February 2026: John Wyndham

And in the shortest month of the year, we will visit the always inventive John Wyndham (10 July 1903 – 11 March 1969).

His most popular novels are The Day of the Triffids and The Midwich Cuckoos although some fans may disagree on which are his best novels. He also wrote a lot of stories

What do you plan to read?

I am fond of The trouble with lichen but maybe have read it enough times. Somewhere I have an early work whose title I forget, about a tribe living under the Sahara.

>2 sarahemmm: The Secret People, I think.

Just found this group - what a great idea!
I haven't read The Crysalids for ages or Trouble With Lichen at all and my library has both. So it will be one of these.

I'm looking at either reading The Chrysalids or The Midwich Cuckoos.

I have The Kraken Wakes on my TBR which is why I had nominated this author originally. I am very much looking forward to this however, I tried reading Brave New World by Aldoux Huxley last month and had to put it down as our current world is already post-apocalyptic enough. Hopefully I won't have to put this one down as well.

I have read all his major works, some more than once, so I am reading one of his lesser known ones The Outward Urge.

The Outward Urge is the first John Wyndham novel I have read in over 12 years, and is not one of his better known ones. The action takes place over a period of 200 years from 1994 onwards (35 years into the future when the book was published). It concerns the race to build a space station on the Moon and move ever outwards into space, to Mars, then Venus, then the Asteroid Belt, and thence, who knows. Successive generations of one family, the Troons/Trunhos, drive this forward over 200 years from 1994-2194, pursuing and seeking to satisfy their desire to spread ever further away and explore the unknown.

The geopolitics is interesting. There is a mysterious (to the observers on the moon) Great Northern War in 2044 where the US, Europe and Russia are all wiped out, but it isn't clear who started it and what the circumstances are. The geopolitical centre of Earth moves southwards to Brazil and Australia, and outer space becomes a "province of Brazil". Members of the Troon family suffer fatal misfortunes, including being blown up trying to stop a missile, dying on the surface of Mars, and as a victim of conflicts between the new superpowers following the first expedition to Venus.

Incidentally, Venus as depicted here is the pre-1960s version with watery oceans and rain, plant and insect life, before in our world the early probes discovered it had a surface temperature of nearly 500 degrees C and an air pressure 90 times that of Earth. In line with a lot of science fiction, the story says more about the Earth of the time it was written (1950s) rather than the future times it portrays, with no women in prominent positions (there is only one, minor, female character in the story), everyone smoking, and computers still using punch cards to process data. Overall though quite an enjoyable read but nowhere near as impactful as Wyndham's more famous works.

Okay, I started The Kraken Wakes last night and immediately was hooked. Wyndham's writing and pacing is just too good. I could only read the first 30 pages or before going to sleep last night but I was very tempted to keep reading and I can't wait to get back to the story.

>9 lilisin: I listened to a German radioplay adapted from this novel during the holidays, and I was impressed with the story.
I am finding it very difficult to lay my hands on his novels in English here in Germany, and I don’t really want to buy online. Don’t know yet if I can participate this month.

>12 MissWatson: I had a look on archive.org in the hope they would have some John Wyndham you could access for free. They don't seem to have his books but there are a few radio plays of his books, including The Kraken Wakes and The Midwich Cuckoos.

>13 JayneCM: Thanks for the info, I checked the usual sites, but he’s not ion the public domain yet. Maybe I’ll get around to the audios.

While everyone is having fun reading Wyndham, would you please also come over and vote for our April-June authors: https://www.librarything.com/topic/378513

I read Trouble With Lichen. It was interesting but somewhat repetitive.