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About the 1957 novel... |
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| An admirer of HG Wells, British author John Wyndham (born John Benyon Harris in 1903 in Warwickshire) published his first science fiction tale in the English magazine "Wonder Stories" in 1931. In his devotion to weird fiction, the writer generally explored the predicaments of humans struggling to recover from a catastrophic situation, and explanations of the extraordinary circumstances, logical or otherwise, were simply omitted. A prolific short story writer, Wyndham published dozens of tales, under various pseudonyms, over a two-decade period (1931-51) in such magazines as "Wonder Stories," "Amazing Stories," "Marvel Tales," "Passing Show" and "Colliers." His first novel (also his most successful), The Day of the Triffids (1951), first appeared in short story form as The Revolt of the Triffids in "Colliers." His subsequent books, including The KrakenWakes, The Trouble with Lichen, The Midwich Cuckoos, The Outward Urge and The Chrysalids, all written in the 1950s, placed him among the best writers of modern science fiction. Reworking his own 1955 book The Chrysalids (AKA The Rebirth) - a postwar Darwinian fable sympathetically depicting a race of mutants struggling for survival in a society that ostracizes and destroys any creature different or misunderstood - Wyndham penned The Midwich Cuckoos two years later. In what literary critics called "an ingenious yarn... only slightly short of being a science fiction masterpiece," the author directed the reader's pity away from an outcast civilization (in this case, the alien children) to the plight of humanity. Intrigued by the unusual behavior of the migratory cuckoo bird, which lays its eggs in the nest of other birds then tricks the hens of these ornithological species into raising and nourishing their young, Wyndham incorporated this fact of nature into a story of how humanity faces a threat to its evolutionary supremacy when a superior alien race implants its own young in the wombs of human women. The book's provocative themes include xenogenesis (impregnation through an external source) and parthenogenesis (development of a fetus without fertilization) and the social, cultural and emotional pressures on women to accept the role of mother to children who are not their own (with subtle references to the controversies of abortion and bastard children). Wyndham also explored such issues as the attitudes of humans toward those who are different, the Darwinian conflict between survival of our own species versus an alien culture, and how parents morally confront their personal mortality when threatened by their own children. |
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