Unfocused wars against unseen enemies, the threat of biological warfare and religious fundamentalism are no more strangers to novelists now than they were 50 years ago, when John Wyndham's The Day of the Triffids was first published. Today's uncomfortable themes all found their way into the works of that master of what is now termed science fiction, and hang eerily over recent events.
Wyndham had his first major success with The Day of the Triffids. The combination of a quintessential Englishness and a uniquely strange fictional vision was a compelling and popular mix that transcended the traditional market for an otherwise niche genre. Beneath the surface of his English tones, however, he was more radical than his critics have recognised.
Born in Knowle, West Midlands, in 1903, John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris took on several careers to go with his several names: farming, law, commercial art, advertising and then the civil service. Only after the Second World War did Triffids establish him as a successful writer. His slowly unfurling plot combined the suspense of a gripping crime novel with the curiosity of a man whose ideas were as varied as his CV. The result was Wyndham's answer to the question: what if plant life evolved to threaten mankind?
His narrative threw in what was to become a typical leveller: he took away man's sight with a spectacular meteor display that ruined the optic nerves. And in a gruesome twist, he created a carnivorous plant that gained an awkward, stumbling mobility - a sort of "Baron von Titchmarsh's monster".
Thus began a familiar theme in Wyndham's celebrated succession of novels in the 1950s and 1960s - the manipulation of one fundamental element that introduces chaos into an organised society and culminates in the decimated civilisation making a desperate attempt to reinvent itself and survive. His later novels had us hamstrung by conventional weapons and warfare as our towns and cities slid under-water from a marine invasion that no one could combat (The Kraken Wakes, 1953); waging a fundamentalist religious war against our own survival in the wake of nuclear turmoil (The Chrysalids, 1955); and letting a fleeting chance to attain immortality slip through our fingers as violent commercial pressures ruin the potential benefits (Trouble with Lichen, 1960).
Wyndham's critics always pointed to his Englishness, and his stories are indeed rooted in the comforting glow of Dixon of Dock Green - his characters are almost all middle-class and white, and of a good educational background. They take quiet evening strolls. The name of the character Zellaby in The Midwich Cuckoos (played in the film version by George Sanders, perfectly cast) is an allusion to Sherlock Holmes. His places are called Oppley, Trayne and Stouch; their pastures, mills and weirs are presumably borrowed from his own Warwickshire roots. And then he set about organising the collapse of this idyll. As one critic said, he took "genteel English destruction further than Wells had".
This was the 1950s; the political backdrop to his writing was the cold war. Wyndham's stories were pitched at his contemporary audience, and his fascination with Englishness disguised a sidelong sneer at the vulnerability and incompetence of British authority. National institutions are presented as posturing, vain, ignorant and indifferent, keeping separate those who most need to co-operate at the time of greatest crisis. The realisation of the true enemy and the correct course of action always dawns too late. The blindness that breaks out in Triffids is not a lack of sight so much as a metaphor for a lack of foresight. The telepathy he describes in the factional war zones of The Chrysalids signifies co-operation rather than social divisiveness.
Part of Wyndham's cynicism about institutions may have come from his experiences as an official censor during the war until 1943, after which he served in the Royal Signal Corps. He also spent some time as a civil servant, and his father was a barrister. These traces of the establishment in his life may have given him raw material. It is difficult to say, because he left very little biographical information, had a strong dislike of personal publicity, and left instructions to his estate that he was resolutely opposed to a biography. To this day, there has not been one.
Critics have argued that the tone and locale of Wyndham's most famous works are limited, yet he entered into this willingly, even deliberately exaggerating it - for example, by calling one chapter in The Midwich Cuckoos "Well Played, Midwich". For him, introducing an element of science fiction was sufficient suspension of disbelief. He saw the need for his readers to cling on to something they could perceive as common. Wyndham's market was the middle class, whose old-fashioned values he lightly satirised. His depiction of the collapse of this homogeneous class was all the more shocking because he used its own idiom to emphasise its destruction.
The issues Wyndham raised half a century ago remain contentious today. The Day of the Triffids contains the seeds of Jurassic Park. In both, an original or revolutionary scientific idea is hijacked by commercial interests and becomes uncontrollable outside a contained environment. Although Wyndham's treatment is very different from Michael Crichton's, both plots germinate from biological botch-ups.
While fiction today invariably focuses on the latest developments in science - recently, genetics and cloning - Wyndham differs by looking not at the manner of destruction, nor even at the morality of it, but at the consequences. Anticipating the impact of commercialism on nature, Wyndham's characters are displaced from their environment and forced into hostile ones, running, scavenging from the country decaying around them. In The Kraken Wakes, the rising tide reduces London to a gigantic boating lake, and parliament is forced to relocate to York.
Wyndham also identified issues that have since accrued political interest and importance. The Chrysalids is a chilling dissertation on the emergence of fascism in a society frightened by its own deviancy. Wyndham's satire is uncommonly scathing in the way he creates a crude regime of religious intolerance. He paints a distressing portrait of unsentimental destruction of the disabled. New political leaders ascend from the lowest common denominator, evoking the sheer ruthlessness of regimes such as the Taliban.
The irony in his work is subtle, and the humour understated, but both are vital ingredients. In Web (published posthumously in 1979) and Triffids, plant and insect life become hazardous to man after adapting their intellect from man's own behaviour. By the end of Triffids, the survivors are in effect confined to a reserve, marginalised and endangered by the evolution and development of another species, in an ironic reversal of how we have used the animal species.
Too often was John Wyndham described as a disaster novelist. He was, more correctly, a post-disaster novelist. In that sense, he was an optimist. Even his critics acknowledge that his success introduced sci-fi to a new audience. Especially popular in America, he took a genre that lacked critical kudos, and which was anchored to a cult readership, and displayed it in the shop window of English literature.
