Once every woman in the village becomes pregnant, you’d say that their stories have the most immediacy and modern writers would likely have made one or more of those women the main characters, but in this story the women are all struck down by shame and indecision, until the “three wise men” of the village – meaning the doctor, the vicar and the writer – come together to make decisions and mostly to decide how much information they should give their wives. The book is rather dated in some respects. As such, it is a complementary novel to Jack Finney’s The Body Snatchers (1955). The creepy children may be seen in that light. At the same time, it is set during the cold war and at a time when fears existed about internal communist takeovers of society. This is a decade after the Roswell incident and the story has some familiar elements that we associate with alien paranoia, such as aliens messing with our reproduction and having lost time. It is short but very descriptive, with the author just telling in a cheery voice what happened. Hard to believe that this was written in the same era of Alfred Bester and Philip K. There is a lot of my-dear-fellow-ing the book feels like a 19 th century one, actually. In a dry, eloquent manner Wyndham talks about Mr and Mrs so-and-so having cups of tea and police chief this and teacher that maintaining calm at the local pub. Wyndham sticks with his theme of a small English town by telling a very calm story about middle class citizens dealing with supernatural events. The cuckoo chick then pushes all the other eggs out of the nest like a parasite. Let’s take a look at The Midwich Cuckoos (1957), which has quite an interesting premise, wouldn’t you agree?Ĭuckoo of course refers to the cuckoo bird, famous for laying its eggs in the nests of other birds.
John Wyndham was a reasonably successful British science fiction writer in the 50s and has a handful of SF novels on his name that are considered classics and are still in print today: The Day of the Triffids (1951) in which everyone gets blinded and attacked by sunflowers, The Chrysalids (1955) in which mutant children fight for freedom in a post-apocalyptic world, and this one. They all give birth to identical boys and girls with blond hair and golden eyes.
Until a mysterious silver object falls from the sky, and afterwards, all the women in the town are discovered to be pregnant. In the quiet, unremarkable town of Midwich, all is calm.
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