‘She says that people who can only talk with words have something missing. She says we ought to be sorry for them because, however old they grow, they’ll never be able to understand one another much better. They’ll have to be one-at-a-times always, never think-togethers.’

The Chrysalids is a lot more gripping than The Kraken Wakes. Something about the polyphonic nature of the Kraken text, the way it pulled in a multiplicity of sources, characters, newspaper editorials, eye-witness accounts, interviews with scientists and many other types of text in order to present a panoramic overview of a global catastrophe, made it feel diffuse and – except for the novel’s one really dramatic, standout scene (when the sea tanks release exploding tentacles which suck everything they touch back into a squelched-up ball of compacted flesh; yuk!) – overall, oddly undramatic.

Whereas The Chrysalids throws us back into the most exciting and coherent fictional form of all – the first-person adventure story, and one which turns into a breathless race against time!

Plot summary

David Strorm

The narrator is a 10-year-old boy, David Strorm. He lives in an extended family, part of an isolated rural community of some 30 farms named Waknuk. But right from the start we realise something is wrong. His parents are strictly religious but the religious precepts hung around the house says things like: ‘Watch Thou For The Mutant!’ and ‘Keep Pure The Stock of The Lord!’ and ‘Blessed Is The Norm!’ There are references to the Bible but a Bible which has been strangely altered to focus on reproductive purity and direct all God’s wrath against the genetically impure, against the deviant and the mutation, alongside the one other book which, we are told, has survived from the olden times, Nicholson’s Repentances.

We learn that, beyond the cleared and ploughed acres cultivated by David’s rural community, lie ‘the Fringe’, then ‘the Wild Country’, then ‘the Badlands, and then the feared ‘Black Lands’. Children are brought up on stories of the goblins and spooks that inhabit the Fringes, people like ‘Old Maggie’ and ‘Hairy Jack’ and their mutant family.

A post-nuclear holocaust future

For yes, we are in the future, in the fairly far future it slowly emerges, three or four hundred years after something now referred to as ‘Tribulation’ took place, and which the reader slowly comes to suspect must refer to some kind of nuclear war which has obliterated most of what we called ‘civilisation’ and left a legacy of radioactive mutation.

David refers periodically to ‘the Old People’ who lived before ‘Tribulation’ and to the few of their works which still remain, such as a grassy bank near his settlement, which curves then goes in a dead straight line into the distance – presumably either a railway embankment or maybe a motorway, but its purpose long forgotten now.

Fear of radioactive mutations

So the nuclear war hypothesis explains why David’s little farming community is surrounded by badlands which are rumoured to be occupied by mutants and half-humans, and is governed by strict rules obsessed with detecting any kind of mutations – of crops, of farm animals and, most of all, of humans. If crops breed strangely, if cows or sheep are born with two heads or five legs, then these ‘offences’ must be reported to the inspector of mutations, who will supervise the animals’ extermination and the burning of the offending fields. If human young are produced with noticeable physical defects, these are called ‘blasphemies’, ‘against the true Image of God, and hateful in the sight of God,’ mockeries of the divine form divine, and are dealt with appropriately.

We are never show what happens to blasphemer humans exactly, but there are a couple of references to burning (on pages 86 to 89, the wizened old-timer, Old Jacob, tells a horrified David about the good old days when a woman who gave birth to a blasphemy was whipped for the offence, and the baby was taken away and burnt!).

So, growing up, all David knows is that any human born with even the tiniest deviation from ‘normality’ will meet an obscure and terrifying fate. As it is, David has a recurrent nightmare of his father pinning down a deviant animal and lifting a blade high in the air ready to slash its throat.

Who decides this fate is the caste of genetic inspectors who examine crops, livestock and humans for visible signs of deviation against a list of Scheduled Deviations as set down in ‘the Purity Laws’. Every human must carry a ‘Normalcy Certificate’ declaring them ‘pure’.

Geography

Young David notices that the rate of mutations is higher after a rough winter when there have been lots of storms blowing from the south-west (page 90). Hmm. So he must be living north-east of a major radioactive zone. And about half-way through the book we learn that his community is located in what remains of ‘Labrador’ (neither David or anyone in the story knows this, but we realise this must be what used to be the easternmost province of Canada). So when the storm winds blow from the south-west they are coming from what was once America and, if they are laden with radioactivity, you don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to realise that ‘Tribulation’ must have involved the nuclear incineration of the United States.

A boy’s-eye view

All this information is revealed in bits and pieces, with nice pacing by Wyndham, through the eyes of the young narrator,  David, who is more preoccupied by many other workaday aspects of life on a rural community, helping with ploughing and sowing and reaping, with tending the livestock, and with the umpteen household chores shared in the extended family. This consists of David’s father and mother, his two sisters, Uncle Axel, as well as the kitchen girls and dairymaids, some of whom were married to the farm men, and their children, and, of course, the men themselves, so that when they gather at formal meals there are over 20 of them.

David’s harsh father

We learn early on that David’s father is a harsh devotee of the strictest interpretation of the laws about genetic purity, outdoing every other farmer in the locality for his zeal. He is always nagging and criticising David and beats him savagely, until he bleeds, at any infringements of the law. In this he is backed up by his mother, Emily, physically less strong but just as harsh and unforgiving.

So the young boy’s growing consciousness, his developing opinions about adults and their strange ways, are interspersed with the science fiction themes, so that the book would possibly make what, nowadays, is referred to as Young Adult Fiction. It conveys a good sense of the confusions of trying to make sense of the adult world.

Uncle Axel

As so often in coming-of-age stories, David escapes from his harsh parents to spend time with a far more congenial foster father figure, Uncle Axel. Axel not only listens sympathetically, as David shares with him what are, initially typical adolescent troubles and emotions, but slowly Axel opens up a different world, for in his youth Uncle Axel had been a sailor. He had travelled down the river which flows through the community to Rigo, the nearest thing to a capital city, and then on to the coast where he’d taken a job aboard one of the old-style, wind-powered sailing ships which sail up and down the coast.

In chapter 6 Axel describes the longest voyage he made in a wind-powered clipper, south along the coast of what the reader realises is the Atlantic seaboard of the USA. He describes how, the further south they went, the more the coast became festooned with weirder and weirder plants and strange things scuttling or flying which have never been seen before. Then how organic forms peter out altogether, and then there is a long stretch of rocky coast where everything inland is utterly black and sterile, where nothing grows, where in the night the land seems to be softly glowing. The Black Coast.

More importantly for the theme of the novel, Axel tells David that, if you sail far enough you reach islands whose inhabitants display florid signs of deviation (and some of them are even black!) but when the ship anchored and they crew met and talked with these communities, they discovered that many of the Deviations consider themselves to be the true images of God and all the others the deviants.

Axel was eventually injured at sea, and forced to return to the quiet rural community of his birth where he was taken in by his brother-in-law, David’s rigid father. But he brought with him these ‘subversive’ experiences and thoughts arising from them which, once David grows a little older, old enough to understand, Axel cautiously shares with the boy.

So this is why he is so sympathetic to David and all his adolescent questions, and David lets himself confide in him.

Chapter 5

Sophie The story opens as David has made friends with a girl his own age, Sophie Wender, whose parents live in a log cabin on the edge of the community. David likes going to their house, they are friendly, and loves playing with Sophie. One day he is splashing in a stream and has to spend a lot of time persuading Sophie to take off her heavy shoes to play long. Only when she does so, does he realise she has six toes instead of five. David doesn’t mind at all, he thinks it’s a trivial thing, but at that moment one of the local toughs, Alan appears, and although Sophie scampers into the bushes, he sees her wet footprint clearly outlined on a dry rock. Aha.

David goes for Alan and they roll around fighting until Sophie surprises us by whacking Alan with a rock and he falls off David, unconscious. David accompanies Sophie back to her house and, when they tell her parents she’s been seen and clearly identified as a mutant, they immediately realise they have to leave. Turns out they have an emergency bag packed, they’ve been living on this knife-edge for years. They share a last meal with David, pack up and ride away.

Now, the thing is, David can read other people’s thoughts. This has slowly leaked into the narrative beforehand, but now he uses this power to feel Sophie’s mother’s distress particularly strongly. David knows that he himself is not normal, just not in a way anyone can see.

The Wenders persuade David to spend the night at their house rather than go straight home to give them a chance to get as far away as possible. However, next morning on returning home, David realises this itself has aroused everyone’s suspicions, and he arrives to find the mutation inspector with David’s father in the front room. When questioned about the Wender girl David staunchly lies, but they know about it all from the Alan boy, and it is for lying to protect a mutant that David’s father takes him up to his room and whips him till his back is raw.

Chapter 6

That night David has a nightmare of his father raising the sacrificial knife but, instead of bringing it down on a deformed calf or lamb, bringing it down to cut Sophie’s throat.

It becomes clearer than ever that David is in telepathic contact with a number of ‘others’, led by Rosalind, a girl his own age. As in all teen fiction, all the others are themselves teenagers who are alienated from or afraid of the society of ‘norms’ which surrounds them.

