John wyndham

John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris, British writer, born July 10, 1903 in Knowle and died in 1969.

The son of a lawyer, he tried various professions (from farmer to art dealer to publicist) until he began writing in the late 1930s, where his detective or sci-fi short stories met with limited success. He enlisted in the British Army during World War II, and participated in the Normandy landings. This fact would mark him so deeply that he supposed that after the war he would opt for catastrophic and apocalyptic stories, mainly of alien invasions. For example, his biggest hit, The Day of the Triffids, which is written just after the war ended, is essentially a story of an invasion of Britain by "foreigners" 3. 4; (in this case, the Triffids).

Style

Wyndham's work mixes science fiction with horror. For example, The Midwich Cuckoos in its film version gave rise to The People of the Damned (1960), a story where the invasion of extraterrestrials is done through birth - simultaneous - of some strange children of all the fertile women of the town of Midwich. Children all blond, blue-eyed, highly intelligent and, as later discovered, with telepathic powers. The Day of the Triffids itself is the story of humanity blinded by strange lights in the sky and The kraken lurks against dangerous walking carnivorous plants. >, the alien invasion comes from the bottom of the sea.

The most terrifying thing about these stories is that humanity is not faced with terrible monsters, but with seemingly "normal" situations: Wyndham loves to describe the towns of the English countryside, those same towns that will be invaded by horrifying aliens.

Evolution is an ever-present theme in his works. Most of the invading aliens can be interpreted as species better adapted than man that take control of the environment that surrounds them. In this sense, Las crisálidas is his most paradigmatic work. In it he describes the genetic fundamentalism that emerged in a post-nuclear society, which forces anyone affected by a malformation to be sacrificed.