He’s already doing what science fiction does best: asking big questions and exploring the implications of certain developments in science and society. Indeed, in these early John Wyndham stories we find him already high on concept, not settling for run-of-the-mill space operas or adventure stories where colonial subjects have been swapped for aliens from another planet. And although he would really find his own voice as an author – and, more crucially, his distinctive theme or set of loosely related themes – Wyndham’s early work shows a writer beginning to shake himself loose from the shackles of the pulp fiction market and the constraints of formulaic genre fiction. But although The Day of the Triffids in 1951 marks Wyndham’s ‘beginning’ as a major writer, he had already published a number of SF novels under the name John Beynon (Beynon being one of his many middle names), including several planetary romances, as well as many stories in the magazines of the era. In that first haul, it was later, mature Wyndham that I picked up, dating from the 1950s and 1960s. In my previous blog post, I mentioned how John Wyndham is a ‘charity shop’ author: his novels frequently turn up in branches of Oxfam or Age UK for 99p in slightly battered Penguin paperbacks from the 1960s and 1970s, and as I said, this is how I (belatedly) got into his work, having come across a pile of them in these exact circumstances.
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