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There are contribution levels at $5, $10, and $20 per month, and annual equivalents are available as well. So if you'd like to support sophomore lit, go to theincomparable.com slash members to sign up. Are your school days out of sight when you took in? Welcome back to Sophomore Lit, where we reread your 10th grade reading list.
I'm your host, John McCoy, and with me is first-time co-host David Dedrick. Hello. Did I pronounce that right? You did, actually. Thank you for getting that right. So many people say Dedrick. But since Bernie Miller ended, I think that's taken away that risk a little bit. Barney Miller, that takes me back. Me too. Do you know when I was a young boy and my father was attending grad school in... New York, and I apparently knew Hal Linden's kid.
Oh, and I have I have like next to no memory of this, except that I remember going once to a extremely elaborate birthday party. where there was a magician and the magician gave everyone like a $5 bill. I think that might have been it. Derailed immediately. Yes, let's completely derail ourselves. I like it. Well, this is not a Barney Miller podcast. This is sophomore lit.
And why don't you introduce yourself to everybody? Oh, sure. Also, I'll introduce myself with my podcast life, which is I have been doing a long time. kind of comedy podcast called Sneaky Dragon. It's a completely random title, which I just love random things. So we've been doing it for 694 episodes now. So I guess 13 years. of podcasting with that and we've never missed a show so i'm kind of proud of that And it's quite good. My friend's name is Ian Boothby. He's a...
He used to write for Simpsons Comics and he's quite a funny guy. So I'm basically the straight man. Occasionally slip in something amusing and just let him be funny for a solid two hours. It's a lot of fun. And out of that, we kind of do what I like to call side casts. So we did a Beatles one where we went through chronologically through all the Beatles albums. from Please Please Me to Abbey Road and talked about the movies as well. And then we did a Tin Tin one.
Tintin, the comic character, and then a Marx Brothers one as well. So that was fun. So yeah, and then we've done movie ones called Fansplainers. And we did one with my daughter I did called Sneaky Dragon Listening Party, where I went through and I made mixtapes for listeners who'd sent in CDs to the show, CDRs to the show. And we went through and sort of discussed the mixtapes I made.
my decisions. So I've done a lot of different podcasts. They're all kind of fun, usually comedy-based because I enjoy comedy. Well, this time we are doing a book that you suggested to me. You pitched me John Wyndham. The Chrysalids from 1955, which it was a book I knew of. I had not read until we did this podcast. What's your history with this book?
Well, I read this book in grade 10. We don't have the same. We don't have sophomore in Canada. I'm from I'm from Canada. So people know I'm from Vancouver, B.C., basically. And when I went to school, we had junior high school and senior high school. Junior was eight to 10 and senior was 11 to 12.
And so you got two years of being king of the hill. And then you got one year, you got knocked back down to the bottom again. But the junior high school I went to had a quarters system rather than semesters. And so we got three quarters and then I guess the third quarter was summer. So because of that, they offered thematic. um classes so we had like french revolution for social studies we had modern warfare for social studies we had
And what was great in English classes where we could have like science fiction, horror, sort of Canadiana. And then we had one that was dystopian literature. We had a teacher that did this in grade 10. We had to read Player Piano, the Kurt Vonnegut book, and then we read The Chrysalid. And what was great about that was then after that, we could just read whatever we wanted from this box of books that he had. And we got extra marks for how many books we read. So I read every book in the box.
And went on from there. So because we read The Chrysalids, he also had Day of the Triffids in the box. So I read that right away after. And I really got into John Wyndham from reading this book. I think this is a fabulous young adult book. Post-apocalyptic literature makes up a great deal of sophomore lit. I've done... on the beach. I've done Alas Babylon. I've done, I did not do player piano, but I did do
Cat's Cradle and the World ended in that book as well. Yes, that's right. Cat's Cradle has an instant ending and a kind of depressing book, that one. But like I read Player Piano that year and then I went on and read. All of the Kurt Vonnegut books I could find at that time.
through my great tenure and really affected my writing style. I remember writing a letter to a friend who'd moved away and he wrote back and said, are you reading Vonnegut? So I had to admit, yes, I've been stealing all his lines. Sorry. Well, I've never read this book, but I did know of it from a radio adaptation that appeared on the... Canadian, the CBC horror anthology Nightfall, which is a great radio show that I recommend anyone out there.
