Books by John Wyndham
“If you don’t want to commit to a whole novel and you want a little story to read, Seeds of Time is a really good collection. There’s some fun stories in there, some scary stories in there, some very touching stories in there. It shows his range. Loads of these stories could be entire films. Something like Survival is scary, real freak-out stuff; but then something like Chronoclasm is a fun little time travel story, silly and ridiculous” Read more...
Amy Binns, Biographer
“There’s a society that’s dealing reasonably well with its own affairs – not particularly well – and some children are born who appear physically normal, but who can communicate with each other…It’s never been filmed, and yet if you ask people of a certain age, ‘What’s your desert island book?’, lots of people will say The Chrysalids. It’s relatively short – my Penguin copy is about 190 pages, easy to read. It was commonly given as a book for teenagers to read in schools, because it’s got lots of issues that young people are interested in, the idea of the new generation. And it’s a great adventure story as well – with all these stories, we talk about the emotional resonance, but they’re all adventure stories. It was very, very widely read.” Read more...
Amy Binns, Biographer
“Even though Wyndham wrote several novels which were very successful, he carried on enjoying writing short stories. He wrote them to entertain himself, and lots of them could be entire novels. Some of them are funny; some of them are horrifying; some of them explore ideas that are really very complicated or unusual. Consider Her Ways is one of the most interesting of his short story collections because of that story at the start of it…The name, ‘consider her ways’, comes from the Bible: ‘go to the ant thou sluggard, and consider her ways’. The idea is that women set up a world that’s modelled on an ant’s nest: there are people who are mothers, and that is their only function; there are people who are workers; there are the intelligentsia, the doctors; and there are the people who care for the mothers, the carers. Everybody knows their place. Everybody has a function. It’s very conflicted, as a story; he’s not sure if this is a good world or not.” Read more...
Amy Binns, Biographer
“It’s something that’s been dramatized a number of times because it’s such a great story. Margaret Atwood spoke about how she read The Midwich Cuckoos when she was a student, and it freaked her out so badly she had dreams about these evil children for weeks. This story is about how the instinct of motherhood can be subverted by an alien intelligence. Obviously, a cuckoo lays eggs in another bird’s nest. This group of women all give birth to babies who apparently are physically normal, but who can control them, and communicate with each other, and who develop much more quickly than ordinary children. They clearly have their own end in view.” Read more...
Amy Binns, Biographer
“He took part in another very difficult battle where a group of Nazi troops held out to the last man, and they were encircled by British troops, and the smell was appalling at the end of the battle; he talks about feeling like he’s become impure, and that people will somehow know when he gets back. So after this very, very difficult war, he came back to Britain, and was again struggling to be a writer… And then wrote this incredible book, The Day of the Triffids. Triffids combined – for the first time, really, in science fiction – the science bit, the satellites and the germ warfare and dealing with a destroyed world, with the thing we associate with John Wyndham: humanity. What happens to people?” Read more...
Amy Binns, Biographer
Interviews where books by John Wyndham were recommended
The Best John Wyndham Books, recommended by Amy Binns
When The Day of the Triffids introduced John Wyndham to the world, it was a smash hit because of his keen interest in humanity, says his biographer Amy Binns. She talks us through her top five Wyndham books, stories that explore motherhood and feminism, religion, loneliness and uncertainty – but always wrapped in warm, witty, page-turning adventures.
