John Wyndham is the pen name of John Wyndham Parkes Lucas
Beynon Harris (1903–1969), the son of an English barrister. The
boy’s parents separated when he was eight, and after attending
various boarding schools, he lived off family money while trying
his hand—unsuccessfully—at careers such as law, commercial
illustration, and advertising. In 1924 he turned to writing, and
within a number of years he was selling short stories, mostly
science fiction, to pulp magazines in America, as John Beynon or
John Beynon Harris. During World War II, he served behind the lines
in the British army, and in 1951 he published The Day of the
Triffids, his first novel as John Wyndham, and a tremendous
success. John Wyndham’s six other novels include The Kraken Wakes
and The Midwich Cuckoos.
Christopher Priest has published eleven novels, three
short-story collections, and a number of other books, including
critical works, biographies, novelizations, and children’s
nonfiction. In 1996 Priest won the World Fantasy Award and the
James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel The Prestige. His
most recent novel, The Separation, won both the Arthur C. Clarke
Award and the British Science Fiction Association Award.
"John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids anticipates and surpasses many of
today’s dystopian thrillers….The Chrysalids explores intolerance
and bigotry with satisfying complexity as it races toward an ending
that is truly unpredictable." —The Seattle Times"One of the most
thoughtful post-apocalypse novels ever written. Wyndham was a true
English visionary, a William Blake with a science doctorate." --
David Mitchell
"Sometimes you just need a bit of soft-core sci-fi, and Wyndham’s
1950’s classic, newly back in print, fully delivers." --Thicket
Magazine "It is quite simply a page-turner, maintaining
suspense to the very end and vividly conjuring the circumstances of
a crippled and menacing world, and of the fear and sense of
betrayal that pervade it. The ending, a salvation of an extremely
dubious sort, leaves the reader pondering how truly ephemeral our
version of civilization is..." --The Boston Globe “[Wyndham]
was responsible for a series of eerily terrifying tales of
destroyed civilisations; created several of the twentieth century's
most imaginative monsters; and wrote a handful of novels that are
rightly regarded as modern classics.” –The Observer
(London) “Science fiction always tells you more about the
present than the future. John Wyndham's classroom favourite might
be set in some desolate landscape still to come, but it is rooted
in the concerns of the mid-1950s. Published in 1955, it's a novel
driven by the twin anxieties of the cold war and the atomic
bomb…Fifty years on, when our enemy has changed and our fear of
nuclear catastrophe has subsided, his analysis of our tribal
instinct is as pertinent as ever.” –The Guardian
(London) “[A]bsolutely and completely brilliant…The Chrysalids
is a top-notch piece of sci-fi that should be enjoyed for
generations yet to come.” –The Ottawa Citizen “John Wyndham's
novel The Chrysalids is a famous example of 1950s Cold War science
fiction, but its portrait of a community driven to authoritarian
madness by its overwhelming fear of difference - in this case, of
genetic mutations in the aftermath of nuclear war - finds its
echoes in every society.” –The Scotsman “The Chrysalids comes
heart-wrenchingly close to being John Wyndham's most powerful and
profound work.” –SFReview.net “Re-Birth (The Chrysalids) was
one of the first science fiction novels I read as a youth, and
several times tempted me to take a piggy census. Returning to it
now, more than 30 years later, I find that I remember vast parts of
it with perfect clarity…a book to kindle the joy of reading science
fiction. –SciFi.com “A remarkably tender story of a
post-nuclear childhood…It has, of course, always seemed a classic
to most of its three generations of readers...It has become part of
a canon of good books.” –The Guardian, September 15, 2000
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