All the episodes are available one place or another on YouTube or the Internet Archive. It ran, I think, from like 1981 to 1983. A bit longer than that. Yeah. Yeah. It was a good show. Yeah. Very, very scary. However, this adaptation was not that scary. This was because the book itself is not that scary. Now, John Wyndham, if you don't know who he is, he was a British... author of science fiction, who you probably have heard of The Day of the Triffids. That was his book.
He has something of a reputation of being one of these literary science fiction writers, you know, people like Aldous Huxley or the aforementioned Kurt Vonnegut, people who write science fiction. There is they've been embraced by a sort of a larger literary community. I know that Margaret Atwood is very fond of John Wyndham. And she also writes science fiction as well.
A literary science fiction, yeah. It's funny because, you know, you don't normally see The Handmaid's Tale put in the science fiction section of a bookstore. And I've always kind of wondered how that happens. You know, I know that there are a lot of people who write science fiction who get a little bit. defensive about that. They say like, well, I'm doing something that I think is important and that has ambition. Why am I not treated the same way?
Yeah, well, I think the difference is for, well, Margaret Atwood is she wrote... She wrote novels that are just sort of like general fiction. uh you know just about a woman's life or whatever like uh nothing jumps into my mind now that i i just read one a little while ago and now i can't remember the title of it but
You know, she just wrote kind of general, she wrote surfacing, of course, and then she wrote a great book about just a general book discussing Canadian literature. So she came, you know, her arrival into science fiction is kind of oblique. And I'd say Kurt Vonnegut is the opposite. He started in science fiction and he kind of moved out of it. You know, and even though his books had touches of science fiction, they're more like almost kind of surrealistic or the sort of satirical books.
Yeah. And what's interesting with Wyndham is he actually wrote in a very B movie or sort of pulp lit science fiction through the 30s and 40s under the name John Baynon. Because he had many names. He had like five names. He was like John, Wyndham, Lucas, Park. Or maybe Lucas is his last name, but it was like Bane and Lucas or something like that. So he, he did all these various.
uh aliases by by mixing up his his names and so like because there's a book he wrote called the outward urge that he wrote with lucas parks but that's actually just his other another name that he took out of his names which is kind of odd But yeah, so he wrote, there's a book. My camera's cold now. I found it a while ago, a paperback.
with his name, John Bannon, on it about people in Africa who fall into a kind of a pit and end up being the prisoners of these sort of underground people. And they have to escape from this situation. And it's much different in tone than, say, they have the Triffids and stuff like that. But what happened was he had a brother named Vivian. This is when male British people had names like Vivian and Evelyn. And his brother was a very successful author. He wrote four books.
And Windham was like, well, why aren't I doing this? And so he changed his writing style. And took on a more kind of like Huxley or Waugh kind of that kind of very classic British 20th century style, which is really a style. It's kind of just really good writing. I don't know how else to describe it. sort of master stylist, you know, the sort of people like, you know, Graham Greene and stuff. And so...
And so he started writing in that style and it just took off for him. And maybe because he changed and he also changed his name as well. He changed from John Bainan to John Wyndham. And then nothing was ever mentioned of those earlier books that he'd written. And he kind of recycled some of the short stories later on, but he kept, he kept as John Wyndham and really separated himself from his earlier. Maybe that was the, maybe that's the answer, how you get.
How you get clear of your sci-fi roots and escape from that. Something like Philip K. Dick can never do. You know, I know what you mean by this sort of mid-century British style. I would have a hard time describing it as well. Just really good writing is the only way I can think of how to describe it.
Evelyn Waugh or Graham Greene or someone like that. I always think of it as like very... dry and ironic i guess maybe i think there's something about it that's economical but not terse like hemingway like it's not telegram like it's this really It only tells you what you need to know. It never really wastes a lot of time describing what things look like.
what people look like. You just kind of get the sense of it from what you read. Right. Well, I think instead of telling you what people are thinking or what they're feeling. There's a the the narrative voice focuses on an action that someone takes or like an object on a table or something like that. And we're supposed to. fill that in ourselves. Yeah. Yeah. It's amazing. Like there's that book or so it's a short story called The Work Suspended because.
