The Enemy Within

[bibliogramma]

The Midwich Cuckoos – John Wyndham

One of the great classics dealing with mid-20th century xenophobic paranoia, The Midwich Cuckoos is, for the handful of people who don’t know the basic plot, the story of a quiet English village that, along with a number of other small human habitations scattered around the planet, falls asleep one day and nine months later finds itself rearing a group of very unusual and psychically gifted children who are ultimately revealed to be a threat to all humankind.

It’s a simple story, one that that couches the question of the human response to fear of the unknown, the different, the other, inside a Darwinian framework – preservation of the species against the possible introduction of a new improved species that might compete successfully for resources and eventually drive out and condemn to evolutionary failure its less adapted predecessor.

The mysterious and obviously inhuman children are born with powerful defence mechanisms that protect them from deliberate attempts to harm them and enable them to retaliate against and punish much of what they cannot protect themselves from. Their difference, and their gifts, evoke fear in the humans around them. The situation moves quickly to a face-off in which both groups – the children, and the natural inhabitants of the world they have appeared in – assume that competition to the point of destruction is the only alternative.

The assumption is that Midwich and the other sites where these strange children have been born have been seeded by aliens, who leave their young to either survive or die with nothing more than their exceptional abilities to help them – in itself an evolutionary mechanism that permits minimal investment in reproduction at a great potential cost.

The fact that the children are shown to be a species of hive-minds – each town actually host only two alien individuals, one male, one female, with multiple bodies – without much in the way of difference or individuality in their component parts, suggests an interpretation of the book as a ideologically slanted parable of the Cold War, with the recently “hatched” communist totalitarian states invading the long-established capitalist and individualistic nations of the West via an insidious "fifth column." The enemy might be, not just the person beside you, but the very child at your breast.

Was Wyndam saying in The Midwich Cuckoos that co-operation between different species – or different socio-political systems – is doomed to failure and must inevitably end in the destruction of one or the other? Or was he lamenting the mindset in which fear of the unknown and the impulse to answer threat with escalated threat makes such co-operation unthinkable? I’ve never been completely certain, but either way, The Midwich Cuckoos does present the question for consideration in unforgettable fashion, and, as it was when the book was first written, it is a question well worth considering today.