Advantages: An original writer of imaginative and gripping science fiction.
Disadvantages: Perhaps a little dated now.

...John Wyndham is a British science fiction writer, who started writing in the thirties, but his best known works were written in the 1950s. As a result, much of his fiction is tinged with echoes from the cold war and can seem dated. However, his sheer imagination, brilliant descriptive writing and believable characters make him a must read author, even today. Most people have heard of The Day of the Triffids, as it has been reworked for film and television, as was The Midwich Cuckoos. However, some of Wyndham's slightly less famous books such as Chocky and The Kraken Awakes are just as entertaining and highly readable. The Day of the Triffids begins with one of the best openings to a story I have ever read. The story opens in a hospital, the day after a spectacular firework display caused by thousands of meteorites, which the whole... Read review

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Advantages: Excellent on every level
Disadvantages: The premise might take a bit of swallowing

..."The Day of the Triffids" marked a turning point in John Wyndham's career, as he adopted a new pseudonym and style, and showed a marked improvement in his talent as well as his sales. The plot is probably familiar to everyone - with most of the human race blinded, man-eating plants take over. It sounds daft, but in Wyndham's hands the situation is portrayed convincingly. Fortunately Wyndham does not allow the book to dissolve into melodrama. Instead he shows in a convincing and thoughtful manner how different people might cope with the disaster, from panic and giving up, through the introduction of a police state, to the more benevolent society that the protagonist and his friends dedicate themselves to. There is no deus ex machina: no one discovers a miracle cure or weapon, they simply fight on as best they can, and by the end... Read review

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Advantages: Thought provoking -entertaining-dammed good read
Disadvantages: none

...The day off the Triffids is probably one of the author John Wyndham's best known books and a personal favorite of mine. Possibly because I first discovered it when I was about 12, devouring the horror of it over a weekend, or maybe that I then later studied it at "O level" and discovered a whole new level to the book I had missed when I was younger. For whatever reasons I now have two copies that I find I can go back to time and time again and never be boared with. Written in 1951. The Cold War was clearly preying on Wyndham's mind at the time of writing, and the book mirrors a growing sense of unease felt by many during this time, Where they felt man was on the brink of wiping himself off the face of the earth, either through war or industrial accident and that we were delving in to scientific areas of research we knew very little... Read review

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Advantages: Entertaining, readable
Disadvantages: A couple of weaker links, some stories not "meaty"

...John Wyndham, the classic British science-fiction writer probably best known for "The Day of The Triffids" published this collection of six short stories in 1961 The first story, which gives its title to the collection, is a novella really and could have been stretched into a short novel. It is the piece de resistance of the book. A woman wakes up in a hospital bed to find her body has grown in a gross manner and everything around her is different. She was a doctor in her remembered life but now she is practically bedridden and learns her function is simply to produce babies, presumably through some test-tube method or other. The story deals with an all-female society. Women are grouped into different functions, representing political power, professionals, warriors, manual labour and Mothers - theoretically the most important... Read review

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Advantages: A satisfying read
Disadvantages: none

...'s worse characteristics.Only a few of the sighted join up with the each other and try to make a stand against the triffids. Only a few individuals have retained their sight, those that didn't for one one reason or another, watch the light show of the comets. One man, Bill Mason, a biologist and our protaganist in this story, lays in a hospital bed, his eyes covered in bandages which have been covered since a triffid attack a week before. He has acquired a slight immunity to the plants as well as an interest in them, due to a previous attack while working with them at the triffid oil processing farm. John Wyndham is a pen name for John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris, who wrote around the 30's to the 60's. As well as the Triffids novel, he wrote The Midwich Cuckoos (filmed in 1960 as Village Of The Damned) and The Chrysalids... Read review

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Advantages: Amazingly atmospheric, simple but ingenious plot
Disadvantages: ... ... ... ... ... ... well, none spring to mind.

...I wonder if a science fiction like John Wyndham could become popular today. The plot of his story, as is the case with The Midwich Cuckoos, runs something like this: Unknown object hits earth, leaves something behind, hey who cares what or why let's just look at how it affects people and how people react to it. Nowadays most sci-fi authors would feel obliged to go into great detail describing the why and how - especially the how - using as complicated jargon and scientifically accurate terminology as possible. Not Wyndham - his novels are far less about the actual event or object, and focus almost entirely on the people. This is the quality that makes his books so accessible for those that might not be fans of science fiction generally, and also help to make them timeless. ----- The sleepy village of Midwich... Read review

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Advantages: Entertaining, occasionally thought-provoking
Disadvantages: Two-dimensional characterisation, tapers off

...John Wyndham is best known for “The Day of the Triffids”. Although “The Midwich Cuckoos” (filmed as “The Village of the Damned”) and “The Chrysalids” under review here, also attracted considerable interest. Wyndham is an interesting, very British, science fiction writer. He does not deal in fantasy worlds with hosts of unfamiliar creatures battling each other for control of galaxies. Wyndham’s novels may not be parochial but they are very much earthbound, with a rogue element introduced which creates the dramatic conditions for his novels. In the case of “The Chrysalids” Wyndham is concerned with a post nuclear holocaust scenario – the novel was written in 1955 when the Cold War threat was a very real one – where the effects of radiation have devastated... Read review

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Advantages: It's Wyndham...
Disadvantages: ... many of the t stories end just when they're getting interesting...

...The Seeds of Time is a collection of 10 short stories by John Wyndham, author of such sci-fi classics as The Day of the Triffids and The Midwich Cookoos. In a short foreward he explains his reasons for writing the stories, as a ckind of cross-genre experiment, and his dismay that the science fiction genre in popular terms had become tied up almost exclusively to tales of intergalactic heroes. He also thanks various magazines who were willing to publish these stories which, at the time, were viewed as unsuitable for the mass market. The stories themselves are varied and almost all interesting, with Wydnham's unique style and wry humour coming out in all of them to some degree. First off we have CHRONOCLASM, a kind of time-travel romance, followed by TIME TO REST is a tale of a lone earthman travelling across Mars in search... Read review

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Advantages: Thoughtful, intelligent sci-fi...
Disadvantages: ... some occasionally long-winded speeches

...The Chsysalids by John Wyndham is a post-apolaclyptic vision of a world where people are obsessed with conformity to the norm, or in their words, "the image of God". Anyone who does not conform to this image becomes an outcast, and the women who are categorised as Deviants are sterilised before being sent off. The "image of God" has 2 arms, 2 legs, 2 eyes, 1 nose, 5 digits at the end of eat hand and foot… etc. You get the idea. The narrator of this book is David, a young, apparently normal boy who finds out quite early on that he is not quite normal… but to all outward appearances he is, so is safe from the religious-minded people around him, chief of whom is his father. Not so lucky is a girl he meets who has a physical deviation, and this causes him to wonder whether it really is the will of God being done by the zealots here... Read review

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Advantages: Fantastic story, tense, gripping
Disadvantages: Ridiculous film adaptation...

...The Day of the Triffids is a genuinely chilling tale of an ecological apocalypse. First published in 1951, time ha