John Wyndham is a difficult writer to categorise. At the height of his popularity he attracted a large mainstream readership and his novels appeared as set texts on several school curricula - a very rare achievement for a man primarily writing in what was, and remains, a largely disparaged and renegade genre like science fiction. Then again, he is far from a typical SF writer. While his most famous works include, at first glance, two post-apocalyptic novels (The Day of the Triffids and The Chrysalids), two alien invasion stories (The Kraken Wakes and The Midwich Cuckoos), one nature-goes-mad horror story (Web) and one 'first contact' novel (Chocky), these are far from typical explorations of the themes. There are virtually no spaceships, hard science or in-the-flesh aliens in the best of Wyndham's work - these things interested him far less than the impact of the unknown and unforeseen on contemporary society.

An Ideas Man

It's fair to say that Wyndham is not a great stylist or innovative writer, but this is arguably one of his strengths. He tells unfamiliar types of story in familiar ways, thus providing a kind of reassurance for the reader. Most of his books, for example, start in virtually the same way - the narrator finds himself in some arrestingly strange situation, which hopefully hooks the reader, at which point Wyndham 'pulls back' to provide some background information to allow the story to proceed.

What motivates Wyndham and drives the plots of his novels are ideas. They are at the core of his work, and his books are plotted to allow them to be explored and contemplated in the best possible way. The characters and settings are similarly chosen to serve this end. There are, as a rule, very few set-piece action sequences in a Wyndham novel, not much character development, and virtually no romance or comic relief. There is never an actual villain. In their place are usually long passages of deceptively prosaic descriptive writing and lengthy moral and ethical debates between the main characters discussing whatever situation they find themselves in.

This is by no means to say that Wyndham's books are slow, dry, or talky. He has a keen eye for detail and his depictions of the shattered or skewed worlds many of his books take place in are utterly convincing. Furthermore, one of his favoured methods of elucidating his ideas is to present them by way of a practical, desperately urgent moral dilemma faced by the narrator and his companions. In The Day of the Triffids, Wyndham's narrator Masen spends several chapters torn between leaving the doomed population of London to their fate, thus giving himself the best chance of surviving the post-apocalypse, or staying to offer them what little ultimately-futile help he can. In The Midwich Cuckoos, the future of humanity is threatened by the alien Children of Midwich. Only the utter extermination of the Children can save human civilisation - but that very civilisation recoils from the idea of killing infants, no matter how dangerous they are. It is nearly always the least-socially-acceptable option that Wyndham implies to be the correct one, and this relates to the key themes of his work, covered in more detail below.

Given this, and Wyndham's interest in plot as a servant of idea, it's not surprising that one could get the impression that 'Wyndham can't do endings'. It is true to say that most of his books do not possess a climax in the accepted sense of the word and when they do resolve the story, it is more often than not in a rather peremptory fashion - The Kraken Wakes' ending, in particular, is an outrageous deus ex machina contrived inside the last four pages. Rather than being due to any lack of writing skill on the author's part, this is surely more a case of, having developed and explained his concepts to his satisfaction, Wyndham simply concluding his plot by the simplest method available. In any case, several of his novels have conclusions as memorable as anything else in science fiction.

Common Techniques and Narrative Elements

Wyndham employs a number of devices throughout his work - not quite stock characters and events, but certainly they appear frequently enough to be considered hallmarks of his writing.

Foremost amongst the Wyndham staples is his use of a narrator. All of his most famous novels, with the exception of Trouble With Lichen, employ a single first-person narrator, and all these characters have a lot in common. They tend to be decent, well-educated, middle-class everymen. If they do have special skills or knowledge of some kind this is never called into use by the story. These characters are narrators rather than heroes, playing a passive, observational role for the most part and almost never intiating action except to ensure their own survival. They are a point of identification for the reader and usually a mouthpiece for the reader's own instinctive reaction to events. (Wyndham is often forced into tricky sleights-of-hand in order for the narrator to be able to report on all the key events of the novel.) The narrator never begins the novel sharing Wyndham's own philosophy, although by its' conclusion experience has forced them to accept it.

The Wyndham viewpoint in most of his novels is taken by another quasi-stock character, the sage - this is usually an older, academically-inclined man of somewhat radical views. The character appears in embryonic form in The Day of the Triffids, his role split between the minor character of Vorless and Masen's companion, Coker, but appears in much more typical guise as Bocker in The Kraken Wakes. Bocker is initially ridiculed for his outlandish theories, but is eventually proven correct and by the end of the novel has saved the world and is playing a key role in its' reconstruction. This unusual concept of the sage-as-hero gets its' most satisfying articulation in the form of The Midwich Cuckoos' Gordon Zellaby, arguably the novel's central character. Once again it is only Zellaby who has the insight and determination to think the unthinkable and remove the menace to the human race. An interesting twist on this character is Camilla Cogent from Web, who combines the roles of sage and leading lady - a typically elegant economisation on Wyndham's part.