Next morning the inspector calls to see him. He’s brought some sweets. He is reasonable and candid in order to find out how long David has known about Sophie (about six months) but then reverts to his religious job, telling David that the Devil sends blasphemies to tempt us. David listens respectfully but cannot believe that a sweet innocent girl like Sophie has anything to do with the Devil. In the middle of this patient dialogue, David’s father puts his head round the corner and says they’ve captured the Wenders, all three of them. The inspector leaves but a while later comes back to reassure David, who is crying in his bed, that it wasn’t his admissions which led to the family’s capture; they were caught by chance by one of the patrols which patrol the border with the Badlands. The inspector is the human face of the regime.

A few days later David confides in Uncle Axel that he’s going to run away from his repressive parents and constricting community (as so many young teenagers have wanted to). This is the passage where Uncle Axel advises him not to, then goes on to tell David about his sea voyage and the other peoples who think they are the True Image. Everyone thinks they are the True Image of God and all the others are the fakes. And what, Axel ruminates, if they are right. What if there is no True Image, just a diversity of images…

Already David had very cautiously revealed to Axel that he can share thoughts with another of his kind, Rosalind. She is the daughter of his half-uncle, Angus, with whom his father has a low-level grudge and argument. Now David leaks out the fact that there are others as well, a community of about eight young adults who can feel each other’s thought shapes. There’s eight of them now but until recently it was nine, till one just stopped communing with the group. David never knew his name but asks Uncle Axel to find out whether anything has recently happened to a young teen boy in the wider neighbourhood.

Chapter 7

A big event is when David’s mother has a baby they name Petra. There is the usual delay before anyone in the family is allowed to acknowledge the birth while they wait for the purity inspector to come and certify the baby ‘normal’.

(There is a small theme or sub-plot running through the first half of the book about the mutual dislike between the inspector who, as we’ve seen, is a humane man, and David’s father, who is rigorous, angry and impatient. This is to set us up for a big revelation later in the story.)

Eventually the purity inspector arrives and certifies Petra ‘normal’, and the whole extended household is, at last, able to acknowledge her birth. Different customs for different places.

There then follows another extended passage, which, like Sophie’s story, is designed to bring out the repressive horror and despair of living in this society obsessed with radioactive mutations. David happens to be in the room next to his mother’s bedroom when his Aunt Harriet arrives. He overhears but cannot see the ensuing dialogue.

Basically, Aunt Harriet has also given birth but her little baby has some small but evident defect (David can’t see it and neither of the women verbalise what it is, but Harriet shows it and her sister gasps in horror). And now Harriet asks her sister if they can swap babies for the purpose of the inspection i.e. Harriet will take away Emily’s certified baby, have it certified normal, then bring it back and swap it back for her own baby.

But David’s mother is outraged, scandalised at this deliberate breach of the most sacred laws. And, even more upset that Harriet is using family ties to emotionally blackmail her. She strongly refuses. At which point David’s father enters the bedroom and quickly catches onto the situation. Harriet weeps that it is the third time she has bred ‘impurely’ for her husband, Henry. He will cast her out, send her and the baby to the Badlands. David’s parents remain firm. Weeping and broken, Harriet picks up her baby. David’s father tells her to pray for her sins but Harriet replies:

‘I shall pray God to send charity into this hideous world, and sympathy for the weak, and love for the unhappy and unfortunate. I shall ask Him if it is indeed His will that a child should suffer and its soul be damned for a little blemish of the body. . . . And I shall pray Him, too, that the hearts of the self-righteous may be broken….’

Next day David hears the news that Aunt Harriet’s body has been found in the river. It is implied she has committed suicide, along with her baby, although no-one mentions the baby, as it wasn’t registered, and a mutant into the bargain. David is haunted by what he heard, and then the tragic outcome.

Chapter 8

David is still a boy. The fate of Harriet, piled onto the fate of Sophie, means he now lives in fear of his own secret but invisible mutation, his telepathy, being discovered. Next time they’re working together but alone, Uncle Axel asks him what’s wrong, so David shares what he saw of Aunt Harriet’s plea for mercy. Axel shares back that he’s discovered that a young teen, Walter, was recently killed in a farming accident at exactly the time one of David’s ‘group’ of nine telepaths suddenly went offline. So that must have been him. Phew. It’s a relief to learn it was an accident. David was anxious that the fellow telepath had been detected, captured or worse.

Axel is the book’s philosophical mouthpiece. He says what set humans apart from other animals was the quality of mind; in body man had become as advanced as he could be, what use would extra arms or legs be? It was inside, in his mind, that he evolved, eventually creating a great gulf between him and the rest of the created world. What if David and his friends are the next step in evolution, a further leap forward of the quality of mind so it can become communal and function with many times the power of one mind? What if they are not ‘mutants’ but part of God’s plan for the evolution of humanity?

David realises he and his friends better identify themselves to each other so they can better protect the group. He learns the group consists of himself, Rosalind who he’s been friends with since he was small, Michael, Katherine and Sally, Mark, Anne and Rachel. Anne is the oldest, at 13, which indicates the ages of the others.

Time passes and the group are schooled in what passes for the community’s little village schools, from part-time teachers. But because they share everything, what one learns, they all learn. It is a great struggle for each of them to appear more stupid than they are, to dumb themselves down to the levels of their families, to keep their galloping intelligence and understanding hidden from all around them.

Still our whole consideration if we were to survive must be to keep our true selves hidden; to walk, talk, and live indistinguishably from other people. We had a gift, a sense which, Michael complained bitterly, should have been a blessing, but was little better than a curse. The stupidest norm was happier; he could feel that he belonged. We did not, and because we did not, we had no positive—we were condemned to negatives, to not revealing ourselves, to not speaking when we would, to not using what we knew, to not being found out—to a life of perpetual deception, concealment, and lying. (page 86)

They manage to keep this up for the next six years. Until they realise someone new has joined their number.

Chapter 9

It’s Petra, David’s sister, and the rest of the novel is determined by the fact that Petra far outdoes all the others in her telepathic powers, has such advanced powers that she can ‘feel’ and communicate with telepaths far, far beyond their little community, who turn out, in fact, to live on the other side of the planet.

They first realise Petra’s superpower when, one day, David is happily working in a field when his head is suddenly filled with an overpowering compulsion to run down to the river. Oblivious of everyone around him, he drops his farm implements and sets off running, becoming vaguely aware on the way that the others are following suit. Turns out Petra had fallen into the river and was clutching on to a bush and emitted a huge, vast wave of distress, to which the others had no choice but obey.

David gets there about the same time as Rosalind and they rescue Petra, but get funny looks from all the other farmhands and people they ran past on the way. Rosalind insists they must have heard Petra’s screams for help but, of course, none of them did, and the normals eye the pair pretty suspiciously. Though it takes a while, this is the beginning of the end of the uneasy existence the eight telepaths have managed.

David has an encounter with ‘Old Jacob’, a grumpy old man who is angry because it looks like being a bad growing season with a high rate of mutations Pages 86 to 89). This is the conversation when Old Jacob laments for the good old days when they used to whip any woman who gave birth to a blasphemy.

Later David has another one of his regular chats with Axel, the thoughtful Ideas Man of the novel. It’s in this conversation that Axel speculates that bad mutation rates follow stormy winters with winds from the south-west i.e. that ‘something’ is blown up from the Badlands in the south-west that causes a year or two of mutations. Of course, the reader knows this is invisible radiation from devastated America.

This fact, about the wind from the south-west, provides interesting background information and gives the teenage reader a pleasant frisson of post-apocalyptic shivers; but its relevance for the plot is that Axel points out that, because the crops and livestock will suffer a wave of mutations, chances are people will be more on the alert for anything unusual and will be looking for scapegoats – giving David a meaning look. Life is about to get riskier for the telepathic friends.

Chapter 10

The next test or crisis for the group of teenage telepaths is when one of the group, Anne, announces she is getting married, to a young man named Alan, the very same bully who spotted Sophie’s six toes and reported it to the authorities leading to the arrest and unspecified fate of Sophie and her parents. The same smirking sadist.

The others are appalled. Living with a ‘normal’ would entail committing to an entire life of lies and self-control. This critical development gives rise to some eloquent descriptions of what it is to be telepathic:

Other people seem so dim, so half-perceived, compared with those whom one knows through their thought-shapes; and I don’t suppose ‘normals’, who can never share their thoughts, can understand how we are so much more a part of one another. What comprehension can they have of ‘thinking-together’ so that two minds are able to do what one could not? And we don’t have to flounder among the shortcomings of words; it is difficult for us to falsify or pretend a thought even if we want to; on the other hand, it is almost impossible for us to misunderstand one another. What, then, could there be for any of us tied closely to a half-dumb ‘normal’ who can never at best make more than a clever guess at anyone else’s feelings or thoughts? (page 92)

Anne persists in her determination and slowly cuts herself off from the group. This prompts much soul-searching, not least between David and Rosalind who finally acknowledge their feelings for each other, and the deep sense both of them have had since they can remember that they will themselves marry. Anne’s wedding goes ahead and she moves into a cottage with Alan and little is heard of them for 6 months. Then one day Alan is found dead with an arrow through his neck.

As soon as she gets the news Anne’s sister, Rachel, hastens to Anne’s cottage with her mother. There they find Anne hanging from the rafters, quite dead. The mother notices a letter on a table and hands it to Rachel to read, being herself illiterate. Rachel opens it, reads and is horrified. In her last despairing act, Anne had denounced all of the group as mutants, even little Petra. This has the shock of betrayal as under the Stasi or SS. A real frisson of shock.

