Wyndham and Kneale

One mystery that is not solved is what happened to all his writings prior to The Day of the Triffids

Is the archive at University of Liverpool incomplete then? They suggest they have:

The archive consists of a virtually complete collection of manuscripts and typescripts (including unpublished works) and letters

Pardon my confusion, but are you saying that you feel the female characters in The Midwich Cuckoo are not proto-feminist or are you merely pointing out that the main character was a guy? Either case could be true.

In any event, Wyndham was truly a very fine writer and I’m glad you’ve used the site to mention him.

It was a very pleasant surprise to find that The Day of the Triffids is still in print.

“Youtube is where BBC 4 documentaries go to live”

Bang on. I became a fan of John Wyndham’s novels when a lad back in the 1950s but it would be missing an opportunity here and now to overlook other great recent BBC2 documentary series on Youtube.

Try, for example, this enlightening three-part documentary, written and produced by Adam Curtis, about the war on terror under the title: The power of nightmares. Part 1 is at:
http://www.oneplanetonenation.com/ponightmares1.html

The ideological roots of the war on terror are traced back there to Sayeed Kotb, whom some regard as the ultimate ancestor of modern Jihadism, and to Leo Strauss, at the University of Chicago, whom some regard as the ultimate ancestor of what became Neoconservatism.

Another fascinating (and worrying) documentary series produced and written by Adam Curtis is: The century of the self. Part1 is here:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8953172273825999151&q=The+Century+of+the+Self&hl=en

That starts with Freud and goes on to explore the pervasive influence of Edward Bernays, a nephew of Freud who is usually credited with being the founder of the “public relations” profession.

Katherine — you’re right on both counts, and the recent BBC radio dramatisation picks up very well on the lesbian couple. So, I should not have excluded that novel from the general point.

Bob b, you should probably include The Trap, another Adam Curtis documentary series which pulls together some strands from both the other series and explores some other areas as well: game theory and its (ab)use in economic theories, targets in government and how they ended up being counterproductive, psychology and how a model was developed of the ‘correct’ amount of happiness/sadness/boredom/excitment was defined via computer analysis (which made people behave more like the machines assumed by game theory), the effects of using these models then to try to reform Russia overnight, etc.

While no doubt everyone will question some of his work, conclusion and putative causal links, he always pulls up a lot of interesting material to consider at the least.

The Trap made me reconsider my love for Yes, Minister. Considering how deep and fervent my love for Yes, Minister is, that’s saying something.

Go ahead and write it Noel! I read avidly John Wyndham’s books in my early teens and think that Day of the Triffids is ripe for a remake – much more so than Planet of the Apes or King Kong.

I’m also an admirer of Philip K Dick, whose career read uncannily like Vonnegut’s Kilgore Trout.

Probably it was “Journey into Space” that I heard on BBC radio.

Wyndham a proto-feminist?!! In the two novels I read, a pathetic weak girl is looked after by a sensible middle-aged academic chap! Not only are they plainly just rewrites of his own dodgy fantasies, but there isn’t a feminist line in them (unless a man writing a science fiction novel with a girl in it was considered feminist at that time). Whatever next? Dr. Who as model of post-feminist gender relations?

Stendhal of course, and the lyrics are from “Crown of Creation”, for the few readers who aren’t Airplane fans.

Anyone here with credible explanations for the perennial – and verging on universal – appeal of Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids (1951)?

Of course, there are the envisaged “unintended” and horrifying consequences of prescient unexpected scientific advances and technological break-throughs, all originally motivated for what seemed to be compelling but well-intended reasons. But Wyndham’s narrative also fits in the genre of dystopian fiction – like William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954) – which explore what reversion to a Hobbesian state of nature could entail.

In that, Wyndham implicitly (and plausibly IMO) rejected Rousseau’s benign notion of the noble savage unconstrained by the imperatives and institutions of civil society. For Wyndham, as for Hobbes, life in a state of nature is nasty, brutish and short. His many readers appear to endorse the credibility of that vision. The paradox, perhaps, is that Wyndham nevertheless continues to embody “liberal” values in his leading characters despite pressures for authoritarian solutions to social dislocations.