Waugh was working on it, and then it was interrupted by World War II, in which he fought in. And when he came back, he couldn't pick up the threads of the story. So he just kind of published it as an unfinished work. And it's probably the best thing I've ever read in my life. Like, it's just so well written.
And it doesn't go anywhere because it ended like abruptly. But it's just amazing writing. You're just kind of how sad that it wasn't finished because it really was. And his post-war stuff is written differently. It has a different tone to it. So it's interesting. But yeah, I really like that style. Being Canadian, we got more of the British stuff here in Canada than you did.
Yeah. Well, it's because you spell things the same way. That's right. We have an immediate, we say Z as well, so we have an immediate family thing. I don't want to derail us any more than what we have, but I think, you know, there's also, you have people like Robinson Davies, who is continuing in 19th century Dickinsonian style or something. So there's this kind of a... It's in your blood somehow. I don't know. Yeah.
The chrysalids does fall into this category of post-apocalyptic fiction. It falls into a kind of a category that I also think of when I think of a book like Canticle for Leibowitz, which was also done on this podcast. in that it's a story about... humanity surviving... hundreds or thousands of years past an apocalypse. And that... Everything has changed in the meantime. There's usually some sort of a regression in technology, in knowledge, in sort of cultural practices.
And people might return to something like subsistence. farming or hunting or something more like a feudal system. And there is always a kind of dramatic irony that is there for the reader, where the reader understands something that the characters don't. we can piece together that this is A story that takes place after some sort of a nuclear calamity, partly because there's so many mutants and because when the wind changes, mutations happen more.
But none of the characters know that. And also, people talk about place names, which are... mutated versions of the place names we know from the current day. To a degree, although it takes place in Labrador, which they call Labrador. So it's weird that that's like the one. they called newfoundland newf but Labrador still has this really long name. And then you have like Woknuk, which I can't figure out what that's supposed to be, actually.
at some town that they live in, in Labrador. I'm not too sure what... Is that supposed to be like an Inuit name or something? It could be, but it's not an Inuit area, so... There is Aboriginals or First Nations people there, but not Inuit in that part of it. or newfoundland it truly is So this takes place in Labrador in some far-flung future where Labrador being one of the few places that... It was unscathed by whatever the calamity was.
And, you know, I guess that's the advantage to living that far north. Yeah. Living in the north community, less likely. Right. Now, the main character is this guy, David, who's like a teenage boy. And. He is the son of an important leader in the town. His father leads this community of sort of... extreme fundamentalists. And it's worth noting that his grandfather left left the more populated area of this.
world to come out to this remote area to be more fundamentalist because he felt like they were they were backsliding and so he's He's come out and he's and they pioneered this sort of new area where they can be even more extreme in their in their fundamentalism. One of the main tenets of this community is that any kind of... divergence from what they see as the correct way of being formed for humans, for animals, for plants.
must be rooted out immediately. That means that babies who are born with mutations are typically left to die of exposure. Older people who have mutations discovered are... sterilized and thrown out of the community. Animals are killed. There's a kind of a funny part where it turns out that the dad doesn't quite understand what a Manx cat is. And he wants to have it killed because it has no tail. He does kill it.
Yes, he does kill it and has to face the consequences, not the consequences, but the shame of discovering that there is actually a species of cat that is tailless. Right. Well, I mean, it's ironic because all domestic animals are the way they are because humans have bred them to be that way. So there's not really a...
It's not really a natural form. Even the cows that they're using are a husbanded creature that wouldn't exist without man's interference. And the chickens and everything else. And horses, you know. It's an interesting, you know, that. Part of the irony, I think, of it for Wyndham, you know, there's a small irony of it.
You know, now Labrador is fertile. It's a place that you can have farms now. You know, it's not just a rocky outcropping where there's hydroelectric dams. It's actually a farmable world there. And that's sort of an irony. And then the irony of this idea that we could possibly understand hundreds of years after this cataclysm what real people look like or what real animals are.
It's which is brought out in the book from from David's sailor uncle who has traveled the world and has seen more than these these kind of back. backwards people. And it is kind of backwards. When he describes a farmhouse, you have this kind of sense of this sort of ramshackle thing that's had farm buildings added on to a kind of a hut or a small house.
