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Mar. 14th, 2017 02:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsI'm familiar with John Wyndham as the author of such science fiction classics as Day of the Triffids and The Kraken Wakes, but I'd never heard of The Chrysalids before reading it for work book club.
The Chrysalids is I think the earliest example I've ever encountered of the now-familiar trope, Psychic Kids Against Cruel World. In this particular case, the cruel world is a post-apocalyptic future in what I think is strongly implied to be northern Canada, which has set up a strict religious farming society in response to massive nuclear destruction.
The fact that protagonist David is a Psychic Kid isn't actually revealed until a few chapters in, after David has already talked us through his friendship with six-toed Sophie, Sophie's parents' attempt to hide her 'mutation', the eventual discovery of Sophie's extra toe by the authorities, and Sophie's family's attempt to flee. Only then is David like, "ALSO, by the way, I have a telepathic bond with my cousin Rosemary and a couple other random kids from the closest six towns or so and we all live in terror lest anyone should find out and denounce us as mutants! GOOD TIMES."
Eventually a couple things start to disturb the tenuous balance that keeps David and his other psychic friends safe and out of suspicion:
- one teenage telepathic girl decides to marry a local non-telepathic boy, despite the fact that all of her friends think this is a terrible idea -- as it, in fact, turns out very definitely to be
- David's baby sister turns out to be an ENORMOUSLY POWERFUL telepath who is CONSTANTLY SCREAMING at all the other telepathic kids ALL THE TIME because she DOESN'T KNOW HOW TO USE AN INDOOR TELEPATH VOICE, which means that suddenly all the telepathic kids are, like, running out to the middle of the woods together for no apparent reason because Petra fell into a hole and will not shut up in their heads
- also, while we're at it, Petra informs David that there are some other people out there she's been chatting with, well beyond the bounds of what the rest of the community considers dead world; they're super far away! but they're there!
You probably have a sense of the kind of book this is by now, I think. It's a very good example of this kind of book; maybe the ur-example? In any case, I enjoyed it, in a grim and postapocalyptic but not hopeless sort of way.
The Chrysalids is I think the earliest example I've ever encountered of the now-familiar trope, Psychic Kids Against Cruel World. In this particular case, the cruel world is a post-apocalyptic future in what I think is strongly implied to be northern Canada, which has set up a strict religious farming society in response to massive nuclear destruction.
The fact that protagonist David is a Psychic Kid isn't actually revealed until a few chapters in, after David has already talked us through his friendship with six-toed Sophie, Sophie's parents' attempt to hide her 'mutation', the eventual discovery of Sophie's extra toe by the authorities, and Sophie's family's attempt to flee. Only then is David like, "ALSO, by the way, I have a telepathic bond with my cousin Rosemary and a couple other random kids from the closest six towns or so and we all live in terror lest anyone should find out and denounce us as mutants! GOOD TIMES."
Eventually a couple things start to disturb the tenuous balance that keeps David and his other psychic friends safe and out of suspicion:
- one teenage telepathic girl decides to marry a local non-telepathic boy, despite the fact that all of her friends think this is a terrible idea -- as it, in fact, turns out very definitely to be
- David's baby sister turns out to be an ENORMOUSLY POWERFUL telepath who is CONSTANTLY SCREAMING at all the other telepathic kids ALL THE TIME because she DOESN'T KNOW HOW TO USE AN INDOOR TELEPATH VOICE, which means that suddenly all the telepathic kids are, like, running out to the middle of the woods together for no apparent reason because Petra fell into a hole and will not shut up in their heads
- also, while we're at it, Petra informs David that there are some other people out there she's been chatting with, well beyond the bounds of what the rest of the community considers dead world; they're super far away! but they're there!
You probably have a sense of the kind of book this is by now, I think. It's a very good example of this kind of book; maybe the ur-example? In any case, I enjoyed it, in a grim and postapocalyptic but not hopeless sort of way.
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Date: 2017-03-14 09:57 pm (UTC)He is one of my incredibly early, influential, formative writers and one of the best reviews I have ever received compared our prose styles. I tend to think of him as best known now for Venus Plus X (1960) and Some of Your Blood (1961) because the one pushes concepts of sex and gender a lot further than anyone else was doing in the late fifties (in ways that anticipate some of the insights and problems The Left Hand of Darkness, though it approaches them differently, and which I thought still held up the last time I read the novel in 2014) and the other does really fascinating things with concepts of vampirism, genre-fiction psychology that is not garbage, and reader comfort with different kinds of sex/violence taboos. He was a prolific author of short stories as well, and not all of them are great works of art, but a number of them are and his writing style is consistently excellent. You may be able to find examples online.
He also, famously and hilariously, ghostwrote I, Libertine (1956) for Jean Shepherd. A now-defunct used book store in Lexington Center had a paperback copy when I was in high school and I could not afford it and I may regret to the end of time not finding some way to scrape up the money anyway. "'Gadzooks,' quoth I, 'but here's a saucy bawd!'"
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Date: 2017-03-14 10:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-03-14 11:51 pm (UTC)My family actually owns the complete set of Sturgeon; they are technically split between my father and me. I agree on their frequent anthologization and importance to the field (I don't think "The World Well Lost" is actually the first positive portrayal of homosexuality in genre fiction, but in 1953 and published by Universe there's a really good chance it's the first one most readers ran into), but I haven't seen them studied as much as the novels. This may be an inaccurate side effect of criticism tending to focus on novels over short fiction or the criticism I happen to have read.
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Date: 2017-03-15 12:04 am (UTC)THAT'S ME YOU HEAR RINGING THE DOORBELL
....ahahaha. //cries from jealousy -- I think I have one or two volumes that I got very used, but probably they're OOP now. The library must have them, anyway. I remember being thrilled to death when they came out because pre-internet it had been so hard to find even the somewhat gnarly paperback collections.
It's just as likely my reading sff was influenced by the Santa Fe Public Library not having a lot of money and so they had lots of anthologies -- Nebula, Hugo, Dangerous Visions and so on -- so as a kid I wound up focusing on short stories a lot, and had to buy the novels as used paperbacks. I still have the boxed edition I found of Le Guin's Always Coming Home with cassettes. (Also, my parents thought science fiction was "trashy" and boy did they not approve of my bringing Godbody home from the library. "Is this about sex?")
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Date: 2017-03-15 12:39 am (UTC)I benefited hugely from my parents both being serious readers of science fiction and fantasy; we had a significant amount of original paperback Sturgeon in the house when I was growing up.
I still have the boxed edition I found of Le Guin's Always Coming Home with cassettes.
That is the best edition.
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Date: 2017-03-15 02:38 pm (UTC)IOW, when Sturgeon said that 90% of everything was crud, he knew of which he was speaking. My experience with the more developed Sturgeon is mostly from anthologized stories as well, "Microcosmic God" blew my mind when I read it in SFWA Hall of Fame vol. 1, and um... I love the way both of you have been carefully talking around "If All Men Were Brothers..." Not my favorite part of Dangerous Visions, but certainly a story that takes down barriers.