A slow apocalypse

[bibliogramma]

The Kraken Wakes by John Wyndham

I've been rereading old sf classics as I find used copies here and there (or my partner does, which is essentially the same thing). I've managed to find a few volumes to restart my collection of John Wyndham novels. Wyndham is probably best known for The Midwich Cuckoos and The Day of the Triffids, both of which were made into movies, but I've always preferred The Kraken Wakes.

There are some strong similarities between the three books - an alien lifeform arrives on Earth, and changes life as everyone knows it - but what makes The Kraken Wakes that little bit more interesting to me is the slow progress of the invasion, as it were, and the detailed examination of how political and scientific communities around the world ignore the problem until it's just too late to do anything. There is some of this subtheme in the other works I've mentioned, but it is exploited to its fullest here.

Like many other sf writers, a lot of Wyndham's work deals with comunication - or the lack of it, or indeed the impossibility of it - whether between humans or with alien species. Those issues are foregrounded in the book, in part because the protagonists, a husband and wife research and writing team for a British television network, communicate for a living. They want to understand, to put the pieces together, to communicate.

Something else that I enjoy about Wyndham's work is that he sees women as people who contribute actively to the development of the plot. Wyndham's women are not the women of much standard sf written in the 1950s and early 1960s. They are often present in the novel becasue of their relationship with a man - Wyndham was a man of his times - but once in the novel, they think, they act, they offer valuable contributions to the development of the story.

I enjoyed reading this again. I must find more of his works to re-read (bearing always in mind that the man had more pen names than most sf writers of the era: John Beynon, John Beynon Harris, Johnson Harris, Lucas Parkes, and Wyndham Parkes.