And then it describes a midden, which is basically like a refuse heap in the middle of this. So, you know, they don't even like have their refuse like away from the house. They just throw it into the center, the courtyard of this. of this farm uh that's where all the refuse has been thrown and then it describes like them like reusing uh rocks and stuff from the old people the old people's buildings to to build these houses and then it's it's finished off with wattle and and like
and stuff so it's it's really bad it's really backwards like you know even though they think they're like the latest thing and they're really like following in the footsteps of the old people and somehow they're going to revitalize this world they are really like living in a middle the middle ages really Even though they have a steam engine, but I never quite understand what that's for. That doesn't explain what they do with it as well.
Early in the book, David develops a close friendship with a girl, Sophie, with whom there's a sort of implication of sort of puppy love. It's never really blossoms into anything. that romantic, but they are fast friends and they go everywhere together. And then David discovers that Sophie has six toes, which marks her as deformed. I think this is a good move by Wyndham because this is the way that he, this is the way you sort of explain this world. You don't.
You know, you don't do it all through exposition. You give the situation that David feels conflicted about. He knows that his father would not like it, but he also knows it. Sophie is a good person. So he doesn't understand, you know, he's he's he has his ideas challenged. well there's that and it's also so small that it's it's not off-putting to us as the reader as well like to us it also seems
So so insignificant. Why would we treat this person? And the other thing is when they are marked as as. as, you know, whatever, as a deviation, as they call them, they are considered to be without a soul. So they're not even considered as a human now. So once you are discovered to have an extra toe on your foot, you become a non-human. and subject to to laws that, you know, that you don't even get treated as a as a as a being. You're just thrown out of the community.
So it's quite interesting. So it's really good that he starts it off with such a small, a small deformity as well. And it's also, I think – Dramatically, it's a bit shocking because you expect that Sophie is going to be a major character in the book. She's very quickly removed from the narrative because her family tries to run away. They get captured. And then we don't know what happens to them. Yeah. Eventually.
she will come back. But I thought that was, it was good because it does put the stakes of this world pretty high. and he also at this time is also slowly revealing that david is different too because there's things where he's like sort of reading sophie's mom's mind she's able to project kind of half form of thoughts. And we know that he has a sort of relationship with his cousin Rosalind, where they can kind of communicate with each other without speaking.
And it's very subtly introduced and it almost is kind of superseded by Sophie's appearance. We're not really thinking about it after that. And then it'll appear later on in the story with more force. David and Rosalind sort of make this backbone of these. This group of adolescents who... connect to each other through telepathy.
Even in cases where they haven't actually met in person, they may not even know what they look like. They don't get used to those names at the beginning of the story when we first start hearing about them.
speak talk to each other they don't know where they live they don't they somehow they feel i think you know even if they're not thinking themselves as as deviants at this point they are thinking that what they're doing is not normal and so they should probably keep it hidden which is very early on, because remember, at the very beginning of the story, David talks about a dream that he has of this city is sort of like.
a futuristic city with flying he thinks they're like they look like flying fish but they're flying ships And he tells his sister about it. And his sister's like, maybe that's a dream of the old people. But don't tell anyone about this because you're just going to get in trouble for even having this as a thing that you're doing. So, yeah, right away, you just kind of you have this feeling that everyone's under threat all the time. It's kind of like ham radio. You know, there's these.
but cooler a cooler everyone okay as it's introduced you know we All these voices start talking in David's head. And I feel a little bit mixed about this as a reader because I think it's an interesting idea. But... From a dramatic standpoint, I feel like this is a bit of a drag on the story because a lot of it now suddenly becomes these. conversations that they're having in their minds that are unburdened by geography.
It goes from the showing to the telling. And it reminded me, this is going to sound strange, but... When I was a young nerd, I read a lot of Robert Heinlein, which I regret now because I don't really think he's that great an author. But one of the books I read was one of his late books called... I will fear no evil, which has as the premise that the main character is involved in a accident and has his consciousness. put into the body of his secretary.
