The Chrysalids (New York Review Books Classics) [Paperback]

John Wyndham (Author), Christopher Priest (Introduction)

Book Description

Release date: November 18, 2008 | Series: New York Review Books Classics

The Chyrsalids is set in the future after a devastating global nuclear war. David, the young hero of the novel, lives in a tight-knit community of religious and genetic fundamentalists, always on the alert for any deviation from the norm of God’s creation. Abnormal plants are publicly burned, with much singing of hymns. Abnormal humans (who are not really human) are also condemned to destruction—unless they succeed in fleeing to the Fringes, that Wild Country where, as the authorities say, nothing is reliable and the devil does his work. David grows up ringed by admonitions: KEEP PURE THE STOCK OF THE LORD; WATCH THOU FOR THE MUTANT.

At first he does not question. Then, however, he realizes that the he too is out of the ordinary, in possession of a power that could doom him to death or introduce h im to a new, hitherto unimagined world of freedom.

The Chrysalids is a perfectly conceived and constructed work form the classic era o science fiction, a Voltairean philosophical tale that has as much resonance in our own day, when religious and scientific dogmatism are both on the march, as when it was written during the cold war.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"One of the most thoughtful post-apocalypse novels ever written. Wyndham was a true English visionary, a William Blake with a science doctorate." -- David Mitchell

"Sometimes you just need a bit of soft-core sci-fi, and Wyndham’s 1950’s classic, newly back in print, fully delivers." --Thicket Magazine

 

"It is quite simply a page-turner, maintaining suspense to the very end and vividly conjuring the circumstances of a crippled and menacing world, and of the fear and sense of betrayal that pervade it. The ending, a salvation of an extremely dubious sort, leaves the reader pondering how truly ephemeral our version of civilization is..." --The Boston Globe

 

“[Wyndham] was responsible for a series of eerily terrifying tales of destroyed civilisations; created several of the twentieth century's most imaginative monsters; and wrote a handful of novels that are rightly regarded as modern classics.” –The Observer (London)

 

“Science fiction always tells you more about the present than the future. John Wyndham's classroom favourite might be set in some desolate landscape still to come, but it is rooted in the concerns of the mid-1950s. Published in 1955, it's a novel driven by the twin anxieties of the cold war and the atomic bomb…Fifty years on, when our enemy has changed and our fear of nuclear catastrophe has subsided, his analysis of our tribal instinct is as pertinent as ever.” –The Guardian (London)

 

“[A]bsolutely and completely brilliant…The Chrysalids is a top-notch piece of sci-fi that should be enjoyed for generations yet to come.” –The Ottawa Citizen

 

“John Wyndham's novel The Chrysalids is a famous example of 1950s Cold War science fiction, but its portrait of a community driven to authoritarian madness by its overwhelming fear of difference - in this case, of genetic mutations in the aftermath of nuclear war - finds its echoes in every society.” –The Scotsman

 

“The Chrysalids comes heart-wrenchingly close to being John Wyndham's most powerful and profound work.” –SFReview.net

 

“Re-Birth (The Chrysalids) was one of the first science fiction novels I read as a youth, and several times tempted me to take a piggy census. Returning to it now, more than 30 years later, I find that I remember vast parts of it with perfect clarity…a book to kindle the joy of reading science fiction. –SciFi.com

 

 

“A remarkably tender story of a post-nuclear childhood…It has, of course, always seemed a classic to most of its three generations of readers...It has become part of a canon of good books.” –The Guardian, September 15, 2000

About the Author

John Wyndham is the pen name of John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris (1903–1969), the son of an English barrister. The boy’s parents separated when he was eight, and after attending various boarding schools, he lived off family money while trying his hand—unsuccessfully—at careers such as law, commercial illustration, and advertising. In 1924 he turned to writing, and within a number of years he was selling short stories, mostly science fiction, to pulp magazines in America, as John Beynon or John Beynon Harris. During World War II, he served behind the lines in the British army, and in 1951 he published The Day of the Triffids, his first novel as John Wyndham, and a tremendous success. John Wyndham’s six other novels include The Kraken Wakes and The Midwich Cuckoos.


Christopher Priest has published eleven novels, three short-story collections, and a number of other books, including critical works, biographies, novelizations, and children’s nonfiction. In 1996 Priest won the World Fantasy Award and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel The Prestige. His most recent novel, The Separation, won both the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the British Science Fiction Association Award.

Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: NYRB Classics (November 18, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1590172922
• ISBN-13: 978-1590172926
• Product Dimensions: 5 x 0.5 x 7.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (183 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #69,615 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

59 of 63 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Great Atmosphere December 16, 1999

By Travis Cottreau

Format:Paperback

I read this book for the first time in highschool years ago and re-read it again since.

What most impressed me was the author's ability to set up atmosphere in the novel. I still to this day, after years between readings remember images I formed while reading the novel. Grass between the toes, the nuclear wastes, the way the children formed telepathic images etc...

One thing that I remember clearly is how the novel was like a breath of fresh air, clean and smooth. There are no frilly edges and there is no attempt by the author to make the book flashy. This makes the book pure and adds to the impact of the story.

As an overview, there are a group of children who are living in Eastern Canada after some type of holocaust (this is never much of a point in the book... no one has memories of it). Their society is strongly anti-mutant with a very strict set of rules as to what is "normal" and what isn't. All of this children are normal looking but are telepathic and form a click of just a small number.

The book is their story of growing up and existing in this paranoid and highly dogmatic society without being discovered and banished or killed.

