I've read a lot of Wyndham now, and his books seem to be of a sort - semi-serious examinations of difficult philosophical or societal problems with a tongue set firmly in cheek. I prefer his 'The Day of The Triffids' which I felt was just serious enough; this is more like 'The Chrysalids' which is sad, dramatic and also occasionally 'funny' (the humour doesn't always age well).

You could say that 'Trouble With Lichen' is also one of Wyndham's more experimental pieces, as he starts the book with something of a retrospective of the main character, looking back almost from the end. Such a stylised form is unlike his other writing, and doesn't entirely work. However, once the story of a scientist's discovery of an anti-aging lichen gets underway, it is pretty interesting and offers a lot to think about. ( )

The lichen in this piece is a rare plant. It has the amazingly quality of being useful in retarding the aging process in humans.
The discoverers of this decide to keep it quiet, to prevent an uproar, but inevitably, the secret gets out. Particularly when one use it was put to was basically in a beauty salon!
Definitely Wyndham's weakest effort.

http://notfreesf.blogspot.com/2006/12... ( )

I whizzed through this book in a day.

Other reviewers have mentioned that it is irrelevant to today but I disagree. Management of desire to commercial or political ends is still very much in fashion - look at the annual Christmas must-have toy. Management of scarce natural resources in terms of both fulfilling short term desires and longer term as a result of our aging and growing population is still a somewhat important topic - look at pensions, look at the work needing to be done to improve crop yeilds. And the correct way of dealing with medical and scientific advances - look at badscience.net and tell me that's not still an important issue.

So, relevant and thoroughly enjoyable! ( )

Extremely dated. It reminds me a lot of books about robots from the 30's, where the robots have no trouble understanding what's said to them, BUT... CAN... ONLY... TALK... VERY... SLOWLY... AND... PAINFULLY. The problems people thought were difficult then turned out not to be problems at all, and the real problems were things that people didn't even realize were problems. This book is exactly that, on two different levels.

First is the aging problem. The premise of the book is that a scientific version of the Fountain of Youth is discovered. We know now that many deaths that used to be put down to old age are the result of cancers, blockages, or other individual causes that can be isolated and cured, or at least retarded, and that this is bringing us closer to the fountain of youth all the time. So the premise that a new drug can simply retard the aging problem doesn't really work any more.

But more interestingly, the reactions to the discovery are tightly related to the context of the book, written in 1960 during the height of the Cold War. The attitudes of the discoverers are an allegory of Communism; they wish, basically, to keep the benefits of the discovery for themselves, assuming that the rest of mankind isn't quite "ready"; precisely as the leaders of Russia did at that time. Had the discoverers done the correct things, like publish their results in a peer-reviewed journal, the compound would have been determined and duplicated quickly, no doubt.

Was the allegory intentional on the part of the author, or a subconscious reaction to his times? I don't know the answer, but the much better book on the topic of longevity was written by that noted capitalist Robert Heinlein, Methuselah's Children". Read that instead. ( )

Not one of Wyndham's better known works, but this is a little gem, with some interesting things to say about scientific discoveries, their popularisation in the media and people's desire for medical "miracles" that turn out to have a darker side. The antagonism between the men and women's positions on the "miracle" seems simplistic and unconvincing at least in modern terms, but probably acceptable to an original reader at the end of the 1950s. Well worth reading. ( )