Chapter 11

There’s another incident with Petra. She sends out a distress signal so blaring none of them can afford to ignore it and for the first time, all eight of the telepaths discover they have ridden horses to her rescue. For Petra was out riding a pony when it was attacked by a true mutant animal which savaged her pony while she scrambled up a tree.

But all eight of the telepaths arrive in the woods where it took place and immediately realise the danger. David and Rosalind tell the others to turn right around and disperse, but they haven’t all done so before a normal man rides in, one Jerome Skinner who none of them know. He had followed these hard-riding teenagers and is mystified and puzzled. How come he didn’t hear any screams?

He tells them it’s been a rough season and mutants are coming out of the badlands, hence the increase in patrols and watchfulness. In the group conversation that follows Michael, who has emerged as the strongest personality, the most reliable character, explains to the others that their skill is known about and is called ‘telepathy’, but the authorities don’t know whether it exists and whether it is a mutation, exactly.

Situation returns to normal but with added anxiety. David sets about trying to give Petra lessons, showing her how to control and shape her thoughts. It’s after the fourth of these that Petra reveals the presence of the others. Not the eight in the group, the ‘other others’. People whose mind thoughts she can read from very far away (page 115). This is a revelation to David and will come to dominate the rest of the narrative.

David has another of his chats with Uncle Axel. In this one Axel reveals that a) they’ve been careless and people have started asking questions about them b) he knows about Petra. More importantly, c) he declares that he is the one who shot and killed Alan. It’s because Anne told her husband everything about herself and the entire group and Alan was planning how to use this knowledge to blackmail them all. So Axel stepped in. David is shocked but the more Axel explains how the sadist Alan would have used the information to exploit them, the more he agrees.

That night the group confer with Michael taking the lead and saying they must all prepare to scarper at short notice. In particular he paints a distressing image of what they will do to little Petra if they discover she, too, is a mutant, namely sterilise her and turn her out into the Badlands.

Chapter 12

This represents the turning point of the narrative. Up till now things had been sort of ‘normal’, albeit with a growing sense of anxiety. In the early hours David is woken by urgent messages from Rosalind and Michael. ‘They’ have taken Sally and Katherine. It’s clearly a co-ordinated attack. David leaps out of bed, dresses, tells Petra to get dressed and tiptoes downstairs with her. The night before he had put some food and a bow and arrow in a sack, now he grabs it, they tiptoe downstairs, out to the stable, where they mount the black mare, Sheba, no time to saddle her, open the paddock gate and as quietly as possible pad away from the homestead.

That is the end of his peaceful life in the community, the last time he will see his parents or Axel. From now to the end of the book the narrative takes the shape of one of the oldest adventure tropes, THE CHASE. Looking back David can see lights go on in the house. ‘They’ have arrived. He pads on across fields, down along the river, over the ford, quietly past the mill. And it is here that they rendezvous with Rosalind who has come with two of her father’s horses.

Now it’s necessary to go back a bit. Earlier in the book the feud between David’s father and his half-brother, Uncle Angus, had crystallised when Angus bought two unusually big horses, giant horses. David’s father insisted they must be mutants, but was appalled when the mutant inspectors passed them as OK.

Well, it’s these horses that Rosalind has brought with her. She explains her mother helped her pack, her mother has always sort of suspected. Now here she is with the two horses which are carrying huge panniers either side of their flanks, large enough for Petra and David to climb up into, Petra to snuggle down with the sacks of provisions, David to be alert with his bow and arrow. They dispatch Sheba to find her own way back to the homestead.

They ride on south-west pausing for rest and sleep. David is jerked awake by waves of anguish nearby and wakes to discover Rosalind has shot an intruder dead with bow and arrow. They are still reeling from this, when they are all galvanised by a wave of extreme pain. Sally explains that ‘they’ve broken Katherine’, they’re torturing her. There’s mention of her feet being scalded. She has broken and confessed everything. There is an unpleasant hint that they might have sterilised her, as well, whatever that means in practice…

Michael cuts in harshly pointing out that now it is war. This is interesting over and above its presence in this book, because it crystallises what may be Wyndham’s central or most repeated theme, which is The impossibility of two intelligent species sharing the same planet. Homo sapiens cannot share livingroom with the new telepaths. The telepaths for their part have hardened into anger and vengeance.

‘I don’t understand,’ said Rosalind. ‘If we were to promise to go away and stay away—?’
‘They’re afraid of us. They want to capture you and learn more about us—that’s why there’s the large reward. It isn’t just a question of the true image—though that’s the way they’re making it appear. What they’ve seen is that we could be a real danger to them. Imagine if there were a lot more of us than there are, able to think together and plan and co-ordinate without all their machinery of words and messages: we could outwit them all the time. They find that a very unpleasant thought; so we are to be stamped out before there can be any more of us. They see it as a matter of survival—and they may be right, you know.’ (page 132)

At this point there are two developments. 1. From now to the end of the story, Michael is not suspected by ‘them’, so he has been recruited to the large posse which has been gathered to hunt down the non-human mutants. He is able to feed Rosalind and David continual updates of how the search is going. This is a handy narrative device thought up by Wyndham for keeping the reader informed on a kind of twin track, of what Rosalind and David are really doing, along with what the leaders of the posse are doing and thinking and planning. Doubles the narrative interest and hikes up the tension.

2. But the other storyline which runs parallel with the physical chase for the rest of the story, is that Petra now has a much clearer signal from ‘them’, the other ‘them’, the people who only she can hear. There follows a set passage where Michael, David and Rosalind ask her to question these others, and we discover they come from a place called Zealand which is made of two islands in the bright blue sea (page 136). Petra struggles to describe vehicles which move without being pulled by horses and objects flying in the sky.

I need to make another backtrack and explain that David has, intermittently throughout the story, referred to his own dreams of this mysterious place and its strange machines. Now he realises they were telepathic impressions of a real place.

After resting, they get moving again, heading south-west through forest towards the Badlands, but Michael radios in to tell them the posse has picked up their trail, has discovered the body of the man Rosalind shot and is closing in fast!

Chapter 13

They turn a corner and encounter a man on horseback. Both sides loose off arrows but one of Rosalind’s hits the man’s horse which rears, throws him and bolts. Our heroes gallop past the terrified man before coming to a wide stretch of agricultural land, but David can tell straight away that the oats being grown is strongly deviant. They gallop across the farmland, startling a group of farmers near their barn and outhouses and on into woods, go some way before stopping and dismounting to eat.

Here there is a further development with the others from Zealand. The message comes through loud and clear that they must do all they can to stay safe… for Petra’s sake. The voice coming through tells them that never before have they encountered someone with such strong telepathic power as Petra and she must be protected at all costs – which understandably chagrins Rosalind and David a little. The voice explains that ‘they’ are coming for them. Well, what can that possibly mean?

The girls go to sleep. Michael discusses the latest news from Katharine and Sally. They have clearly damaged their minds. It is a war. The normals are terrified and want to obliterate every trace of this power. He grimly tells David that if it looks like they are going to be captured, he must kill Rosalind and Petra, it will be far preferable to being tortured and mutilated.

Petra wakes up about now and hears part of this and David has to try and explain it carefully – that being dead is like going for a nice sleep. Petra continues to explain that she – it is a woman calling – has explained that everyone in Zealand is telepathic but some more than others. The woman calling is more powerful than most, but not as powerful as Petra who is unique.

They trot on into denser and denser forest, accompanied by bulletins about the posse which has identified the farmland they crossed only a little earlier. The chase is getting nearer. At a point where the forest is densest people suddenly drop out of the trees on top of them. They’ve been ambushed!

Chapter 14

David wakes to find himself trussed-up in the pannier of the giant horse which is clearly still plodding along. Meanwhile, Rosalind has been awake and talking to the kidnappers. They are unsure what to do with them but decide to take them to their leader. Now David has a dialogue which takes an unexpectedly philosophical turn. The dirty man leading his horse explains that the real blasphemers are the people back in his community. They are convinced they know that the True Image is and, surprise surprise, it’s how they look. They want to keep things like it was under the Old People, but they haven’t learned anything. God brought Tribulation to punish the Old People for their arrogance. God is Change, things are changing continually. Trying to stop it like the ‘normals’ in his community, that’s the real blasphemy.

‘The Old People thought they were the tops, too. Had ideals, they did; knew just how the world ought to be run. All they had to do was get it fixed up comfortable, and keep it that way; then everybody’d be fine, on account of their ideas being a lot more civilized than God’s.’

He shook his head. ‘Didn’t work out, boy. Couldn’t work out. They weren’t God’s last word like they thought: God doesn’t have any last word. If He did He’d be dead. But He isn’t dead; and He changes and grows, like everything else that’s alive. So when they were doing their best to get everything fixed and tidy on some kind of eternal lines they’d thought up for themselves, He sent along Tribulation to bust it up and remind ’em that life is change.’
(page 153)

This is all thought-provoking stuff for the book’s ideal readership which is probably thoughtful 14-year-olds.

And it is immediately followed by more thought-provoking stuff: our characters’ first real exchange with the voice from Zealand. She is now near enough to project directly into David and Rosalind’s minds and explains in more detail who she is. She explains that she comes from the New People, the people who can share minds and thoughts and think-together (page 156). They consider themselves radically different from the ‘savages’ which is how they describe all Rosalind and David’s families and communities. They are going to build a new world, better than the Old People’s. And she gives a persuasive summary of the faults of the Old People, which would be us.