And now there are two individuals in this body. And so a lot of the book is. the internal thoughts of these two halves of this, of this person talking to themselves. And it felt like that to me, which is like, which is to say very talky and very, um, kind of talk talk that's sort of divorced from action yeah and so so this is my one criticism of the book because otherwise i kind of like the book
Kind of. What did you? I love this book. I mean, when I was in grade 10, I thought it was great. And it's funny, I was not a, even though I was, I took, you know, I took science fiction, the science fiction reading class in grade nine. where we read have space spaceship or a space suit will travel camera what it's called another Heinlein book in that class. As well as the belt, which you talked about before in the show.
Well, yeah, this novel, I Will Fear No Evil, is sort of his post-Stranger in a Strange Land, like, really kinky stuff. Like, really super... It's a look into Highland's strange id. I read Stranger in a Strange Land in grade 10 after I read it. And I kind of, it kind of put me off science fiction, actually. I became a non-science fiction person for quite a while. It wasn't until I discovered Philip K. Dick to Robert Crum, you know, a weirdo story.
that I became interested in science fiction again, but, uh, cause I just was so put off by that book and I, and I, and I wasn't like a Star Trek fan and stuff. So I, I just kind of dismissed it all with a, you know, off like, but, um, But yeah, no, I love this book. I thought it was a great, I just think it's really great young adult fiction for one thing. It's just really well told.
I gave you a little bit, I guess, about the voice, but I feel like what Wyndham's really good at is he constantly ups the stakes as the story goes on. So there's never a time where you feel like, oh, it's really lagging. Like there's always... some problem or some threat to David throughout the story until we get to the, like the big threat to him. He's kind of a funny author though, Wyndham, because I was thinking about this with Dave the Triffids.
And I think it also works in this book, too, which is where he'll have an idea and you'll get partway through the book and then he'll get it. That's not what he really wants to talk about. So he'll just kind of get rid of it and he'll move on to something else. Because in Day of the Triffids, you start off with the character waking up.
uh it's kind of it's been stolen two times now the beginning of it once by 28 days later and once by the walking dead where the care he wakes up in the hospital and he can tell by the sound of the world that he's woken up to that it's changed in some way, but he doesn't know what it is. He has bandages on his eyes because he was injured in the Triffid attack.
And then he discovers that people in the world watch some sort of like technological warfare or something in the sky and it's made everyone blind. And so that's where you start. And then at some point in the book, he gets tired of all the blind people. So he has a plague come through and wipe them out. And then the triffids become the main part of the story. And then the rest of the story is them dealing with the triffids.
And I kind of feel like both these stories' main idea is evolution. One story is what is survival of the fittest and what is most apt to survive. So in a world with blind people... And this weird plant that can walk and kill and eat people, they are the most fit to survive in this world. Man has been supplanted in Day of the Triffids. In the chrysalids, it's evolution again, but in this case, it's Homo sapiens are being supplanted. Oops. So Homo sapiens are being supplanted by...
And that's what he's really interested in. And so everything else in the story is just to get to that idea of the book. And so he'll get bored of, it seems like he'll just get tired and he'll just make an abrupt right turn and we'll go off in a completely new direction just so we can get to this main thing I want to talk about, he says. It's kind of a weird way to write, but he does it quite a bit.
He does it in the quick and wakes too. As the book goes on, I think characters... start talking about themes more and they kind of put an underline under what Wyndham wants you to take away from this, which is the idea that nature is not... is always changing. And that humans should also expect to be always changing. And that the idea... that you have arrived at a point where everything's good, where we're like, there's no more to there's no more to change.
You know, either from the standpoint of your biology or from the standpoint of your culture, that's when you fall apart. That's when you die because you don't have. And it's interesting because. Since mutation is the... is the vehicle through which these children you know develop these special skills that make them above humans it's it kind of is is like evolution in miniature because evolution is driven by mutation too exactly and i think that's why he's he's using it as an excuse
He's using the nuclear war and this world and stuff like that he's created is basically just to do this microcosm of evolution. So you have the mutations to imitate evolution, to bring about the theme, I think. And so we have the woman coming from Sealand. which is New Zealand, which was also apparently not important enough. No one wanted to kill all the sheep. So it didn't get destroyed or much destruction in this nuclear annihilation of the world.
