Gary K. Wolfe Reviews Logical Fantasy: The Many Worlds of John Wyndham by John Wyndham

Logical Fantasy: The Many Worlds of John Wyndham, John Wyndham (Subterranean 978-1-64524-143-0, $50.00, 424pp, hc) April 2024.

So many impressive writers of short fiction have shown up over the past few decades that it’s worth wondering how the writers of earlier generations seem to be holding up. A couple of new collections from two very different figures, Harlan Ellison and John Wyndham, might offer some clues. There was a time when Wyndham was among the most familiar names in what has since come to be called literary SF, earning praise from writers as diverse as Stephen King, Margaret Atwood, and David Mitchell, and for a time he was regarded, at least in the UK, as a solid midlist novelist rather than as a genre SF writer. When he contributed a novella to an original collection titled Sometime, Never in 1956, for example, the other two contributors were William Golding and Mervyn Peake. Now, I suspect, he’s remembered mostly for two novels which were later adapted into films, The Midwich Cuckoos (filmed as Village of the Damned) and The Day of the Triffids (which provided the SF vocabulary with a convenient catch-all term for any sort of scary-looking plants). Although he published a number of collections during his lifetime (he died in 1969), his short fiction was never quite as popular, and it’s been more than a half-century since the posthumous The Best of John Wyndham was published in England (apparently it never even appeared in the US, although a separate small-press retrospective appeared in 2003). Interestingly, only four of the stories from The Best Of appear among the 18 selections in Logical Fantasy: The Many Worlds of John Wyndham edited by David Dyte, so that likely even the relatively few readers familiar with his stories will have a good deal to discover.

Wyndham’s career lasted from the early days of the pulps through the New Wave, but breaks naturally at World War II, prior to which he published under variations of his own name, as John Beynon or John Beynon Harris. The earliest story in the collection, ‘‘The Lost Machine’’, appeared in Amazing Stories in 1932 and, like much pulp fiction of the era, focuses on a single concept designed to evoke a classic sense of wonder – in this case, an intelligent machine from Mars stranded on Earth after its spaceship crashes, killing its human companion. But Wyndham already shows a bent toward the literary, splitting the narrative between the viewpoints of the scientist and his daughter who find the machine, and the machine itself, whose frustration at finding only dumb machines on Earth adds a comic overtone. A similar breeziness shows up in ‘‘Spheres of Hell’’, in which a fad for raising pumpkin-like growths – originally designed as a kind of biological warfare – quickly gets out of control, perhaps offering an early glimpse of the sort of veggie apocalypse we’d see much later in the triffids. By 1938, though, with ‘‘Beyond the Screen’’, anxiety about European politics clearly informs what otherwise would be a standard superweapon tale, involving a device which projects a field that annihilates anything in its path without a trace. ‘‘The Reich made public references to fertile and foreign lands,’’ we are told, the ‘‘Rome-Berlin axis’’ represents a growing threat – hence the need for a defensive superweapon – and Nazi officers turn out to be the villains. But again, Wyndham offers an unusual twist – objects ‘‘annihilated’’ by the field don’t simply cease to exist, but are projected into an alternate timeline.

Significantly, a gap shows up between 1939 and 1946 – Wyndham served in the war – and by the time of ‘‘Living Lies’’ (1946), a rather heavyhanded parable of racism set on a Venus whose population is rigidly segregated according to skin colors which turn out to be entirely artificial – he’s begun to turn decisively away from pulp clichés, or at least to upend them. The premise of ‘‘The Eternal Eve’’ sounds like the setup for a smirky Playboy-style fantasy – one of the few women colonists on Venus becomes the only hope for the continuation of the human race after the Earth is destroyed – but Wyndham chooses to focus on the woman, Amanda, who refuses to be objectified: ‘‘I’m me; my own self. They won’t make me belong to one of them.’’ As Michael Marshall Smith notes in his brief introduction, she’s not the only self-sufficient, competent woman in these stories. In ‘‘Survival’’, the only woman aboard a Mars rocket that goes off course into deep space, with little hope of rescue, at first appears shy and withdrawn, but turns out to exert her survival skills in ways that complicate the horror-story ending. On the other hand, the neurasthenic housewife in ‘‘Compassion Circuit’’, persuaded to buy a domestic robot because she’s wearing herself out with housework, veers uncomfortably close to 1950s stereotypes.

Generally, the later stories seem more playful and more confident, coming to resemble the odd twists of a John Collier story more than reflecting SF tropes. We begin to get a stronger sense of humor in ‘‘Pawley’s Peepholes’’, in which a British city plagued by time-travelers finds a way to turn the tables, and ‘‘Chinese Puzzle’’, which pits a newlyhatched Chinese dragon against a traditional Welsh dragon as a test of national pride – which the dragons themselves are not at all interested in. Two of the most charming tales are twists on the old-fashioned time-slip; in ‘‘Odd’’, an investor from 1906 somehow finds his consciousness briefly thrust forward to 1958, where he learns about plastics, and ‘‘Stitch in Time’’ briefly permits an old woman to reunite with her lover, who hastemporarily been brought fifty years forward in time. And ‘‘Perforce to Dream’’, one of the most haunting tales despite its weak resolution, begins with two women having independently submitted almost identical novels to a publisher, after having had a succession of similar dreams. By this point, though, we’ve come to appreciate that the real strength of Wyndham’s stories are not the gimmicks or the sense-of-wonder gotcha moments, but the increasingly graceful prose, the ingenious structures, and the credible, sympathetic characters faced with oddities, paradoxes, and mysteries. It’s a long ride from those pulp beginnings, and something of a shame that Wyndham’s best short fiction – of which this is only a sampler – remains almost unknown today.

Gary K. Wolfe is Emeritus Professor of Humanities at Roosevelt University and a reviewer for Locus magazine since 1991. His reviews have been collected in Soundings (BSFA Award 2006; Hugo nominee), Bearings (Hugo nominee 2011), and Sightings (2011), and his Evaporating Genres: Essays on Fantastic Literature (Wesleyan) received the Locus Award in 2012. Earlier books include The Known and the Unknown: The Iconography of Science Fiction (Eaton Award, 1981), Harlan Ellison: The Edge of Forever (with Ellen Weil, 2002), and David Lindsay (1982). For the Library of America, he edited American Science Fiction: Nine Classic Novels of the 1950s in 2012, and a similar set for the 1960s. He has received the Pilgrim Award from the Science Fiction Research Association, the Distinguished Scholarship Award from the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts, and a Special World Fantasy Award for criticism. His 24-lecture series How Great Science Fiction Works appeared from The Great Courses in 2016. He has received six Hugo nominations, two for his reviews collections and four for The Coode Street Podcast, which he has co-hosted with Jonathan Strahan for more than 300 episodes. He lives in Chicago.

This review and more like it in the April 2024 issue of Locus.

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