‘I don’t know about that. Who does? But we do know that we can make a better world than the Old People did. They were only ingenious half-humans, little better than savages; all living shut off from one another, with only clumsy words to link them. Often they were shut off still more by different languages, and different beliefs. Some of them could think individually, but they had to remain individuals. Emotions they could sometimes share, but they could not think collectively. When their conditions were primitive they could get along all right, as the animals can; but the more complex they made their world, the less capable they were of dealing with it. They had no means of consensus. They learnt to co-operate constructively in small units; but only destructively in large units. They aspired greedily, and then refused to face the responsibilities they had created. They created vast problems, and then buried their heads in the sands of idle faith. There was, you see, no real communication, no understanding between them. They could, at their best, be near-sublime animals, but not more.

‘They could never have succeeded. If they had not brought down Tribulation which all but destroyed them; then they would have bred with the carelessness of animals until they had reduced themselves to poverty and misery, and ultimately to starvation and barbarism. One way or another they were foredoomed because they were an inadequate species.’

She tells them a little more about the survival of the New People on their two islands in the sea during Tribulation, and how they managed to rebuild their damaged society. She ends by saying, Keep Petra safe, they’re on their way.

Meanwhile, in the real world, the procession of their kidnappers leading the captured giant horses and Petra, David and Rosalind arrives at the mutant camp. It is a clearing full of huts in front of red cliffs which have cave holes in them, reached by rough ladders. It immediately reminded me of the village of the mutants in The Island of Dr Moreau.

They are brought before the camp’s ‘leader’, a gangly man with unnaturally long limbs. David recognises him. Years earlier he had been captured leading a raid into the cultivated land, and brought before a group of civic leaders including David’s father, which he had witnessed as a boy. The gangly man had been led off with a few other captives and David later learned they managed to free themselves and escape back to the Wild Lands.

Now this same man confronts David, recognises him, and tells him who he is. He is David’s father’s brother! At a stroke we realise why David’s father has been so touchily vehement about normality and the Purity Laws. It is because a strong mutant vein ran in his own family. Now the gangly man bitterly explains how, as the eldest son, he should have inherited the big farm, but was done out of it by David’s brother. And now he, David, has also lost his inheritance. The bony man smiles bitterly. He eyes up Rosalind (who, we have learned earlier, through David’s eyes, is tall and slender with lovely pointed breasts) with obvious lust in his eyes. We realise that almost all the women who have been detected as ‘deviants’ and turfed out into the Badlands were first ‘sterilised’. So it’s not only that Rosalind is young and beautiful – she can breed – she can bear him children (page 163).

Gangly man interrogates David more and quickly learns that a posse of ‘normals’ is on their trail. David asks Michael (who is riding with them) who confirms there’s about a hundred of them. Good, says gangly man. They can ambush and massacre them. Revenge will be sweet.

Rosalind breaks under the creepy man’s stare and, suddenly, with great intensity, David feels her fear and horror, and he leaps for the man, getting in one good punch to the jaw before he is caught and restrained by the man’s bodyguard. He simply orders David to be kicked out of the camp and if he comes back, shot on sight. They literally throw him out of the camp perimeter into the bushes, David walks away a bit then sneakily doubles back, but they easily capture him and beat him unconscious.

Chapter 15

When David comes to he is being tended by one of the dirty slatternly women from the mutant village. With horror he realises it is… Sophie, the sweet innocent girl he knew all those years before. She recognised him. She followed him. She still loves him.

Sophie explains that she is the gangly man’s woman, it gives her a little self-respect and authority in the camp. But now, with the coming of Rosalind, he will make her his woman and Sophie will be an outcast once again, she says weeping. David assures her Rosalind will never become the gangly one’s woman.

They talk till it’s dark and Sophie says it will be safe to sneak him back into the settlement. They skirt round the perimeter, along ways she knows, till they come to the cliff, she puts his hands against a ladder, and he climbs up into ‘her’ cave. It is pitifully poorly furnished. David thinks back to the Wender family’s lovely log cabin, back in happier days. She nips back out to fetch a bowl of broth. David communicates with Michael, whose function is to increase the sense of tension and stress. Michael tells him there are about a hundred in the posse and they are continuing towards him. There have been a few minor skirmishes but the normal leaders are determined to a) deliver the Badlanders a decisive defeat and b) recapture Petra, David and Rosalind. Rumour is there’s a dozen or more of the telepaths and they want to interrogate our threesome to find out who they are.

Sophie returns with broth for David to eat and he’s just finishing when Petra wakes up in the leader’s tent, where she’s being guarded alongside Rosalind. Her squeal of delight when she realises David is near is so overwhelmingly powerful that all the other telepaths complain, including she, the leader of the Zealanders, who comes through much more powerfully now. She is coming closer. She tells them she is about 16 hours travel away. The clock is ticking, the tension ratcheting up.

Sophie watches David’s side of this. He has already explained to her that he is a telepath, it is a kind of mental mutation, but she is awed to see it in practice. Clearly Petra and Rosalind need to be rescued. David picks up a spear but Sophie says she’ll do it. She disappears through the cave mouth blanket. A little while later David picks up signals of relief mixed with horror from Petra and Rosalind. A little later they climb up the ladder in the darkness and enter the safety of the tent. Here they will remain, hiding out, till the end of the novel.

Chapter 16

There is a female confrontation between Sophie, poor mutilated aged and lined and haggard Sophie, and fresh, clean, pert and lithe Rosalind. Sophie tells them to unpick the red crosses from their dresses (worn by all women in the normal settlements) but then bursts out in uncontrollable grief that David is in love with beautiful Rosalind, while she, Sophie, loves him, has always loved him, but poor and ugly and sterile… she bursts into tears and throws herself on her wretched straw bed. Petra tries to comfort her.

They sleep. They wake. Michael gives them an update on the posse’s approach. Then ‘she’ from Zealand tells them she is 8 hours away. She describes flying over mile after mile of rock and landscape fused to black glass. What happened here? Who were the madmen who did it?

Sophie goes out to fetch food and returns with discs of hard bread. The mutant men had gone to mount an ambush but we learn from Michael’s point of view that the posse successfully fought them off, with casualties. The posse has arms and ammunition. Sophie reports that the villagers discovered Rosalind and Petra’s guard murdered and the girls gone and figure David must have done it. But now they have bigger concerns. The survivors of the ambush have returned in dribs and drabs with reports of the posse’s strength. There’s clearly going to be a battle. David asks Michael if his father is with the posse. Michael replies yes. This gives rise to a little Shakespearian pondering as David asks himself what kind of a father it is who would track and hunt down his own son and niece. Shall I rescue him or kill him? he asks bleakly.

The woman from Sealand hears his thought and gives a no-nonsense reply:

‘Let him be,’ came the severe, clear pattern from the Sealand woman. ‘Your work is to survive. Neither his kind, nor his kind of thinking will survive long. They are the crown of creation, they are ambition fulfilled—they have nowhere more to go. But life is change, that is how it differs from the rocks, change is its very nature. Who, then, were the recent lords of creation, that they should expect to remain unchanged?

‘The living form defies evolution at its peril; if it does not adapt, it will be broken. The idea of completed man is the supreme vanity: the finished image is a sacrilegious myth. ‘The Old People brought down Tribulation, and were broken into fragments by it. Your father and his kind are a part of those fragments. They have become history without being aware of it. They are determined still that there is a final form to defend: soon they will attain the stability they strive for, in the only form it is granted—a place among the fossils. . . .’

So the novel presents at least four different notions of the evolution of life: his father’s strict static view that things should be kept as they were; Uncle Axel’s view that nobody really knows how things were and everyone thinks that they are normal; the mutant kidnapper’s view that God is perpetual change and punished the Old People for thinking they had reached the top and had to stop; and the Sealand woman who thinks all three preceding views are the products of a defunct species, soon to be consigned to history and superseded by the New People.

To cut to the chase, the posse eventually attacks the mutant village. Sophie disappears out the cave to be with her man. The attacking normals use a pincer movement coming from two sides at once. Defenders retreating from out of the woods back to the village under a fusillade of shots, are suddenly met by arrows coming from the other side. Peering out from behind the protective rag which covers the cave mouth, David sees the gangly man standing amid the fleeing mutants with a bow notched and ready to shoot, and Sophie by his side. Suddenly the gangly man sees what he’s looking for, David’s father as he rides into the clearing. The gangly man lets off an arrow which hits David’s father in the heart and he falls from his horse. Gangly man picks up Sophie, turns and runs but is brought low by a fusillade of arrows, Sophie gets to her feet, runs, and is herself shot with arrows.

Throughout the wait for the arrival of the posse, and the tense moments as Michael described its approach and careful fanning out for the attack, throughout this the woman from Sealand’s voice has gotten louder and she has told them to hold on. Now David hears a drumming sound coming from the sky. He looks up. The fighters in the clearing and amid the huts look up, too.

A kind of cloud filled with firing lights has appeared and is descending onto the chaotic battle scene below. David realises some kind of gossamer filaments are falling from it. Michael is among the melee below and they beam him telling him to come to the cave but before he can get far something sticky falls on his arm, when he goes to touch it he can’t remove it, his hand gets stuck. The woman from Sealand tells him to lie down and not to struggle. David realises the entire clearing is filling with filaments, horses, men and women desperately struggling to free themselves from the superglue sticky stuff. Then a filament wafts into the cave entrance across David’s eyes and he realises he can’t open them.

