This is a handsome new HB edition of Wyndham’s classic 1957 novel of generational paranoia and alien invasion. Wyndham has been a huge influence on two generations of SF writers but is perhaps more talked about than read these days. This deserves to change. This tightly plotted, beautifully concise and sinister tale of a clutch of alien yet beautiful and clever children is undoubtedly a novel of its time (the roles of men and women, the politics and the social scene all shout the 1950s) but Wyndham’s cool and merciless picking apart of our sense of superiority in the face of an uncaring and unfeeling Universe is timeless. There is a genuinely frightening apocalypse in the offing here and it is all the more frightening for playing out in a quiet English village. Wyndham’s writing is a genuine pleasure; his prose is elegant and his eye for character acute. He is a master at leaving things unsaid and leaving your mind to fill in the terrifying ramifications; things happen off the page, you are left to draw conclusions. Consequently he comes close to ending the world in less than 250 pages. It’s masterful stuff. In his eye for characterisation and his willingness to make the terrors existential he’s not unlike a very English Stephen King. Fans of King and those who wonder how the world really might end will enjoy letting Wyndham show them how. ~ Simon Spanton
A genre-defining tale of first contact by one of the twentieth century's most brilliant-and neglected-science fiction and horror writers, whom Stephen King called "the best writer of science fiction that England has ever produced." "In my opinion, [John] Wyndham's chef d'oeuvre . . . a graphic metaphor for the fear of unwanted pregnancies . . . I myself had a dream about a highly intelligent nonhuman baby after reading this book."-Margaret Atwood, Slate
What if the women of a sleepy English village all became simultaneously pregnant, and the children, once born, possessed supernatural-and possibly alien-powers?
A mysterious silver object appears in quiet, picture-perfect Midwich. A day later, the object is gone-and all the women in the village, they will come to learn, are now pregnant.
The resultant children of Midwich are shockingly, frighteningly other. Faced with these unfathomable and potentially unstoppable children, the question arises: What will humanity do when faced with the threat of the unknown?