Word: wyndham
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...MIDWICH CUCKOOS (247 pp.)-John Wyndham-Ballantine...
...rule science fiction is neither; most writers of real talent believe that their place is in the home, not in outer space. An exception is John Wyndham. a British novelist who manages to be in both places at the same time and to apply a sort of documentary style to the description of a world of sinister flapdoodle...
...Novelist Wyndham well knows the first rule in writing a chiller-effective specters must be ectoplasmatter-of-fact-and so he takes the dullest, most ordinary village in England to populate with his monsters. Nothing much noteworthy has happened in Midwich since the Black Death. One day something very odd does happen: every living thing falls into a trance. All who pass through an invisible perimeter pass out. Traffic piles up. Some victims are hauled out by hooks from the edge of this zone of silence: they wake up unharmed. Promptly, of course, official hush-hush seals off Midwich...
...news seeps out that a similar occurrence took place among the Eskimos, who superstitiously exposed all the strange children to death, and in Russia, which ideologically blasted the unwelcome visitors out of the world with an atomic cannon. How will the commonsensical British deal with this nonsensical problem? Author Wyndham expends the imagination and skill of a serious novelist on resolving the question. Incidentally, he gives a depressingly convincing picture of British social life. Wyndham has chosen to write about the impossible but has the talent to prove that it happened in an all-too-probable place...
...evaluation of Lewis will probably attract a limited audience, and the author of "Wyndham Lewis" has made no effort to entrap the casual reader. The book is a work of scholarship, and makes no particular attempt to capitalize on Lewis' volcanic personality or his famous colleagues. Wagner writes clearly, if without particular flair, and covers his points in orderly progression. Though the scholarly tone of the work and its meticulous consideration of details will probably deter the general reader, it contains much of interest about a provocative man in a turbulent literary...