Chapter 17

The Sealand woman finds Michael and sprays him with something which makes the sticky cilia dissolve. She climbs up to David’s cave and frees him and the girls. She is wearing a one-piece spacesuit. Once everyone is free of the cilia she takes the suit off.

Her eyes were large, with irises more brown than green, and fringed with long, deep-gold lashes. Her nose was straight, but her nostrils curved with the perfection of a sculpture. Her mouth was, perhaps, a little wide; the chin beneath it was rounded, but not soft. Her hair was just a little darker than Rosalind’s, and, astonishingly in a woman, it was short. Cut off nearly level with her jaw. But more than anything it was the lightness of her face that made us stare. It was not pallor, it was simply fairness, like new cream, and with cheeks that might have been dusted with pink petals. There was scarcely a line in its smoothness, it seemed all new and perfect, as if neither wind nor rain had ever touched her. We found it hard to believe that any real, living person could look like that, so untouched, so unflawed.

It seems to me highly symbolic that the representative of the New People is a woman. She joins Wyndham’s long train of strong independent women, from Phyllis Watson in Kraken to Diana Brackley in The Trouble With Lichen, the very tough women in the short stories Survival and Dumb Martian, to the vision of an entirely men-free future in Consider Her Ways.

Looking down from the cave mouth Rosalind sees a panorama as if numerous giant spiders had gone mad weaving webs which hold all the men, women, children and horses utterly stiff. Suddenly Rosalind asks… ‘Are they dead?’ ‘Of course,’ say the Sealand woman, and she goes on to explain that they, the normals, the ordinary people, are not like us, they are like vermin which have to be put down. They themselves realised this which is why they were so determined to track down and exterminate all examples of the new variant. The Sealand woman sees it clearly; they are the new variant and they have to protect themselves.

‘In loyalty to their kind they cannot tolerate our rise; in loyalty to our kind, we cannot tolerate their obstruction.’

You can see her point, but the basic idea – exterminate the Other – can also be seen as cunningly contrived to be the mirror image of bigoted Old Jacob’s view, much earlier in the novel, that all ‘blasphemies’ are not properly human, which is why they should be killed.

One of the most effective parts of the novel is the unexpected characterisation of the Sealand woman as not sympathetic and understanding, but hard and logical and, well, heartless.

This is reflected in almost the last incident in the story. The Sealand woman puts her arms round Petra and declares it was well worth coming all this way to save and rescue such a remarkable young woman. Now they can turn around and leave. Go to Waknuk? Michael asks, to pick up the sole surviving member of the original group who is still there, Rachel? No, she replies. There isn’t enough fuel. Flying all this way has used exactly half their fuel. If they make a separate flight to, landing and take-off from Waknuk and carry an additional passenger, they will not have fuel to make it back to Sealand (page 194).

Michael ponders all this and decides to stay. Through the later parts of the novel David and Rosalind have detected Michael’s love for Rachel. He is not going to abandon her. He’ll make his way back to Waknuk as the survivor of the expedition, wait for the right moment and then… he will take her away, take her to Sealand. Michael asks Petra to project this to her, to Rachel (as it’s too far for either Michael, David or Rosalind to reach her.)

The Sealand woman protests that it’s a very long way and the way she came was across barren glass desert… but Michael points out the world is round. He will come… (As I read this, I reflected that there was the possibility of a sequel, ‘Michael and Rachel’s journey’…. then again, maybe not.)

They climb into the ‘ship’, the door closes, it lifts off. Then the last page cuts to the ‘ship’ descending over a beautiful bay in New Zealand. There are yachts on the sea, a city climbing the hillside, horseless vehicles whizzing along roads, other fish-shaped flying ‘ships’, and beneath it all, David and Rosalind can hear the hum of lots and lots of people like them.

Thoughts

A very powerful piece of what would now be called Young Adult Fiction, in the sense that it’s about teenagers and probably teenagers would be the optimal audience. It’s far more gripping and involving than the more adult, blasé Kraken Wakes and nowhere as genuinely upsetting as Day of the Triffids.

If even teenagers nowadays would be over-familiar with the basic tropes of a post-apocalyptic world which lives under a repressive form of degraded Christianity, there are still novel twists and unexpected episodes, for example the tragic story of Anne and her hopeless attempt to marry out of the telepath community or the simple but heart-breaking attempt of Aunt Harriet to save her child. The presence of kindly consoling Uncle Axel may be a familiar structural device, but his interventions help to pace the slow development of the book’s ideas, and of David’s growing awareness of his plight and the world he’s trapped in, very nicely. And the ending is weird and not comforting; it is a happy ending of sorts, except for the coldness with which the Sealanders kill everyone in the camp, friends and enemies, and the uncomforting way the magic ‘ship’ does not have fuel to save Rachel so Michael takes the decision to stay behind and go back and rescue her, a decision you can’t help feeling will lead to both their deaths.

So although the basic shape of the story may nowadays be over-familiar from thousands of science fiction TV shows and hundreds of science fiction movies, The Chrysalids vividly depicts its story with great skill and pacing, and contains odd countercurrents, unexpected eddies which make it deeper and darker and more thought-provoking than it might at first appear.

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Credit

The Chrysalids by John Wyndham was published by Michael Joseph in 1955. All references are to the 1973 Penguin paperback edition (recommended retail price 30p).

Related link

• The Chrysalids online (PDF)

John Wyndham reviews

• Sleepers of Mars (1973) 5 short stories from the 1930s
• The Day of the Triffids (1951)
• The Kraken Wakes (1953)
• Jizzle (1954) 15 short stories
• The Chrysalids (1955)
• The Seeds of Time (1956) 11 short stories
• The Midwich Cuckoos (1957)
• The Outward Urge (1959)
• Trouble with Lichen (1960)
• Consider Her Ways and Others (1961) 6 short stories
• Chocky (1968)
• Hidden Wyndham: Life, Love, Letters by Amy Binns (2019)

Other science fiction reviews

Late Victorian

1888 Looking Backward 2000-1887 by Edward Bellamy – Julian West wakes up in the year 2000 to discover a peaceful revolution has ushered in a society of state planning, equality and contentment
1890 News from Nowhere by William Morris – waking from a long sleep, William Guest is shown round a London transformed into villages of contented craftsmen

1895 The Time Machine by H.G. Wells – the unnamed inventor and time traveller tells his dinner party guests the story of his adventure among the Eloi and the Morlocks in the year 802,701
1896 The Island of Doctor Moreau by H.G. Wells – Edward Prendick is stranded on a remote island where he discovers the ‘owner’, Dr Gustave Moreau, is experimentally creating human-animal hybrids
1897 The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells – an embittered young scientist, Griffin, makes himself invisible, starting with comic capers in a Sussex village, and ending with demented murders
1899 When The Sleeper Wakes/The Sleeper Wakes by H.G. Wells – Graham awakes in the year 2100 to find himself at the centre of a revolution to overthrow the repressive society of the future
1899 A Story of the Days To Come by H.G. Wells – set in the same future London as The Sleeper Wakes, Denton and Elizabeth defy her wealthy family in order to marry, fall into poverty, and experience life as serfs in the Underground city run by the sinister Labour Corps

1900s

1901 The First Men in the Moon by H.G. Wells – Mr Bedford and Mr Cavor use the latter’s invention, an anti-gravity material they call ‘Cavorite’, to fly to the moon and discover the underground civilisation of the Selenites, leading up to its chasteningly moralistic conclusion
1904 The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth by H.G. Wells – scientists invent a compound which makes plants, animals and humans grow to giant size, prompting giant humans to rebel against the ‘little people’
1905 With the Night Mail by Rudyard Kipling – it is 2000 and the narrator accompanies a GPO airship across the Atlantic
1906 In the Days of the Comet by H.G. Wells – a comet passes through earth’s atmosphere and brings about ‘the Great Change’, inaugurating an era of wisdom and fairness, as told by narrator Willie Leadford
1908 The War in the Air by H.G. Wells – Bert Smallways, a bicycle-repairman from Kent, gets caught up in the outbreak of the war in the air which brings Western civilisation to an end
1909 The Machine Stops by E.M. Foster – people of the future live in underground cells regulated by ‘the Machine’ – until one of them rebels

1910s

1912 The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – Professor Challenger leads an expedition to a plateau in the Amazon rainforest where prehistoric animals still exist
1912 As Easy as ABC by Rudyard Kipling – set in 2065 in a world characterised by isolation and privacy, forces from the ABC are sent to suppress an outbreak of ‘crowdism’
1913 The Horror of the Heights by Arthur Conan Doyle – airman Captain Joyce-Armstrong flies higher than anyone before him and discovers the upper atmosphere is inhabited by vast jellyfish-like monsters
1914 The World Set Free by H.G. Wells – A history of the future in which the devastation of an atomic war leads to the creation of a World Government, told via a number of characters who are central to the change
1918 The Land That Time Forgot by Edgar Rice Burroughs – a trilogy of pulp novellas in which all-American heroes battle ape-men and dinosaurs on a lost island in the Antarctic

