out of the Penn Club in London, and lived near Petersfield, Hampshire, just outside the grounds of Bedales School.

He died aged 65 at his home in Petersfield, survived by his wife and brother. Subsequently, some of his unsold work was published and his earlier work re-published.

Bibliography

Early novels published under other pen names

• Foul Play Suspected (1935) (as John Beynon)
• The Secret People (1935) (as John Beynon)
• Planet Plane (1936) (as John Beynon; also known as The Space Machine and Stowaway to Mars)

Novels published in his lifetime as by John Wyndham

• The Day of the Triffids (1951) (also known as Revolt of the Triffids)
• The Kraken Wakes (1953) (published in the US as Out of the Deep)
• The Chrysalids (1955) (published in the US as Re-Birth)
• The Midwich Cuckoos (1957) (filmed twice as Village of the Damned)
• The Outward Urge (1959)
• Trouble with Lichen (1960)
• Chocky (1968)

Posthumous novels

• Web (1979)
• Plan for Chaos (2009)

Short story collections

• Jizzle (1954)
• The Seeds of Time (1956)
• Tales of Gooseflesh and Laughter (1956) (features stories from the two earlier collections)
• Consider Her Ways and Others (1961)
• The Infinite Moment (1961) (US edition of Consider Her Ways, with two stories dropped, two others added)

Posthumous collections

• Sleepers of Mars (1973) a collection of five stories originally published in magazines in the 1930s: Sleepers of Mars, Worlds to Barter, Invisible Monster, The Man from Earth & The Third Vibrator.
• The Best of John Wyndham (1973)
• Wanderers of Time (1973) a collection of five stories originally published in magazines in the 1930s: Wanderers of Time, Derelict of Space, Child of Power, The Last Lunarians & The Puff-ball Menace (a.k.a. Spheres of Hell).
• Exiles on Asperus (1979)
• No Place like Earth (2003)

Biography and criticism

• "John Wyndham: No Place Like Earth", programme on BBC Radio 4, 11.30 am, 12 November 2010

The first four of the novels published in his lifetime as by John Wyndham are widely regarded as the peak of his achievement. The Day of the Triffids remains his best known, but some of his readers consider that The Chrysalids was really his best.

He also penned several short stories, ranging from hard science fiction to whimsical fantasy. Of these, Consider Her Ways and Random Quest have both been filmed.

Style

Most of Wyndham's novels have a contemporary 1950s English 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) 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 is more concerned with character development than many science fiction writers. Wyndham's science fiction may be considered trendsetting in its insistence that interplanetary catastrophes do not just happen to "other people" (e.g. those best-equipped to face them) and would in fact be extremely difficult for our delicate and highly interconnected civilisation to deal with.

Similarly ahead of its time is the emphasis that Wyndham put on disruptions to the biosphere as a whole, as when the aliens in The Kraken Wakes begin to engineer our planet for their own purposes without asking us first. 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, usually middle-class characters that he employs 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 fantasy". In Triffids, Kraken, and Midwich Cuckoos, the characters and settings are all very reasonable, sensible, and in some sense, properly English. This is the theme at the heart of these works: take the "sensible" and rational society we have now, and introduce one (or in the case of Triffids, two) extraordinary factors. The works then take a very analytical approach to our reactions to these situations. The results are always grim, as we rational beings, most notably in Kraken, at every step attempt to rationalise 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.

External links

• The John Wyndham Archive at the University of Liverpool
• Guardian article on John Wyndham
• "Portrait of Wyndham and Wells" by Christopher Priest
• "Vivisection": Schoolboy "John Wyndham's" First Publication?
• Archive BBC TV interview of John Wyndham in 1960 Requires Realplayer
• John Wyndham at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
• John Wyndham bibliography of first editions