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The Day of the Triffids and The Kraken Wakes by John Wyndham
Brian Aldiss famously dubbed John Wyndham “the master of the cosy catastrophe”, and so damned him with an adjective. Now, whenever anyone writes about Wyndham, they dig that one up. “The essence of the...
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The Chrysalids and The Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham
Just as The Day of the Triffids and The Kraken Wakes make a neat pairing as a couple of catastrophe novels, Wyndham’s next two books, The Chrysalids and The Midwich Cuckoos, are both about an...
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The Crystal World by J G Ballard
J G Ballard’s fourth novel, The Crystal World, seems to have grown like a crystal. Before the novel (published 1966), there was the novella “Equinox” (in two parts in New Worlds between June and August...
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The Death of Grass by John Christopher
John Christopher’s Death of Grass (published 1956) came out five years after John Wyndham’s Day of the Triffids. Both are about how the precariousness of modern life can so easily give way to a...
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Ice by Anna Kavan
Penguin classics edition, 2017. Cover by Jim Stoddart. The unnamed narrator of Anna Kavan’s 1967 novel Ice returns to his (unnamed) home country “to investigate rumours of a mysterious impending...
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The Morrow Books by H M Hoover
Cover to 1987 Puffin UK version, art by Michael Heslop Tia and Rabbit are a little bit different from the other children at the Base, a primitive hunting and farming culture lorded over by the Major...
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Heroes and Villains by Angela Carter
Penguin 1988 cover by James Marsh A few Mewsings ago, I reviewed H M Hoover’s Morrow books, in the first of which a pair of children living in a semi-barbarous, post-apocalyptic society escape to the...
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