1920s

1921 We by Evgeny Zamyatin – like everyone else in the dystopian future of OneState, D-503 lives life according to the Table of Hours, until I-330 wakens him to the truth and they rebel
1925 Heart of a Dog by Mikhail Bulgakov – a Moscow scientist transplants the testicles and pituitary gland of a dead tramp into the body of a stray dog, with disastrous consequences
1927 The Maracot Deep by Arthur Conan Doyle – a scientist, an engineer and a hero are trying out a new bathysphere when the wire snaps and they hurtle to the bottom of the sea, where they discover unimaginable strangeness

1930s

1930 Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon – mind-boggling ‘history’ of the future of mankind over the next two billion years – surely the vastest vista of any science fiction book
1938 Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis – baddies Devine and Weston kidnap Oxford academic, Ransom, and take him in their spherical spaceship to Malacandra, as the natives call the planet Mars, where mysteries and adventures unfold

1940s

1943 Perelandra (Voyage to Venus) by C.S. Lewis – Ransom is sent to Perelandra aka Venus, to prevent Satan tempting the planet’s new young inhabitants to a new Fall as he did on earth
1945 That Hideous Strength by C.S. Lewis – Ransom assembles a motley crew of heroes ancient and modern to combat the rise of an evil corporation which is seeking to overthrow mankind
1949 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell – after a nuclear war, inhabitants of ruined London are divided into the sheep-like ‘proles’ and members of the Party who are kept under unremitting surveillance

1950s

1950 I, Robot by Isaac Asimov – nine short stories about ‘positronic’ robots, which chart their rise from dumb playmates to controllers of humanity’s destiny
1950 The Martian Chronicles – 13 short stories with 13 linking passages loosely describing mankind’s colonisation of Mars, featuring strange, dreamlike encounters with vanished Martians
1951 Foundation by Isaac Asimov – the first five stories telling the rise of the Foundation created by psychohistorian Hari Seldon to preserve civilisation during the collapse of the Galactic Empire
1951 The Illustrated Man – eighteen short stories which use the future, Mars and Venus as settings for what are essentially earth-bound tales of fantasy and horror
1951 The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham – the whole world turns out to watch the flashing lights in the sky caused by a passing comet and next morning wakes up blind, except for a handful of survivors who have to rebuild human society while fighting off the rapidly growing population of the mobile, intelligent, poison sting-wielding monster plants of the title
1952 Foundation and Empire by Isaac Asimov – two long stories which continue the future history of the Foundation set up by psycho-historian Hari Seldon as it faces attack by an Imperial general, and then the menace of the mysterious mutant known only as ‘the Mule’
1953 Second Foundation by Isaac Asimov – concluding part of the  Foundation Trilogy, which describes the attempt to preserve civilisation after the collapse of the Galactic Empire
1953 Earthman, Come Home by James Blish – the adventures of New York City, a self-contained space city which wanders the galaxy 2,000 years hence, powered by ‘spindizzy’ technology
1953 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury – a masterpiece, a terrifying anticipation of a future when books are banned and professional firemen are paid to track down stashes of forbidden books and burn them – until one fireman, Guy Montag, rebels
1953 The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester – a fast-moving novel set in a 24th century New York populated by telepaths and describing the mental collapse of corporate mogul Ben Reich who starts by murdering his rival Craye D’Courtney and becomes progressively more psychotic as he is pursued by telepathic detective, Lincoln Powell
1953 Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke one of my favourite sci-fi novels, a thrilling narrative describing the ‘Overlords’ who arrive from space to supervise mankind’s transition to the next stage in its evolution
1953 The Kraken Wakes by John Wyndham – some form of alien life invades earth in the shape of ‘fireballs’ from outer space which fall into the deepest parts of the earth’s oceans, followed by the sinking of ships passing over the ocean deeps, gruesome attacks of ‘sea tanks’ on ports and shoreline settlements around the world and then, in the final phase, the melting of the earth’s icecaps and global flooding
1954 The Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov – set 3,000 years in the future when humans have separated into ‘Spacers’ who have colonised 50 other planets, and the overpopulated earth whose inhabitants live in enclosed cities or ‘caves of steel’, and introducing detective Elijah Baley who is tasked with solving a murder mystery
1954 Jizzle by John Wyndham – 15 short stories, from the malevolent monkey of the title story to a bizarre yarn about a tube train which goes to hell, a paychiatrist who projects the same idyllic dream into the minds of hundreds of women around London, to a dry run for The Chrysalids
1955 The Chrysalids by John Wyndham – hundreds of years after a nuclear war devastated North America, David Strorm grows up in a rural community run by God-fearing zealots obsessed with detecting mutant plants, livestock and – worst of all – human ‘blasphemies’ – caused by the lingering radiation. But as he grows up, David realises he possesses a special mutation the Guardians of Purity have never dreamed of – the power of telepathy – and he’s not the only one, but when he and his mind-melding friends are discovered, they are forced to flee to the Badlands in a race to survive
1956 The Naked Sun by Isaac Asimov – 3,000 years in the future detective Elijah Baley returns, with his robot sidekick, R. Daneel Olivaw, to solve a murder mystery on the remote planet of Solaria
— Some problems with Isaac Asimov’s science fiction
1956 They Shall Have Stars by James Blish – explains the invention, in the near future, of i) the anti-death drugs and ii) the spindizzy technology which allow the human race to colonise the galaxy
1956 The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester – a fast-paced phantasmagoria set in the 25th century where humans can teleport, a terrifying new weapon has been invented, and tattooed hard-man, Gulliver Foyle, is looking for revenge
1956 The Death of Grass by John Christopher – amid the backdrop of a worldwide famine caused by the Chung-Li virus which kills all species of grass (wheat, barley, oats etc) decent civil engineer John Custance finds himself leading his wife, two children and a small gang of followers out of London and across an England collapsing into chaos and barbarism in order to reach the remote valley which his brother had told him he was going to plant with potatoes and other root vegetables and which he knows is an easily defendable enclave
1957 The Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham – one night a nondescript English village is closed off by a force field, all the inhabitants within the zone losing consciousness. A day later the field disappears and the villagers all regain consciousness but two months later, all the fertile women in the place realise they are pregnant, and nine months later give birth to identical babies with platinum blonde hair and penetrating golden eyes, which soon begin exerting telepathic control over their parents and then the other villagers. Are they aliens, implanted in human wombs, and destined to supersede Homo sapiens as top species on the planet?
1959 The Triumph of Time by James Blish – concluding novel of Blish’s ‘Okie’ tetralogy in which mayor of New York John Amalfi and his friends are present at the end of the universe
1959 The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut – Winston Niles Rumfoord builds a space ship to explore the solar system where encounters a chrono-synclastic infundibula, and this is just the start of a bizarre meandering fantasy which includes the Army of Mars attacking earth and the adventures of Boaz and Unk in the caverns of Mercury
1959 The Outward Urge by John Wyndham – a conventional space exploration novel in five parts which follow successive members of the Troon family over a 200-year period (1994 to 2194) as they help build the first British space station, command the British moon base, lead expeditions to Mars, to Venus, and ends with an eerie ‘ghost’ story

