John Wyndham is the pen name of John Wyndham Parkes Lucas
Beynon Harris (1903–1969), the son of an English barrister. The
boy’s parents separated when he was eight, and after attending
various boarding schools, he lived off family money while trying
his hand—unsuccessfully—at careers such as law, commercial
illustration, and advertising. In 1924 he turned to writing, and
within a number of years he was selling short stories, mostly
science fiction, to pulp magazines in America, as John Beynon or
John Beynon Harris. During World War II, he served behind the lines
in the British army, and in 1951 he published The Day of the
Triffids, his first novel as John Wyndham, to tremendous success.
Wyndham’s six other novels include The Kraken Wakes and The Midwich
Cuckoos, and The Chrysalids (published as an NYRB Classic).
Margaret Atwood is the author of more than forty books of
fiction, poetry, and critical essays, including the 2000 Booker
Prize–winning The Blind Assassin; Alias Grace, which won the Giller
Prize and the Premio Mondello; The Robber Bride, Cat’s Eye, The
Handmaid’s Tale, and The Penelopiad. Her latest work is a book of
short stories called Stone Mattress: Nine Tales (2014). Her
newest novel, MaddAddam (2013) is the third in a trilogy
comprising The Year of the Flood (2009) and the Giller and Booker
Prize–nominated Oryx and Crake (2003). Atwood lives in Toronto with
the writer Graeme Gibson.
“Wyndham singlehandedly invented a whole pile of sub-genres of SF.
It’s as if . . . in the 1950s he was plugged in to the world’s
subconscious fears and articulated them one by one in short,
amazingly readable novels.”
—Jo Walton, Tor.com
“What John Wyndham does so brilliantly is invest quiet suburban
streets with menace. The idea of an alien intelligence inhabiting a
child is always frightening. But here Wyndham turns a story of
‘possession’ into a touching fable about our profligate use of the
planet.”
—The Telegraph
“Wyndham described the odd rather than the fantastic, the
disturbing rather than the horrific, the remarkable rather than the
outrageous.”
—Christopher Priest
“Remains fresh and disturbing in an entirely unexpected way.”
—The Guardian
Praise for The Chrysalids (NYRB Classics)
“One of the most thoughtful post-apocalypse novels ever written.
Wyndham was a true English visionary, a William Blake with a
science doctorate.”
—David Mitchell
“Sometimes you just need a bit of soft-core sci-fi, and Wyndham’s
1950’s classic, newly back in print, fully delivers.”
—Thicket Magazine
“It is quite simply a page-turner, maintaining suspense to the very
end and vividly conjuring the circumstances of a crippled and
menacing world, and of the fear and sense of betrayal that pervade
it. The ending, a salvation of an extremely dubious sort, leaves
the reader pondering how truly ephemeral our version of
civilization is.”
—The Boston Globe
“[Wyndham] was responsible for a series of eerily terrifying tales
of destroyed civilisations; created several of the twentieth
century’s most imaginative monsters; and wrote a handful of novels
that are rightly regarded as modern classics.”
—The Observer
“Science fiction always tells you more about the present than the
future. John Wyndham’s classroom favourite might be set in some
desolate landscape still to come, but it is rooted in the concerns
of the mid-1950s. Published in 1955, it’s a novel driven by the
twin anxieties of the cold war and the atomic bomb...Fifty years
on, when our enemy has changed and our fear of nuclear catastrophe
has subsided, his analysis of our tribal instinct is as pertinent
as ever.”
—The Guardian
“[A]bsolutely and completely brilliant...The Chrysalids is a
top-notch piece of sci-fi that should be enjoyed for generations
yet to come.”
—Ottawa Citizen
“The Chrysalids is a famous example of 1950s Cold War science
fiction, but its portrait of a community driven to authoritarian
madness by its overwhelming fear of difference—in this case, of
genetic mutations in the aftermath of nuclear war—finds its echoes
in every society.”
—The Scotsman
“The Chrysalids comes heart-wrenchingly close to being John
Wyndham’s most powerful and profound work.”
—SFReview.net
“Re-Birth (The Chrysalids) was one of the first science fiction
novels I read as a youth, and several times tempted me to take a
piggy census. Returning to it now, more than 30 years later, I find
that I remember vast parts of it with perfect clarity...a book to
kindle the joy of reading science fiction.”
—SciFi.com
“A remarkably tender story of a post-nuclear childhood...It has, of
course, always seemed a classic to most of its three generations of
readers...It has become part of a canon of good books.”
—The Guardian
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