And so she's coming and she's talking about basically the fact that. They are better. These people who can live in a common consciousness are better than the people, the old people or these, you know, David's parents and the people he's lived growing up with. They are... They are kind of injured or they're like a person without an arm because they don't have this consciousness, this ability to understand people's inmost thoughts, feelings. You know, I'd be able to understand each other.
So, yeah, it's whether she's accurate or not, because basically they're making her she's making herself the crown of creation, which which is a part of the one of the quotes in the book, this idea that. that the people of waknak are the crown of creation they've made themselves They are God's image and that's what's most important about them. And now they're going to be supplanted by a new species, a species that can interact telepathically and physically.
And, you know, and of course, they'll be the crown of creation. And one day they will also have to. step aside for a new... Yeah, she's an interesting character because she does sort of arrive as something of a deus ex machina at the end of the story. David and his little group of fellow...
telepaths have escaped, but now they are in the fringes, as they're called, where all the outcasts have gone. It's kind of more, it's also horrifying too, because two of the characters are captured and tortured. Right. Two of the characters are captured and tortured, and that's presented as a horrible thing to have to endure as a telepath because you feel everything that they're going through. And there's a...
There's a part where David is communicating with this guy, Michael, who is out with the group trying to find him. And this is where it all becomes talking back and forth through telepathy. But she but this woman from New Zealand has has appeared because David's younger sister, who is only a toddler by the end of this story, seems to have. a much stronger telepathic power than, than anyone. It's, it's her thoughts that have reached all the way around the world to the antipathy, to, to, uh,
to New Zealand. And so they're coming to find this miraculous child. But when when she arrives and there's something really funny, too, which is when she speaks out loud. David says he'd never heard an accent like this before. So it seems like the accent is on the speaking voice, but not on the thoughts. Well, because they speak in pictures. That's established in that they don't talk, they'll sometimes spell things out. but they usually speak in pictures to each other.
So how they communicate isn't through words. We're seeing them as words because we're reading the story. But David and the other telepaths, they're getting kind of messages and pictures from each other. And so, yeah, it's it's interesting because, yeah, one of the one of the other kind of irony of the story is that when they escape, they steal these horses called great horses, which are kind of like.
uh draft horses times five i guess they're like 22 hands tall and you know there are these vast creatures that are quite controversial because Because, you know, there's, you know, this idea of animal husbandry doesn't exist in this world. They just assume that everything has always existed as it is.
So the idea of having like even more, even larger horses is outrageous to the, to the real fundamentalists of this community. And, you know, it's going to bring God's wrath down on them, et cetera, et cetera. But the woman from New Zealand, the reason I find her so interesting is she is so convinced. their superiority, of the telepathic human's superiority.
She arrives in the midst of this battle that's taking place between the fringe outcasts and the search party looking for David and the rest of the mutant children. And she basically shows up and uses the technology to save the telepaths and basically kill everyone else. And she doesn't seem to have...
Too much difficulty with that. In fact, she says, you know, this is like, you know, you have to eat meat. You have to, this is the way of nature, you know. You have to pick plants. You have to cultivate.
Yeah, death is part of life. And it's interesting, but also the fact that It's because she can't feel their pain, so she doesn't have any sense of their... of them as as beings as well so it's it's it's uh yes it's it's interesting but i can't imagine it was much different when uh chroma cro-magnon you know uh It developed ahead of Neanderthal and other primitive people and kind of... And when whenever whoever developed when Homo sapiens showed up and and Cro-Magnon was left behind.
You know, no one's no one had any trouble with that. You know, like those those groups are long gone now. Like I can't remember the name of the American. There was an American indigenous population that was here when the Native Americans arrived, probably across the land bridge when they came. A Clovis man. So Clovis man was here and Clovis man is no longer around. So, yeah, it's just, you know, it's.
Something that's not not seemly to think about, but it's I guess that's what how it happens. But yes, she is. She is amazingly matter of fact about killing hundreds of people. And what I kind of like about that is. even as the book is ending, I feel like Wyndham is... bringing in moral ambiguity. We're not...
I felt like we were not, as readers, not supposed to know exactly what to make of this woman. On the one hand, she is saving our protagonists and she's going to take them to the fabulous land of New Zealand where everyone is. flying around in little silver ships or whatever. But on the other hand, she's callous. She's convinced of her own superiority. Which is the hubris that they were running away from was the idea.