1960s

1960 Trouble With Lichen by John Wyndham – ardent feminist and biochemist Diana Brackley discovers a substance which slows down the ageing process, with potentially revolutionary implications for human civilisation, in a novel which combines serious insights into how women are shaped and controlled by society and sociological speculation with a sentimental love story and passages of broad social satire (about the beauty industry and the newspaper trade)
1961 A Fall of Moondust by Arthur C. Clarke a pleasure tourbus on the moon is sucked down into a sink of moondust, sparking a race against time to rescue the trapped crew and passengers
1961 Consider Her Ways and Others by John Wyndham – Six short stories dominated by the title track which depicts England a few centuries hence, after a plague has wiped out all men and the surviving women have been genetically engineered into four distinct types, the brainy Doctors, the brawny Amazons, the short Servitors, and the vast whale-like mothers into whose body a twentieth century woman doctor is unwittingly transported
1962 The Drowned World by J.G. Ballard – Dr Kerans is part of a UN mission to map the lost cities of Europe which have been inundated after solar flares melted the worlds ice caps and glaciers, but finds himself and his colleagues’ minds slowly infiltrated by prehistoric memories of the last time the world was like this, complete with tropical forest and giant lizards, and slowly losing their grasp on reality.
1962 The Voices of Time and Other Stories – Eight of Ballard’s most exquisite stories including the title tale about humanity slowly falling asleep even as they discover how to listen to the voices of time radiating from the mountains and distant stars, or The Cage of Sand where a handful of outcasts hide out in the vast dunes of Martian sand brought to earth as ballast which turned out to contain fatal viruses. Really weird and visionary.
1962 A Life For The Stars by James Blish – third in the Okie series about cities which can fly through space, focusing on the coming of age of kidnapped earther, young Crispin DeFord, aboard space-travelling New York
1962 The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick In an alternative future America lost the Second World War and has been partitioned between Japan and Nazi Germany. The narrative follows a motley crew of characters including a dealer in antique Americana, a German spy who warns a Japanese official about a looming surprise German attack, and a woman determined to track down the reclusive author of a hit book which describes an alternative future in which America won the Second World War
1962 Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut – the memoirs of American Howard W. Campbell Jr. who was raised in Germany and has adventures with Nazis and spies
1963 Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut – what starts out as an amiable picaresque as the narrator, John, tracks down the so-called ‘father of the atom bomb’, Felix Hoenniker for an interview turns into a really bleak, haunting nightmare where an alternative form of water, ice-nine, freezes all water in the world, including the water inside people, killing almost everyone and freezing all water forever
1964 The Drought by J.G. Ballard – It stops raining. Everywhere. Fresh water runs out. Society breaks down and people move en masse to the seaside, where fighting breaks out to get near the water and set up stills. In part two, ten years later, the last remnants of humanity scrape a living on the vast salt flats which rim the continents, until the male protagonist decides to venture back inland to see if any life survives
1964 The Terminal Beach by J.G. Ballard – Ballard’s breakthrough collection of 12 short stories which, among more traditional fare, includes mind-blowing descriptions of obsession, hallucination and mental decay set in the present day but exploring what he famously defined as ‘inner space’
1964 Dr. Strangelove, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb by Peter George – a novelisation of the famous Kubrick film, notable for the prologue written as if by aliens who arrive in the distant future to find an earth utterly destroyed by the events described in the main narrative
1966 Rocannon’s World by Ursula Le Guin – Le Guin’s first novel, a ‘planetary romance’ or ‘science fantasy’ set on Fomalhaut II where ethnographer and ‘starlord’ Gaverel Rocannon rides winged tigers and meets all manner of bizarre foes in his quest to track down the aliens who destroyed his spaceship and killed his colleagues, aided by sword-wielding Lord Mogien and a telepathic Fian
1966 Planet of Exile by Ursula Le Guin – both the ‘farborn’ colonists of planet Werel, and the surrounding tribespeople, the Tevarans, must unite to fight off the marauding Gaal who are migrating south as the planet enters its deep long winter – not a good moment for the farborn leader, Jakob Agat Alterra, to fall in love with Rolery, the beautiful, golden-eyed daughter of the Tevaran chief
1966 – The Crystal World by J.G. Ballard – Dr Sanders journeys up an African river to discover that the jungle is slowly turning into crystals, as does anyone who loiters too long, and becomes enmeshed in the personal psychodramas of a cast of lunatics and obsessives
1967 The Disaster Area by J.G. Ballard – Nine short stories including memorable ones about giant birds and the man who sees the prehistoric ocean washing over his quite suburb.
1967 City of Illusions by Ursula Le Guin – an unnamed humanoid with yellow cat’s eyes stumbles out of the great Eastern Forest which covers America thousands of years in the future when the human race has been reduced to a pitiful handful of suspicious rednecks or savages living in remote settlements. He is discovered and nursed back to health by a relatively benign commune but then decides he must make his way West in an epic trek across the continent to the fabled city of Es Toch where he will discover his true identity and mankind’s true history
1966 The Anti-Death League by Kingsley Amis –
1968 2001: A Space Odyssey a panoramic narrative which starts with aliens stimulating evolution among the first ape-men and ends with a spaceman being transformed into a galactic consciousness
1968 Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick – in 1992 androids are almost indistinguishable from humans except by trained bounty hunters like Rick Deckard who is paid to track down and ‘retire’ escaped ‘andys’ – earning enough to buy mechanical animals, since all real animals died long ago
1968 Chocky by John Wyndham – Matthew is the adopted son of an ordinary, middle-class couple who starts talking to a voice in his head who it takes the entire novel to persuade his parents is real and a telepathic explorer from a far distant planet
1969 The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton – describes in retrospect, in the style of a scientific inquiry, the crisis which unfolds after a fatal virus is brought back to earth by a space probe and starts spreading uncontrollably
1969 Ubik by Philip K. Dick – in 1992 the world is threatened by mutants with psionic powers who are combated by ‘inertials’. The novel focuses on the weird alternative world experienced by a group of inertials after they are involved in an explosion on the moon
1969 The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin – an envoy from the Ekumen or federation of advanced planets – Genly Ai – is sent to the planet Gethen to persuade its inhabitants to join the federation, but the focus of the book is a mind-expanding exploration of the hermaphroditism of Gethen’s inhabitants, as Genly is forced to undertake a gruelling trek across the planet’s frozen north with the disgraced native lord, Estraven, during which they develop a cross-species respect and, eventually, a kind of love
1969 Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut – Vonnegut’s breakthrough novel in which he manages to combine his personal memories of being an American POW of the Germans and witnessing the bombing of Dresden in the character of Billy Pilgrim, with a science fiction farrago about Tralfamadorians who kidnap Billy and transport him through time and space – and introduces the catchphrase ‘so it goes’

1970s

1970 Tau Zero by Poul Anderson – spaceship Leonora Christine leaves earth with a crew of fifty to discover if humans can colonise any of the planets orbiting the star Beta Virginis, but when its deceleration engines are damaged, the crew realise they need to exit the galaxy altogether in order to find space with low enough radiation to fix the engines – and then a series of unfortunate events mean they find themselves forced to accelerate faster and faster, effectively travelling forwards through time as well as space until they witness the end of the entire universe – one of the most thrilling sci-fi books I’ve ever read
1970 The Atrocity Exhibition by J.G. Ballard – Ballard’s best book, a collection of fifteen short experimental texts in stripped-down prose bringing together key obsessions like car crashes, mental breakdown, World War III, media images of atrocities and clinical sex
1971 Vermilion Sands by J.G. Ballard – nine short stories including Ballard’s first, from 1956, most of which follow the same pattern, describing the arrival of a mysterious, beguiling woman in the fictional desert resort of Vermilion Sands, the setting for extravagantly surreal tales of the glossy, lurid and bizarre
1971 The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula Le Guin – thirty years in the future (in 2002) America is an overpopulated environmental catastrophe zone where meek and unassuming George Orr discovers that his dreams can alter reality, changing history at will. He comes under the control of visionary neuro-scientist, Dr Haber, who sets about using George’s powers to alter the world for the better, with unanticipated and disastrous consequences
1971 Mutant 59: The Plastic Eater by Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis – a genetically engineered bacterium starts eating the world’s plastic, leading to harum scarum escapades in disaster-stricken London
1972 The Word for World Is Forest by Ursula Le Guin – novella set on the planet Athshe describing its brutal colonisation by exploitative Terrans (who call it ‘New Tahiti’) and the resistance of the metre-tall, furry, native population of Athsheans, with their culture of dreamtime and singing
1972 The Fifth Head of Cerberus by Gene Wolfe – a mind-boggling trio of novellas set on a pair of planets 20 light years away, the stories revolve around the puzzle of whether the supposedly human colonists are, in fact, the descendants of the planets’ shape-shifting aboriginal inhabitants who murdered the first earth colonists and took their places so effectively that they have forgotten the fact and think themselves genuinely human
1973 Crash by J.G. Ballard – Ballard’s most ‘controversial’ novel, a searingly intense description of its characters’ obsession with the sexuality of car crashes, wounds and disfigurement
1973 Rendezvous With Rama by Arthur C. Clarke – in 2031 a 50-kilometre-long object of alien origin enters the solar system, so the crew of the spaceship Endeavour are sent to explore it in one of the most haunting and evocative novels of this type ever written
1973 Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut – Vonnegut’s longest and most experimental novel with the barest of plots and characters allowing him to sound off about sex, race, America, environmentalism, with the appearance of his alter ego Kilgore Trout and even Vonnegut himself as a character, all enlivened by Vonnegut’s own naive illustrations and the throwaway catchphrase ‘And so on…’
1973 The Best of John Wyndham 1932 to 1949 – Six rather silly short stories dating, as the title indicates, from 1932 to 1949, with far too much interplanetary travel
1974 Concrete Island by J.G. Ballard – the short and powerful novella in which an advertising executive crashes his car onto a stretch of wasteland in the juncture of three motorways, finds he can’t get off it, and slowly adapts to life alongside its current, psychologically damaged inhabitants
1974 Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said by Philip K. Dick – America after the Second World War is a police state but the story is about popular TV host Jason Taverner who is plunged into an alternative version of this world where he is no longer a rich entertainer but down on the streets among the ‘ordinaries’ and on the run from the police. Why? And how can he get back to his storyline?
1974 The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin – in the future and 11 light years from earth, the physicist Shevek travels from the barren, communal, anarchist world of Anarres to its consumer capitalist cousin, Urras, with a message of brotherhood and a revolutionary new discovery which will change everything
1974 Inverted World by Christopher Priest – vivid description of a city on a distant planet which must move forwards on railway tracks constructed by the secretive ‘guilds’ in order not to fall behind the mysterious ‘optimum’ and avoid the fate of being obliterated by the planet’s bizarre lateral distorting, a vivid and disturbing narrative right up until the shock revelation of the last few pages
1975 High Rise by J.G. Ballard – an astonishingly intense and brutal vision of how the middle-class occupants of London’s newest and largest luxury, high-rise development spiral down from petty tiffs and jealousies into increasing alcohol-fuelled mayhem, disintegrating into full-blown civil war before regressing to starvation and cannibalism
1976 The Alteration by Kingsley Amis – a counterfactual narrative in which the Reformation never happened and so there was no Enlightenment, no Romantic revolution, no Industrial Revolution spearheaded by Protestant England, no political revolutions, no Victorian era when democracy and liberalism triumphed over Christian repression, with the result that England in 1976 is a peaceful medieval country ruled by officials of the all-powerful Roman Catholic Church
1976 Slapstick by Kurt Vonnegut – a madly disorientating story about twin freaks, a future dystopia, shrinking Chinese and communication with the afterlife
1979 The Unlimited Dream Company by J.G. Ballard – a strange combination of banality and visionary weirdness as an unhinged young man crashes his stolen plane in suburban Shepperton, and starts performing magical acts like converting the inhabitants into birds, conjuring up exotic foliage, convinced he is on a mission to liberate them
1979 Jailbird by Kurt Vonnegut – the satirical story of Walter F. Starbuck and the RAMJAC Corps run by Mary Kathleen O’Looney, a baglady from Grand Central Station, among other satirical notions, including the news that Kilgore Trout, a character who recurs in most of his novels, is one of the pseudonyms of a fellow prisoner at the gaol where Starbuck ends up serving a two year sentence, one Dr Robert Fender