Wyndham's other characters tend to be rather less well drawn. There are a mixed bag of short-sighted military types and dogmatic religious figures scattered throughout the books, usually representing the status quo which resists the prospect of change necessary in order to survive. While not evil in and of themselves they are clearly dangerous by dint of their own inflexibility. Apart from these there are various other 'everyman' figures serving a variety of roles in the stories, but rarely memorable in their own right.

Wyndham's female characters are slightly more interesting. For the 1950s his women are unusually strong, resourceful and intelligent, often moreso than the hero. (The Kraken Wakes' Phyllis checks herself out of her sanatorium much earlier than her husband, and it is she who has the foresight to lay in supplies well before the collapse of civilisation.) Trouble with Lichen is in part an anticipation of the emancipation of women in the 1970s, although Wyndham rather shoots himself in the foot here by afflicting his otherwise-strong heroine with a schoolgirl crush on the male lead. The short story Consider Her Ways goes even further - Wyndham's theme here is the way in which patriarchal society deceives women with concepts such as love and romance and the heroines' rebuttal of this seems suspiciously half-hearted.

Certainly romance itself seems to have had very little appeal as subject matter for Wyndham. Almost all his narrators are either married at the start of the story, or remain unattached throughout. Only in Day of the Triffids does one form an attachment 'on-stage' and this is mostly implied. In any case the romance between Masen and Josella serves mainly as a plot device - Josella is only in half the novel and her absence is what drives Masen to travel across the country in the way he does. The relative unimportance of a subject central to many other types of fiction certainly reinforces Wyndham's status as a writer not interested in his characters as such.

Setting and Theme

As a rule Wyndham's best books follow the same general lines: everyday life in mid-20th century Britain is disturbed by the appearance of some wholly new, unanticipated factor. The disturbance may be shocking and catastrophic, as in The Day of the Triffids, but more frequently it appears initially as an oddity, an inexplicable phenomenon whose true significance and danger is not fully appreciated until it is too late - except by one of Wyndham's sages, who is invariably ignored by the powers that be.

The nature of the threat varies widely from book to book but if Wyndham's menaces have a common theme it is that of communal intelligence. The triffids themselves, and the spiders of Web, exhibit a 'hive mind' mentality where individuals are unintelligent, but collectively they behave in such a way as to pose a lethal and almost unstoppable threat. The Midwich Children, despite taking the form of thirty girls and twenty-eight boys, are shown to be two intelligences split across their individual corporeal forms and exhibiting chilling powers and intelligence as a result. The Chrysalids, perhaps Wyndham's best book, subverts this idea along with many of his others: here his narrator is actually part of a group-mind struggling to survive amongst normal human beings.

Wyndham uses these menaces to demonstrate how fragile humanity's domination of the world truly is. He demonstrates time and again how a simple unforeseen change in the world could destroy at a stroke our civilisation, whether that change be sudden mass blindness, an alien intelligence attacking using unanticipated methods, or an existing species evolving a new capacity for co-operative action.

Wyndham's Philosophy

It is common in some critical circles to designate Wyndham as a writer of the cosy catastrophe genre, but this is over-simplistic and misleading. Only The Day of the Triffids could properly be described as a cosy catastrophe novel, and part of the point of the novel is how very uncosy the disaster is. Rather than leaving a few unscathed survivors to rebuild the world, Masen and his companions are placed in the desperate moral bind of being surrounded by millions of blinded but otherwise intact survivors - should they try to help as many as possible in an ultimately futile gesture, or callously abandon them and pursue the best interests of the future society to come?

The moral scheme Wyndham seems to be arguing for throughout his novels is a kind of extreme pragmatic relativism, predicated on the following points:

• All our existing ethical and social structures are rooted in our current (precarious) position of dominance.
• They cease to have any value, and become an actual liability, if that position changes or comes under attack.
• In the struggle for survival between two forms of life alien to one another, only complete ruthlessness and self-interest will triumph.

As a corollary to this, Wyndham seems sure that co-existence between two such forms of life is almost impossible given that they must share a planet. The Midwich Children bear 'normal' humanity no malice, but they are fully aware that only one species can dominate and ultimately survival is more important than moral niceties.

This is a grim, Darwinian philosophy (the author himself labels it as such in Kraken), that Wyndham's characters are rarely forced to act upon (just as well, as it might alienate a large proportion of the readership). More often than not some chance event or plot device will resolve the problem for them - such as the plague in Day of the Triffids. But even so this is proof that the philosophy shapes John Wyndham's novels at a fundamental level. It may be grim, but it has a compelling ring of truth even today, and it is probably for this very reason that Wyndham's books are as relevant today as they were fifty years ago.