The Seeds of Time

"If you don’t think you know John Wyndham , you need only hear his most famous titles: The Day of the Triffids and The Midwich Cuckoos , which besides the recent TV series was previously dramatized as the film The Village of the Damned. But he wrote many other wonderful books, including two short story collections. Seeds of Time captivated me as a teen, and I was prompted to re-read it when I interviewed Wyndham’s biographer , Amy Binns. Images from the stories had lived on so strongly in my mind that when I re-read it I kept feeling, “Ah – that’s where that’s from.” The stories are really simple, but haunting, cut off at infuriatingly well-chosen moments – what choice will the itinerant tinker make? Does the gun-wielding mother really do what Wyndham implies? What was next for time-travelling Tavia? They’re also interesting as a whole collection, because while the themes are all very Wyndham, the story types are very varied. Wyndham writes in his forward that the combination of sci fi with the “adventure-narrative form of story is primarily an accident of commercial exploitation,” and that when editorial tastes broadened post-war, he was able to write more widely: “the ten stories I have chosen here are (or were) virtually experiments, made at intervals during fifteen years, in adapting the science-fiction motif to various styles of short story.” He’s interested in the small human stories that will be created by big technological changes. Here, time travel causes a tangled love story, as do parallel universes; time travel also creates embarrassment and outrage for a small town who are being snooped on. Space travel causes humans to grapple with loneliness and to lose their humanity. The sci fi thought experiment is always merely a premise for a tight tale looking at how we do, or might, or mustn’t behave. He’s also a hopeless romantic, reflecting his own lifelong partnership, so there are a lot of love stories. And there’s his ambivalent presentation of women. This was published in 1956 and written over the preceding decade, so brace yourself for the gender norms, but often while the men are busy underestimating the women, the women are outsmarting them. It was fascinating hearing from Binns about this – Wyndham thought that marriage and motherhood enslaved and stupefied women, so he was both quite feminist in his ideas about the lives women should ideally lead, and not very positive about women as he in fact found them."

"If you don’t want to commit to a whole novel and you want a little story to read, Seeds of Time is a really good collection. There’s some fun stories in there, some scary stories in there, some very touching stories in there. It shows his range. Loads of these stories could be entire films. Something like Survival is scary, real freak-out stuff; but then something like Chronoclasm is a fun little time travel story, silly and ridiculous… With the hero of Chronoclasm , you spend the story thinking, “For God’s sake, man!”. A lot of his heroes are really a bit hopeless: they’ve nearly got it together, but not quite. And all of the heroines are really competent. Take Kraken Wakes – the world comes to an end, but it turns out that the wife actually had it all under control. There’s a lot of heroines sorting things out in the background, while the men are fretting and worrying and weighing up the moral pros and cons of the situation, and considering whether or not they really maybe ought to do something – they turn around and the women have got the bags packed. In Chronoclasm, this poor young man is relentlessly out-manoeuvred by a time-travelling woman from the future. Pawley’s Peepholes is just pure fun… Pillar to Post I found very disturbing. It explores what happens if you live a really long time, and you lose the zest for life, but you carry on living. And then it’s got probably my all-time favourite John Wyndham short story: Dumb Martian . This is a story where marriage is literal slavery. A very unattractive character runs out of money, and takes a posting on a remote hunk of rock in space, the equivalent of a backwoods filling station. He’s going to live there for two years in order to save enough money to come home to Earth. To keep himself entertained, he buys a Martian girl, and he is obliged to marry her to get around the immigration rules. So he is married to her, but she is also literally a slave. The whole story is told entirely from his point of view; she is almost expressionless, and she barely speaks. She says the odd word, but her first entire sentence is halfway through the story. But it’s about what she is doing all the time in the background, to break free. It encapsulates a lot of John Wyndham’s ideas about morality and slavery and what it means to be a slave, and the stupidity of racism – she is obviously not just a different race, but a different species, as well as a different sex. It’s also a funny story, because he’s so awful and he’s so stupid all the way through. It’s just a perfect, tiny story that has so much in it. Yes, she’s the same woman! That’s actually why I started writing the biography: it struck me that it’s always the same woman, and I thought, ‘This has to be a real person’. I looked it up on Wikipedia, and it just said he got married in later life. And I thought, ‘There’s surely more than this…’"