Product Description

Cuckoos lay eggs in other bird's nests. The clutch that was fathered on the quiet little village of Midwich, one night in September, proved to possess a monstrous will of its own. It promised to make the human race look as dated as the dinosaur.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #74148 in Books
• Published on: 2000-09-28
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

About the Author
John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Benyon Harris was born in 1903, the son of a barrister. He tried a number of careers including farming, law, commercial art and advertising, and started writing short stories, intended for sale, in 1925. From 1930 to 1939 he wrote stories of various kinds under different names, almost exclusively for American publications, while also writing detective novels. During the war he was in the Civil Service and then the Army. In 1946 he went back to writing stories for publication in the USA and decided to try a modified form of science fiction, a form he called 'logical fantasy'. As John Wyndham he wrote The Day of the Triffids and The Kraken Wakes (both widely translated), The Chrysalids, The Midwich Cuckoos (filmed as Village of the Damned), The Seeds of Time, Trouble with Lichen, The Outward Urge (with Lucas Parkes) and Chocky. He died in March 1969.

Customer Reviews

What a truely great writer John Wyndham was.
Surely the hardest thing for a Science Fiction writer - or any writer for that matter - to acheive is to make the paranormal sound beleiveable. John Wyndham makes it look so easy that by the time you've finished one of his books you feel ready to pick up a pen and write one yourself.
The Midwich Cuckoos is impeccably written, easy to read, and extremely well thought out. Wyndham provides a broad pallete of characters unrivalled in most Science Fiction, each of whom expresses a different, thoroughly beleivable opinion/reaction to the bizzare coming of the "Midwich Cuckoos". What is important is that Wyndham never loses focus of the central characters, so that the book is, in the end, more about people than aliens/spaceships etc.
The point I'm trying to make here (not very coherently) is that whereas most Science Fiction centers around action and fanciful phenomenon, Wyndham's work never loses touch of humanity. He has a keen ear for the voice of post-war England, and a keen eye towards the behaviour of men and women who are 'up against it.' In this way the Midwich Cuckoos is a very English book and as acute a piece of social observation of 1950's village life as you are likely to find.
If none of this wittering makes any sense then allow me to sumarise: The Midwich Cuckoos is an superbly written, elegantly crafted work of Science Fiction that you really have to read.

An unsettling, eerie read
This was a very eerie, disturbing read. I guess that most people are now familiar with the concept of the story. The novel deals with a whole lot of complicated issues - the division of people, attitudes and morals in a small town is easily reflective in modern society. This novel deals with so many different issues, it can make you mental trying to distinguish them all but here's a few: the mass fear taht can arise when humans are faced with something they don't understand and doesn't readily fit into their morals, attitudes and what they have been taught; the inability to see the opportunities of welcoming and trying to understand those things; it shows how division in attitude, morals, religion and custom can divide a town leading to mass hysteria and violence.
It also complicates all the above issues with this one:

What do you do if your child, a product of your own body, something you care for, look after, guide and love turns out to have ideas, concepts and methods that are almost the exact opposite of what you have tried to instil in them? What if they turn out to be manipulative, destructive, controlling and in the end downright evil? How far would you go to keep your faith in that child, continue to defend it and love it knowing that it was capable of committing hideously evil deeds? How do you deal with a child taht knows you are under its control and that you are terrified of it?

This book was brilliant and should be read - it's fairly short so there's no danger of it becoming too overboard or tedious adn I guarantee taht the children will freak you out!!!

Insidious alien invasion of a small English village
A very well-written piece of sci-fi. John Wyndham has achieved a beautifully realised feeling of tension and an ominous foreboding as the book progresses, particularly after the mention of the fate of the Children of Gizhinsk towards the end. What I particularly find remarkable about this novel is that Wyndham has the ability to make the reader totally aware of the confused and mixed emotions of Midwich's inhabitants after the "birth" of the Children and I find the book all the more better for it.

A classic piece of sci-fi that deserves a place in the bookshelf of any sci-fi fan.