1980s

1980 Russian Hide and Seek by Kingsley Amis – set in an England of 2035 after a) the oil has run out and b) a left-wing government left NATO and England was promptly invaded by the Russians in the so-called ‘the Pacification’, who have settled down to become a ruling class and treat the native English like 19th century serfs
1980 The Venus Hunters by J.G. Ballard – seven very early and often quite cheesy sci-fi short stories, along with a visionary satire on Vietnam (1969), and then two mature stories from the 1970s which show Ballard’s approach sliding into mannerism
1981 The Golden Age of Science Fiction edited by Kingsley Amis – 17 classic sci-fi stories from what Amis considers the ‘Golden Era’ of the genre, basically the 1950s
1981 Hello America by J.G. Ballard – a hundred years from now an environmental catastrophe has turned America into a vast desert, except for west of the Rockies which has become a rainforest of Amazonian opulence, and it is here that a ragtag band of explorers from old Europe discover a psychopath has crowned himself ‘President Manson’, revived an old nuclear power station to light up Las Vegas and plays roulette in Caesar’s Palace to decide which American city to nuke next
1981 The Affirmation by Christopher Priest – an extraordinarily vivid description of a schizophrenic young man living in London who, to protect against the trauma of his actual life (father died, made redundant, girlfriend committed suicide) invents a fantasy world, the Dream Archipelago, and how it takes over his ‘real’ life
1982 Myths of the Near Future by J.G. Ballard – ten short stories showing Ballard’s range of subject matter from Second World War China to the rusting gantries of Cape Kennedy
1982 2010: Odyssey Two by Arthur C. Clarke – Heywood Floyd joins a Russian spaceship on a two-year journey to Jupiter to a) reclaim the abandoned Discovery and b) investigate the monolith on Japetus
1984 Empire of the Sun by J.G. Ballard – his breakthrough book, ostensibly an autobiography focusing on this 1930s boyhood in Shanghai and then incarceration in a Japanese internment camp, observing the psychological breakdown of the adults around him: made into an Oscar-winning movie by Steven Spielberg: only later did it emerge that the book was intended as a novel and is factually misleading
1984 Neuromancer by William Gibson – Gibson’s stunning debut novel which establishes the ‘Sprawl’ universe, in which burnt-out cyberspace cowboy, Case, is lured by ex-hooker Molly into a mission led by ex-army colonel Armitage to penetrate the secretive corporation, Tessier-Ashpool, at the bidding of the vast and powerful artificial intelligence, Wintermute
1986 Burning Chrome by William Gibson – ten short stories, three or four set in Gibson’s ‘Sprawl’ universe, the others ranging across sci-fi possibilities, from a kind of horror story to one about a failing Russian space station
1986 Count Zero by William Gibson – second in the ‘Sprawl trilogy’: Turner is a tough expert at kidnapping scientists from one mega-tech corporation for another, until his abduction of Christopher Mitchell from Maas Biolabs goes badly wrong and he finds himself on the run, his storyline dovetailing with those of sexy young Marly Krushkhova, ‘disgraced former owner of a tiny Paris gallery’ who is commissioned by the richest man in the world to track down the source of a mysterious modern artwork, and Bobby Newmark, self-styled ‘Count Zero’ and computer hacker
1987 The Day of Creation by J.G. Ballard – strange and, in my view, profoundly unsuccessful novel in which WHO doctor John Mallory embarks on an obsessive quest to find the source of an African river accompanied by a teenage African girl and a half-blind documentary maker who films the chaotic sequence of events
1987 2061: Odyssey Three by Arthur C. Clarke – Spaceship Galaxy is hijacked and forced to land on Europa, moon of the former Jupiter, in a ‘thriller’ notable for Clarke’s descriptions of the bizarre landscapes of Halley’s Comet and Europa
1988 Memories of the Space Age Eight short stories spanning the 20 most productive years of Ballard’s career, presented in chronological order and linked by the Ballardian themes of space travel, astronauts and psychosis
1988 Running Wild by J.G. Ballard – the pampered children of a gated community of affluent professionals, near Reading, run wild and murder their parents and security guards
1988 Mona Lisa Overdrive by William Gibson – third of Gibson’s ‘Sprawl’ trilogy in which street-kid Mona is sold by her pimp to crooks who give her plastic surgery to make her look like global simstim star Angie Marshall, who they plan to kidnap; but Angie is herself on a quest to find her missing boyfriend, Bobby Newmark, one-time Count Zero; while the daughter of a Japanese gangster, who’s been sent to London for safekeeping, is abducted by Molly Millions, a lead character in Neuromancer

1990s

1990 War Fever by J.G. Ballard – 14 late short stories, some traditional science fiction, some interesting formal experiments like Answers To a Questionnaire from which you have to deduce the questions and the context
1990 The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling – in an alternative version of history, Victorian inventor Charles Babbage’s design for an early computer, instead of remaining a paper theory, was actually built, drastically changing British society, so that by 1855 it is led by a party of industrialists and scientists who use databases and secret police to keep the population suppressed
1991 The Kindness of Women by J.G. Ballard – a sequel of sorts to Empire of the Sun which reprises the Shanghai and Japanese internment camp scenes from that book, but goes on to describe the author’s post-war experiences as a medical student at Cambridge, as a pilot in Canada, his marriage, children, writing and involvement in the avant-garde art scene of the 1960s and 70s: though based on  his own experiences the book is overtly a novel focusing on a small number of recurring characters who symbolise different aspects of the post-war world
1993 Virtual Light by William Gibson – first of Gibson’s Bridge Trilogy, in which cop-with-a-heart-of-gold Berry Rydell foils an attempt by crooked property developers to rebuild post-earthquake San Francisco
1994 Rushing to Paradise by J.G. Ballard – a sort of rewrite of Lord of the Flies in which a number of unbalanced environmental activists set up a utopian community on a Pacific island, ostensibly to save the local rare breed of albatross from French nuclear tests, but end up going mad and murdering each other
1996 Cocaine Nights by J. G. Ballard – sensible, middle-class Charles Prentice flies out to a luxury resort for British ex-pats on the Spanish Riviera to find out why his brother, Frank, is in a Spanish prison charged with murder, and discovers the resort has become a hotbed of ‘transgressive’ behaviour – i.e. sex, drugs and organised violence – which has come to bind the community together
1996 Idoru by William Gibson – second novel in the ‘Bridge’ trilogy: Colin Laney has a gift for spotting nodal points in the oceans of data in cyberspace, and so is hired by the scary head of security for a pop music duo, Lo/Rez, to find out why his boss, the half-Irish singer Rez, has announced he is going to marry a virtual reality woman, an idoru; meanwhile schoolgirl Chia MacKenzie flies out to Tokyo and unwittingly gets caught up in smuggling new nanotechnology device which is the core of the plot
1999 All Tomorrow’s Parties by William Gibson – third of the Bridge Trilogy in which main characters from the two previous books are reunited on the ruined Golden Gate bridge, including tough ex-cop Rydell, sexy bike courier Chevette, digital babe Rei Toei, Fontaine the old black dude who keeps an antiques shop, as a smooth, rich corporate baddie seeks to unleash a terminal shift in the world’s dataflows and Rydell is hunted by a Taoist assassin

2000s

2000 Super-Cannes by J.G. Ballard – Paul Sinclair packs in his London job to accompany his wife, who’s landed a plum job as a paediatrician at Eden-Olympia, an elite business park just outside Cannes in the South of France; both are unnerved to discover that her predecessor, David Greenwood, one day went to work with an assault rifle, shot dead several senior executives before shooting himself; when Paul sets out to investigate, he discovers the business park is a hotbed of ‘transgressive’ behaviour i.e. designer drugs, BDSM sex, and organised vigilante violence against immigrants down in Cannes, and finds himself and his wife being sucked into its disturbing mind-set
2003 Pattern Recognition by William Gibson – first of the ‘Blue Ant’ trilogy, set very much in the present, around the London-based advertising agency Blue Ant, founded by advertising guru Hubertus Bigend who hires Cayce Pollard, supernaturally gifted logo approver and fashion trend detector, to hunt down the maker of mysterious ‘footage’ which has started appearing on the internet, a quest that takes them from New York and London, to Tokyo, Moscow and Paris
2007 Spook Country by William Gibson – second in the ‘Blue Ant’ trilogy
2008 Miracles of Life by J.G. Ballard – right at the end of his life, Ballard wrote a straightforward autobiography in which he makes startling revelations about his time in the Japanese internment camp (he really enjoyed it!), insightful comments about science fiction, but the real theme is his moving expressions of love for his three children