WYNDHAM, John

   That fraction of his full name used by UK writer John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris (1903-1969) after WWII, and by far his best-known byline; before WWII, he had signed work as John Beynon Harris, John Beynon, Wyndham Parkes, Lucas Parkes and Johnson Harris. As well aschanging names with frequency, JW often revised - or allowed others to revise - works from early in his working life; at times this led (as with Planet Plane; see below) to an excessive number of versions of unimportanttitles.As a whole, JW's career broke into 2 parts: before WWII and after it, when he became Wyndham. His first career was inconspicuous. He began publishing sf in 1931 with "Worlds to Barter" as by John Beynon Harris for Wonder Stories, and contributed adventure sf and juveniles to various UKmagazines throughout the 1930s. Some of this early work was assembled as Wanderers of Time (coll 1973) as by JW, the title story having beenreprinted earlier as Love in Time (1933 Wonder Stories as "Wanderers of Time" as by John Beynon Harris; 1945 chap) as by Johnson Harris; most ofthe contents of Exiles on Asperus (coll 1979) as by John Beynon were also pre-WWII. His first novel, The Secret People (1935 as by John Beynon; rev 1964 US; text restored 1972 UK as by JW), was a juvenile sf adventure setin a underground world threatened by a project to transform the Sahara into a lake for irrigation purposes. Planet Plane (1936 Passing Show as "Stowaway to Mars" as by John Beynon; full text 1936 as by John Beynon;cut 1937 in Modern Wonder vt "The Space Machine"; differing cut [by another hand] vt Stowaway to Mars 1953; text restored 1972 as by JW) was a rather well told, though only intermittently subtle, narrative of humanity's first space flight to Mars, where Vaygan the Martian and the machines destined to succeed his dying species deal swiftly with 3 competing sets of Earthlings who have landed almost simultaneously. Vaygan himself impregnates Joan, the stowaway of the magazine title; given the moral strictures then applying to magazine fiction, it is unsurprising that she dies in childbirth and that her child is deemed illegitimate. The sequel, "Sleepers of Mars" (1938 Tales of Wonder as by John Beynon; as title story in Sleepers of Mars [coll 1973] as by JW), deals merely with some stranded Russians, not with the miscegenate offspring. In Bound to be Read (1975), the memoirs of UK publisher Robert Lusty, the John BeynonHarris of these years appears as a rather diffident, obscure, lounging individual at the fringes of the literary and social world; there was no great reason to suppose he would ever erupt into fame.WWII interrupted JW's writing career, and his later works showed a change in basic subjectmatter and a much more careful concern for the responses of the middle-class audience he was now attempting to reach in slick journals like COLLIER'S WEEKLY. Where much of his pre-WWII tales were SPACE OPERAS leavened with the occasional witty aside or passage, JW's post-WWII novels - most notably The Day of the Triffids (1951 US; rev [and preferred text] 1951 UK; orig version vt Revolt of the Triffids 1952 US), filmed as The DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS (1963), and The Kraken Wakes (1953; rev vt Out of the Deeps 1953 US), both assembled with Re-Birth (1955 US; rev vt The Chrysalids 1955 UK) as The John Wyndham Omnibus (omni 1964) - present an eloquent post-trauma middle-class UK response to the theme of DISASTER, whether caused by the forces of Nature, alien INVASIONS, EVOLUTION or Man's own nuclear warfare. JW did not invent the UK novel ofsecretly-longed-for-disaster, or what Brian W. ALDISS has called the COSY CATASTROPHE, for this had reached mature form as early as 1885, with thepublication of Richard JEFFERIES's retrospective After London, or Wild England, and the techniques for giving actuality to the moment of crisishad been thoroughly established, by H.G. WELLS and others, well before WWI; but he effectively domesticated some of its defining patterns: thecity (usually London) depopulated by the catastrophe; the exodus, with its scenes of panic and bravery; and the ensuring focus on a small but growing nucleus of survivors who reach some kind of sanctuary in the country and prepare to re-establish Man's shaken dominion. UK writers as diverse as John CHRISTOPHER, Aldiss and M. John HARRISON have used the pattern withnotable success. Their natural tendency has been somewhat to darken JW's palette and to widen its social relevance, for his protagonists and their women tend to behave with old-fashioned decency and courage, rather as though they were involved in the Battle of Britain, a time imaginatively close to him and to his markets.Three considerably overlapping story collections assembled shorter material produced after WWII: Jizzle (coll 1954), Tales of Gooseflesh and Laughter (coll 1956 US) and The Seeds ofTime (coll 1956). In them, JW again demonstrated his skill at translating sf situations into fundamentally comfortable tales of character, however prickly their subject matter might be. In the UK, though not in the USA, he was marketed as a middlebrow writer of non-generic work, and was not strongly identified with sf.Though published and associated with the cosy catastrophe tales, Re-Birth - JW apparently preferred the title The Chrysalids, by which the book has always been known in the UK - marked anew phase, in which the invasion comes not from abroad but in the form of MUTANTS who must survive in a normal world, and whose threat to "normal"humans was expressed in bleakly Social Darwinist terms; in the end, a somewhat traumatized "cosy" normalcy is retained when the novel's mutant protagonists are forced to leave the human hearth. In his next - The Midwich Cuckoos (1957; rev 1958 US; vt Village of the Damned 1960 US),filmed as VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED (1960) and as CHILDREN OF THE DAMNED (1963) - the incursion is unqualifiedly inimical: the ALIEN invaders whoinseminate the women of Midwich, and the consequent very effectively spooky offspring, mark a decided inturning from the comfortable assumptions of earlier books. Later novels, like Trouble with Lichen (1960; rev 1960 US), are conspicuous for their facetious unease, and itmight be suggested that the potency of JW's impulse to cosiness may well have derived from some profound cultural and/or personal insecurity he was unable to articulate directly. But he wrote effectively for a specific UK market at a specific point in time - the period of recuperation that followed WWII - and he will be remembered primarily for the half decade or so during which he was able to express in telling images the hopes, fears and resurgent complacency of a readership that recognized a kindred spirit. During that period, in the UK and Australia at least, he was probably more read than any other sf author. As late as 1992, his books appeared regularly on school syllabuses in the UK.

   JC

   Other works: The Outward Urge (coll of linked stories: 1959; with 1 story added, rev 1961), published as by JW and Lucas Parkes; Consider Her Ways \& Others (coll 1961) and The Infinite Moment (coll 1961 US), 2 titles whose contents aresimilar, though each book was conceived separately; Chocky (1963 AMZ; exp 1968 US); The Best of John Wyndham (coll 1973; without intro orbibliography vt The Man from Beyond and Other Stories 1975; full version in 2 vols vt The Best of John Wyndham 1932-1949 1976 and The Best of John Wyndham 1951-1960 1976) ed Angus WELLS; Web (1979); John Wyndham (omni1980) assembling The Day of the Triffids, The Kraken Wakes, The Chrysalids, The Seeds of Time, The Midwich Cuckoos and Trouble with Lichen.

   About the author: John Wyndham, Creator of the Cosy Catastrophe: A Working Bibliography (latest rev 1989 chap) by Phil STEPHENSEN-PAYNE.

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