A definite classic in Science Fiction circles.

43 of 45 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A perennial soft sci-fi classic! January 1, 2007

By Paul Weiss

Format:Paperback

At a time in some unspecified distant future after a nuclear war has left much of the world a barren, poisonous wasteland, David Strorm, Sophie Wender and Rosalind Morton live in Waknuk, a small agriculturally focused community in central Labrador. With modern technology yet to be re-invented, the strict religious fundamental beliefs of this still primitive community label the apocalypse as "Tribulation", a punishment visited by God upon the "old people" for their sins.

Genetic variations and mutations, now commonplace (no doubt as a result of higher worldwide radiation levels), are seen as evil. "Deviant" crops and animals are burnt. Humans with even the most minor mutations from their highest religious ideal, a physical norm which the community calls God's "True Image", are labeled as blasphemies and are killed outright or banished to eke out their future existence in a wildly savage outlying area called "The Fringes".

When the community discovers that David and Rosalind together with a small group of other young people have developed the ability to communicate telepathically, they are forced to flee for their lives. They are re-united with their friend Sophie, earlier banished to the Fringes for the disgusting aberration of having six toes instead of the normal five. David's younger sister, Petra, able to communicate her thoughts with a power and at a distance far beyond any of the other children discovers the presence of others like them in a distant community who mount a campaign to rescue the children from their persecutors.

In "The Chrysalids", John Wyndham has mounted a vicious attack on religious fundamentalism, bigotry, intolerance and narrow-mindedness. Analytical readers will be mindful of the irony in the closing chapters as it is clear that the more advanced community is as repressive and intolerant as the community from which the children fled. Wyndham leaves us with the unresolved open question as to whether Man's evolution into a new species will perforce require the extinction of the remaining members of the previous species.

Wyndham's characters, his easy-going unforced and completely natural dialogue, his heartwarming portrayal of children at play, a mother's grief-stricken tragedy as she tries to protect her children from religious attack, and the faltering growth of love between young men and women will all remind classic science fiction fans of the pastoral easy reading style of Clifford D Simak, another giant of the genre.

If you've yet to savour "The Chrysalids", a perennial front runner in the field of soft science fiction, I can't think of a better time than right now. Highly recommended indeed.

Paul Weiss

22 of 22 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Great story, affecting and thought-provoking October 26, 2006

By Kisminette

Format:Paperback

"Don't judge a book by its cover" is absolutely right, I have rarely seen a more repellent (and irrelevant to the story) picture than the one currently "gracing" the cover of this wonderful book. Thank goodness, I had read it years ago, under a different cover and a different title, because as it is presented now I would never have bought it and would have missed a great story, one that I enjoy re-reading again and again.

I was surprised to see that it's marketed to the 9-12 age group. It's a very precocious pre-teen who would be able to get all the sociological, moral, philosophical and political implications of the plot.

The story is narrated by David Strorm, who's about 10 when it begins and around 18 or 20 at the end. David lives in Labrador, centuries after "God sent Tribulation" unto mankind. The 21st century reader soon realizes Tribulation was a nuclear conflict that lay waste to every Western country south of Canada and north of New Zealand. Pockets of humanity do survive in Africa and elsewhere, but all those survivor communities are totally isolated from each other because the radio-activity in what was the USA, Western Europe and the Soviet block precludes land or sea travel (though there is some limited navigation and trading) and communication.

The community David belongs to is a very strait-laced one, who insists on "purity" and conformity to the "True Image". Every deviation (i.e. mutation due to radiation) in either human, animal or plant is rooted out mercilessly. Plants and animals are burned, people get sent to the savage, untamed "Fringes". Physical deviation, that is. The powers-that-be don't realize that a group of children have developed telepathy. They look totally normal, but they're able to communicate with each other without words and over distances. They learn very early that "different is deadly" and protect themselves carefully but get betrayed by one of their own, who falls in love with a Normal and entrusts him with their secret, and also, unwittingly, by David's little sister Petra who's the most powerful telepath ever seen with powers that develop before she's old enough to learn control, the result being they have to flee into the Fringes.

Petra's power as a telepath comes in handy, she can send mental messages half-way around the world - more specifically to New Zealand (not "Sealand" as another reviewer misunderstood) to another group of survivors who have developed telepathy as a society and have been reinforcing the telepathic strain by careful breeding. I'll not give the ending away, but I will say that I always wanted to write a sequel to the book one day. I got so attached to some of the characters that I hate to let go of them.

This isn't just another "post-nuclear holocaust" story (there's been quite a number, including, among others, "Alas Babylon", "... For a Single Yesterday...", etc.). It's about more than mankind surviving a nuclear war and climbing back to civilization, it's about the kind of society that can be built in cases like this, about Did we learn anything from past mistakes?, about tolerance, about bigotry and narrow-mindedness and most of all about surviving in a society where to be different is a death sentence. The author, John Wyndham, dwells on the same theme from a different angle in his "The Midwich Cuckoos" which I have also reviewed, as has Zenna Henderson in her stories of "The People" (extra-terrestrials fleeing the destruction of their planet and trying to blend into Earth society despite their (to us) paranormal powers).

The plot is engaging, the suspense at the end kept me turning pages, the characters are endearing, the whole underlying questions are thought-provoking. It's a great book, for adults more than for children. It's regrettable that it has all but fallen into oblivion and also been relegated to kiddie lit shelves. It deserves a lot better. I give it full marks.