John Wyndham The Best of John Wyndham (Sphere, 1973)
1970s and it's a spacecraft all right, but rendered in a weird sort of cartoon pastel style (similar to that by which Mary, Mungo, Midge, Crystal Tips, and Alastair were once animated) that's used on a couple of thoese Sphere Best of collections. What were they thinking?
Having been terrified close to the point of diahorrea when at the age of six I tried to read Wyndham's The Kraken Wakes, I never went near the man's works ever again but for watching the odd film adaptation. Oddly enough I keep seeing the books from which said films were adapted (Day of the Triffids, The Midwich Cuckoos) being described as 'cosy catastrophe', so either Wyndham authored disasters and invasions tend to place unusual emphasis on damage to cushions and upholstery, or it was something to do with his style of writing. Pretty fucking sure it's the latter actually.
Anyway, being as Wyndham's various cosy catastrophe's are generally regarded as classics (and even without reading them I tend to think this seems fair) and might therefore be properly regarded as his best, it makes the title of this collection a little misleading (common problem with these Best of jobs), and unfortunately downright untrue in one or two cases. As these stories were written during and between 1932 and 1960, there's inevitably some unflattering dating in one or two cases, though with Wyndham being an English writer the way in which some of these stories have dated provide an odd contrast to (for example) A.E, van Vogt. Whereas van Vogt at his most demonstratively of-its-time presents, at worst, a collage of hard-boiled pulp b-movie cliches, Wyndham at his own most demonstratively of-its-time reads like an Ealing comedy, and not always one of the better ones (such as The Ladykillers, before those eejits remade it with Tom fuckin' Hanks). In general, his occasional lapses into the written equivalent of received pronunciation are probably less awkward (at least from my perspective) or pronounced than the equivalent American pulp-isms of the time, but at worst this means ostensibly semi-serious stories with chirpy working class characters called Spotty and Smudger (Close Behind Him) or, at absolute worst Pawley's Peepholes, a tale of time-tourists descending upon small town England which could easily have been written with Big Hearted Arthur Askey, Tommy Trinder (*1) and that Where's-Me-Washboard? character from The Fast Show in mind. Sorry, John, I'm sure Pawley's Peepholes was funny in 1951 but really, I just expected better.
And I expected better because most of the other stuff (excepting maybe Perfect Creature which almost certainly stars a young Bernard Bresslaw) suggests there's something to the claim of Wyndham's status as legend. Inevitably there's a few Dan Dare-isms (for want of a more thought-out term) - plenty of space rockets and colonialism, not much quantum theory, acid house, or teenage pregnancy - but they're generally lost amongst such fantastic writing that you tend to forget. The Trojan Beam and Dumb Martian stand out in particular as having qualities far beyond the constrictions of aging (if that makes sense), and the latter is certainly one of the best (and most righteously rewarding) absolute-tosser-gets-come-uppance stories I've ever read. Strange, how even during his most painfully hackneyed Cholmondley Warner (*2) source material moments, despite the apparent wealth of 1930s or 1940s cliches, it's worth noting that at no point during the reading of this collection did I see any of the twelve endings coming from a mile off, as is so often the case with fiction written when today's corn still seemed fresh. That's quite an achievement.
*1: http://video.google.com/v...my+Trinder&sitesearch=#
*2: http://video.google.com/v...ley+Warner&sitesearch=#