Chris, OK I’ll settle for your interpretation of Wyndham but then the observed facts hardly support Rousseau’s vision of what state of nature would prevail among humans without previous experience of the institutions of civil society.

Consider these redent hostile displays in aerial pictures of an isolated tribe in Brazil:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_pictures/7426869.stm

And this report in today’s news:

“Neolithic age men fought over women too, according to a study that provides the most ancient evidence of the lengths men will go to in the hunt for partners. . . ”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?view=DETAILS&grid=&xml=/earth/2008/06/03/scimen103.xml

For all that, Wyndham clearly took a dystopian view of how most humans would behave absent currently prevailing contraints of civil society. And his popular appeal suggests that his interpretation resonates with many readers..

Bob, my point is not to defend Rousseau here, but to say that your observation re Wyndham doesn’t support to point about Rousseau you made. As it happens, the links in your latest comment wouldn’t bother Rousseau either. As he writes in the Discourse on Inequality:

_As soon as men began to value one another, and the idea of consideration had got a footing in the mind, every one put in his claim to it, and it became impossible to refuse it to any with impunity. Hence arose the first obligations of civility even among savages; and every intended injury became an affront; because, besides the hurt which might result from it, the party injured was certain to find in it a contempt for his person, which was often more insupportable than the hurt itself. Thus, as every man punished the contempt shown him by others, in proportion to his opinion of himself, revenge became terrible, and men bloody and cruel. This is precisely the state reached by most of the savage nations known to us…._

(This immediately after a passage about the emergence of sexual jealousy etc.)

jayann – I know the story, and it strikes me much more as a(nother) exploration of the nightmare of advanced technology given our inability to control it. In The Chrysalids, men (in a vividly patriarchal society) are to blame for the vicious culture that ensues after some sort of nuclear holocaust. So I don’t think that there’s any sort of anti-feminist side to Consider Her Ways, and, in fact, it is interesting to have a middle aged man in the 1950s imagining an all-female society. The documentary attributes his attitude to women to the schooling he had at Bedales, a famously progressive co-educational school in which girls and boys got the same education. It also talks about his keen awareness of the way that social norms and practices restrict women’s career prospects (made very vivid in The Trouble with Lichen, which is my second favourite, actually, after Chocky). In Chocky, although the focus is on a boy and his father (and his mother is very perturbed), the advanced being who communicates with the boy (Chocky) is clearly authoritative in her own community, and is female.

Consider these redent hostile displays in aerial pictures of an isolated tribe in Brazil:

The helicopter demon was not welcome, apparently. They don’t need to be sadists to react defensively to a noisy thing in the sky.

If I were an alien and buzzed New York in my Whatever Ship, I should expect to be shot down, or at least shot at.
.

Say what you will, the ’60s movie of Day of the Triffids with Howard Keel, a savaging of Wyndham’s plot, and a contrived and silly ending (“Salt water dissolves them!”) was just awful.
The BBC 1981 version was much more faithful to the original.

“The helicopter demon was not welcome, apparently. They don’t need to be sadists to react defensively to a noisy thing in the sky.”

As reported, the intrusion was by a light aircraft but you probably have a point.

Evidently, the indigenous uncontacted natives in Brazil tend to assume that alien invaders necessarily have hostile intent but then we tend to assume UFOs or aliens from outer space are probably malevolent or have colonising intentions.

However, Chris here is probably correct too. If the indigenous natives of Brazil were by some chance aware of distant rumours about the fate of the native indians of north America, their reactions become entirely intelligible and rational.

As reported, the intrusion was by a light aircraft but you probably have a point.

I stand corrected.
.

Harry, I think that Wyndham probably was trying to represent in “Consider Her Ways” the idea that men are savage and women civilised/civilising. This is hardly feminist. This view is very clear in “Kraken Wakes” where – Wyndham – ah, I mean, his gentle middle-class middle-aged male protagonist regularly has to teach his younger female sidekick about the “harsh realities” of life because, you know, she’s a weak woman and all that.

I really didn’t get a sense of anything except polite condescension in all his novels – towards women and the “lower orders” (same diff I suppose), i.e. anyone not like Wyndham.