Yes, to be fair to her, she does say that one day they will also have to step aside for the next. the next step in evolution for for humans so i mean she's realistic in that way it's yeah i mean it is a rescue I guess so, you know, when the Dirty Dozen showed up when they did the rescue, they didn't, you know, just.
pet the Germans on the head. You know, there's a lot of shooting going on. So I guess that's part of a rescue is, you know, there's going to be some reciprocal data. Is that reciprocal? Whatever it is. some damage off to the, on the side of, of things, but, uh, collateral, there's the word. Thank you. Uh, yeah, there's, and so. Yeah, you know, I agree with you that she does come across as very as very arrogant when when she she's even arrogant to like all the.
all the other kids whose telepathy is not as advanced as Petra's, as David's sister. who also is the reason that they're on the run because her telepathy is so powerful it's uncontrollable and and she's too young to know to be able to control it When I was reading about Wyndham's life, I know that he... For a while, he lived in this boarding house, this sort of club that was associated with the Quakers. And that's where he met his eventual wife. But they didn't get married right away.
Because at the time, British law was very bad for women. And if you got married, not only did you lose all your rights to property, you could not actually work at that time. So they put that off for quite some time. 30 years. And Wyndham was, I think, you know, it's obvious from this that he...
had a lot of progressive thoughts. And part of that was I think he was a feminist in a time when there wasn't really an idea of what feminism was. And one of the things I do appreciate about this story is It's very blunt about the problems that the female characters have to deal with. When David and Rosalind, sorry, come to the fringes, the problem is that David's uncle, who is also called the Spider-Man because he has these really, really long arms, basically wants to...
rape Rosalind. He wants to forcibly make her into his breeding stock because this is where Sophie shows up. Sophie is there. She's a companion to him, but she has been sterilized, so they can't have children. It's strangely brutal in the midst of a story that in some ways can feel a little bit genteel, even though we've just described a bunch of people being killed in this big fight.
In some ways, it's kind of a bloodless novel. I know that Brian Aldis said that this was a, what was he called? A cozy apocalypse. Cozy catastrophe, yeah. I don't know. I would disagree with that. I mean, you know, obviously Wyndham was writing to the limitations of the day. And also it is a YA novel. Like, I think it's written to young teens. There's so much you can put in there, but Sophie's death is horrifying in it.
She's shot in the neck by an arrow and just dies. There's no heroic. She doesn't get a monologue. She just slides in the mud and she's dead. And after a character that you love so much at the beginning of the story, because she's such a wonderful little character and so sad when she disappears from David's life. And when she comes back again, you know, she's this bitter.
who's you know a concubine to this to this uh leader and about to be chucked out the door and you know she pretty much dies trying to trying to save him trying to save the spider-man from from his own his own hubris and uh yeah it's just it's uh i wouldn't call it totally bloodless i just i just think it's it's kind of toned down a little bit for for the readers of the day particularly for young readers
I mean, my wife said it's no longer in the syllabus for for the but for, you know, forever. It was it was. It was, you know, on the syllabus for reading in grade 10. um lately like canada's kind of tried to cut ties with with uh with with britain in terms of you know cultural um And then also with the States, we have way more like kind of now our books are more, you know, Canadian authors or First Nations authors.
But when I was a kid, this was the sort of thing we got to read. And I just thought it was great. So I would I would disagree. I do think that what you said about him with that organization he was he he he joined or was the club that he was part of where he lived for a number of years. uh was really important also you know he also was in the war he was a It doesn't say, but if you kind of read between the lines of his biography, he must have been a...
He must have been a pacifist because he, he worked for, he worked as a, as a cipher clerk in London. And then he actually did. take part in in the war, but once again, he was just he was not a combatant. He was he was working. behind the scenes as a radio operator and stuff like that. But still he saw a horrible thing, you know, all the horrible parts. He was part of the Normandy invasion and stuff like that. He came in a couple of days after, but he would have seen all the carnage.
