Ideas from Outside the Mind
Reviewing Two John Wyndham Sci-Fi Classics, ‘The Chrysalids’ and ‘Chocky’
Writing as the Nazis first rose to power and later as the Cold War raged, British sci-fi writer John Wyndham could be forgiven his fixation on the catastrophic and apocalyptic. Last year I reviewed The Day of the Triffids (1951), along with several others, including The Kraken Wakes (1953) and The Midwich Cuckoos (1957), all of which exemplify the fascination.
It’s the same with The Chrysalids (1955) and Chocky (1968), each with an intriguing commonality.
The Chrysalids begins sometime in a distant future with two children playing. David, son of a local farmer and community leader, and his secretive neighbor Sophie, share nothing but fun until the girl’s foot gets lodged in a crack and requires David’s help to withdraw. When he removes her shoe, he sees: Splayed across Sophie’s dainty foot sit not five but six toes. Suddenly, the two share something else; they’re both secret outlaws.
Written against the backdrop of nuclear proliferation and widespread fear of global annihilation, The Chrysalids assumes nuclear war has already happened in the remote past. Ever since, humanity has been dealing with mutations caused by fallout from the conflagration. Plants, animals, even people can—and do—all show signs of deviation from the supposed norm.
Rather than admit such morally neutral divergences could prove deleterious in some cases but harmless or even helpful in others, citizens of Labrador have banned all mutations, declaring them evidence of God’s judgment. A girl with six toes? Clear evidence the devil’s handiwork.
What of invisible deviations?
David is secretively telepathic; so are several neighboring friends; and so is his new baby sister, Petra. The unnatural ability presents complications, given that David’s father is one of the chief proponents of ridding their world of deviations—all the more so when it emerges he has secrets of his own.
Chocky strikes a much different note. The final novel Wyndham published in his lifetime (he passed in 1969), Chocky is a cozy alien-encounter story in which eleven-year-old Matthew’s invisible friend turns out to be anything but imaginary. The tipoff?
Matthew begins asking questions no adolescent would ask, begins doing his math homework in binary code, starts painting pictures with preternatural ability and strange perspective, miraculously learns to swim just in time to save his sister from drowning—among other oddities.
His puzzled adoptive parents first chalk it up to childhood development, then some form of psychiatric ailment, reluctantly entertaining the notion of possession and haunting, and finally—at least for Dad—admitting the real presence of Chocky, an alien scout looking for a suitable new planet and eager to warn us of the mess we’re making with our own.
Both novels share this feature. In the case of The Chrysalids, an advanced society in Zealand not only rescues David and Petra, revealing a surprising reality about their strange ability, its representatives also serve as outside observers, offering a corrective to the backwardness of David’s reactionary society. Thankfully, Wyndham keeps the preachiness to a minimum.
More interestingly, both The Chrysalids and Chocky play with telepathy. For David and his friends, it’s a mutation that allows them to talk and plan in privacy. For Matthew, it’s a bridge across space that allows Chocky to communicate with him; Matthew never sees Chocky, but he sees with Chocky’s eyes and meets him in his mind.
Wyndham was clearly fascinated with the idea. He also uses it in the aforementioned Midwich Cuckoos, in that case also an alien ability and an eerie one at that. The Cuckoos’s shared mind precludes individuality, but in both The Chrysalids and Chocky telepathy is a more straightforward means to access another’s mind while retaining one’s own. The Cuckoos weaponize their talent against their hosts, but Matthew and David and his friends use it for constructive ends.
Wyndham’s work—suffused with the technological fascinations and societal anxieties of the fifties and sixties—nonetheless reaches far beyond his own day into our own. We can, for instance, treat his use of telepathy in these novels not only as a narrative device but also as a metaphor for both the perils and potentialities of human connectivity and technological capabilities; it offers some interesting lines to think along.
How do we use the tools we’re given? We obsesses over the catastrophic and apocalyptic because we are contingent and vulnerable creatures. Wyndham reminds us that we possess the means to worsen our situation or better it, depending on how we answer that question.
Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this post, please hit the ❤️ below and share with your friends.
Not a subscriber? Take a moment and sign up. It’s free for now, and I’ll send you my top-fifteen quotes about books and reading. Thanks again!
Make sure you also see:
Wyndham was one of Britain's greatest SF writers. He mastered the concept of bringing the strange and eerie into mild-mannered Britain at roughly the same time Ray Bradbury was doing it to the United States.
One of my favourite childhood authors along with C.S. Lewis, Tolkien, and Rosemary Sutcliffe. The worlds those authors created helped keep my soul alive until I came alive to the search for soul and coming home to new becoming.