The helicopter demon was not welcome, apparently. They don’t need to be sadists to react defensively to a noisy thing in the sky.

If I were an alien and buzzed New York in my Whatever Ship, I should expect to be shot down, or at least shot at.

This is precisely a point made in The Kraken Wakes about the Lovecraftian sea-aliens’ likely reactions to our exploration of the deep.

WRT “Wyndham: proto-feminist or chauvinist pig?”, it’s a long time since I read TKW, but I seem to recall there are quite a few occasions when Phyllis shows out as considerably smarter than wossisname.

Did anybody else find the sentiments expressed by the “good guys” at the end of The Chrysalids as creepy as I did? All that, “never mind we let those people suffocate, we’re a superior species” stuff?

I’m not suggesting those are Wyndham’s sentiments, mind. He was probably just depicting his characters in a solidly unsentimental way. “Why, yes, they’re technologically advanced psychics – and, also, Nazis.”

From New Zealand, if memory serves.

Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids (1951) set off something of a subsequent fashion in English writing for what has been termed post-apocalyptic science fiction. Death of Grass, by John Christopher, in the same genre, followed shortly in 1956:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_Grass

There have been many since. Plant of the Apes (1963), by Pierre Boule, was another in the succession although it’s certainly arguable that credit for starting – or reviving – the genre really belongs to Albert Camus: La Peste (The Plague), published in 1947.

The development of the genre is manifest testimony to its popular appeal but what motivates this extensive appetite for reading about the consequences of catastrophe?

The Trouble With Lichen is premised on the idea that only women would want to stay young forever, isn’t it? – ie, be obsessed with beauty. Doesn’t sound very feminist to me.

I’ve never read Wyndham–I’ve just enjoyed all the fine adaptations of his work, including Village of the Damned (from The Midwich Cuckoos) and a lovely British TV adaptation of Chocky. I want to read him, I just never get around to it. I’ve read Olaf Stapledon, though–now there’s a British SF writer whose work NEVER gets adapted to film or TV.

Kneale is one of my heroes, and someone who could write his own teleplays, with consummate skill. He didn’t like being called a science fiction writer–he had this idea that meant space opera, and scantily clad girls wearing space helmets, being menaced by bug-eyed monsters. He was really writing rationalized ghost stories, influenced by the likes of M.R. James. He didn’t fit into any of the convenient little cubbyholes.

Yes, Doctor Who ripped him off, but acceptably. The real culprits were Yanks like Chris (The X-Files) Carter, who stole from him constantly, without so much as a doff of the cap, figuring nobody would notice. Compare the scene from “X-Files: Fight the Future” where Mulder and Scully find the cornfield with a bee-filled dome in it to the scene in “Quatermass 2” where they find the alien dome. It didn’t begin or end there.

John Carpenter actually tried to acknowledge his debt to Kneale when he credited his screenplay for “Prince of Darkness” to a Martin Quatermass. Kneale reportedly did not appreciate the joke. He didn’t like horror movies any more than he liked science fiction. And he was never compatible with Hollywood’s way of doing things.

His post-Quatermass work wasn’t always as good, but sometimes it was better. And he was uncanny at predicting trends–his “The Year of the Sex Olympics” basically predicts the rise of the reality gameshow. Also mass idiocy, but I guess that didn’t require much of a prophet.

Tis also interesting to note this amazing outpouring of enduring British fantasy/SF?metaphorical writing during the 1940s. Just a short list would include ‘The Gormenghast Trilogy’, ‘Lord of the Rings’, CS Lewis’ Ransome Trilogy and Narnia series, TH White’s ‘The Once And Future King’ and ‘1984′.

Wyndham, Kneale and co were baptised in that river.

Tis also interesting to note this amazing outpouring of enduring British fantasy/SF/metaphorical writing during the 1940s. Just a short list would include ‘The Gormenghast Trilogy’, ‘Lord of the Rings’, CS Lewis’ Ransome Trilogy and Narnia series, TH White’s ‘The Once And Future King’ and ‘1984′.

Wyndham, Kneale and co were certainly baptised in that flood tide.

I honestly thought Windham was a woman with a male pen name, like Tiptree.

Trouble With Lichen is hilarious.