And he was convinced that humans were just going to do this all again. And so that's a big part of his stories as well as is, you know, the tech, the more technology we get, the worse we get. So the day of the Triffids, you know, people are blinded by some sort of technological, it's not, it's not a, it's described as a meteor shower, but the book makes it clear, not really clear, but it's, it's sort of in this.
subtext of the story that it wasn't a natural meter shower. It was some sort of technological thing happening in space between superpowers that cause this blindness. And in the Kraken Wakes, where we have a, in that story, there's aliens that come to Earth. But they're from a gaseous planet. And so they have to, the only place they can live is at the bottom of the ocean. And so in the story, there's a scientist who's like, well, that's no problem because what do we care?
you know if they want to live at the bottom of the ocean that's fine we don't we can't use that so that's theirs and but that's not good enough the british send down a bathysphere which gets destroyed and then they drop a bomb and then they create this war between between the you know so once again human
or inability to just coexist peacefully. So it's something that he's really, all his books seem to have an element of, or at least these kind of ones through the 50s have this element to them of. a fear of nuclear annihilation, a fear of human, uh, um, combativeness, you know, our tendency to want to be warmongering. And this book as well has that element to it. And I think you're right. It's interesting that you said that about when the lady comes from sea land.
She is no less brutal and warmongering, it seems. She has this very gruesome weapon to kill people where it's like a filament that falls on you and then it slowly tightens and binds you.
to where the point where you just suffocate and uh i don't know if that's better than being shot to death it sounds horrible there's a way to go so yeah it's uh it is interesting Whether or not this book is still widely taught in the curriculum, you can see, or at least I could see as I was reading through this, the DNA of so much. that came after it. You could draw a very straight line between this, say, and The Hunger Games. In some ways, a lot of these...
these post-apocalyptic novels can run together in my head. But I do recognize this was one of the first to do this kind of a story. You know, I mentioned before Canticle for Leibovitz, one of my favorite novels in the world that came after this. And I don't know if Walter Miller read this or not, but.
This really did, I think, pave the way for a lot of what happened after it, including... just in general, young adult fiction, you know, you get these outliers, I think, in the... 50s and 60s and 70s of people moving toward this, what today we would recognize as young adult fiction. And but there wasn't really a clear demarcation back back at this time. You know, it was kind of like you had children's books and then you had adult books. Yeah. Well, I also think that.
Wyndham was also kind of ahead of the curve because he's recognizing a teen market. for stories that, and teenagers were a pretty new phenomenon in the mid 50s. You're just kind of starting to get the blackboard jungle and those kind of, that sort of outrage of that time period. I mean, it predates. Clark of Orange by like seven years, which is I think another sort of, you know, kind of teen.
you know, who can control these teenagers kind of a story. And this book is from the point of view of the teen. So it's even more important. Like, I don't know if you know, there's a Jefferson Airplane song called Crown of Creation. on the album Kind of Creation and actually quotes from this novel in the lyrics of the song. So it obviously spoke to that teen generation of kids who were separating themselves from the 50s.
from that very uniform, very repressive... you know, for middle class kids, very repressive age. And, you know, embracing the bohemianism of the 60s. And, you know, so that, you know, this is obviously kind of a touchstone novel for kids who are reading science fiction in the 50s, taking that into the 60s.
I think, I do think it also has that element to it, where it's sort of like, I don't know what to call it, like a generational novel, like, you know, the sort of teen, the sort of, you know, kind of a created, a created... A kind of reflected like the best the best science fiction shouldn't be describing what's going to come, but it should be describing what's happening.
Old Testament prophets where they're not really describing what's going to come, but they're kind of using this sort of novel language to describe what's happening. And I think the same with great science fiction books should be describing what is happening or what's kind of what's emerging into the world, you know. And so this book kind of could be taken.
In different ways, like if you were like a queer person, you can read this book and feel a connection to it. If you're a teenager growing up in a very, very uniform world of the 50s, you could read this book and feel a connection to it. and that there's a sea land out there for you. I think it kind of has that element to it as well that speaks to the young reader.
Thanks again to guest host David Nedrick. If you have an idea for a book, a story, a poem, or any other reading to cover on a future episode, Or if you have a suggestion for a guest host, or if you'd just like to say hi, you can write me at sophomore.literature at gmail.com. The sophomore lit theme song is by Malcolm Nygaard. This podcast is brought to you by The Incomparable Network. More podcasts available at theincomparable.com.
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