John Wyndham

(1903-1969)

(John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris)
 
 

The well-known British author John Wyndham is one of the few science-fiction authors who found great acceptance among non-science-fiction readers. He began publishing science-fiction stories in 1931 in Wonder Stories but became famous with his outstanding novels like The Day of the Triffids (1951), The Kraken Wakes (1953), The Chrysalids (1955), The Midwich Cuckoos (1957), Trouble with Lichen (1960) and others.

John Wyndham's concern about time was not central but very early in his work. Wanderers of Time had been written originally under his own name John Beynon Harris in Wonder Stories (1933) and reprinted in Coronet Books, Hodder Paperbacks Ltd., London (1973)


quotations from Wyndham's Wanderers of Time:

"(Del said:) "... this must be a kind of "dead" spot in time. It is as though our machines had been thrown into the flow of time and swept along until, for some unguessable reason, they met an obstruction at this point. Every one of us has arrived here because his machine was faulty in some way or other. To take an illustration - a bad one, I admit, but enough for our purpose - one may consider time as a river. You may turn boats adrift on it at many points, and they will all collect together at the same serious obstacle, whether they have travelled a hundred miles or two miles. We are now at some period when the straight flow of time has been checked -  perhaps it is even turning back upon itself. We know no details at present, but it is certain that the same curious phenomenon has thrown us all together."
"But," Hale objected, "time, like space, surely is curved?"
"It may be - in fact, it must be; but I see no reason why there should not be interruptions in time. After all, are not the stars interruptions in space?"
"You mean that space may interrupt time in the same way that time distorts space?"
"Roughly, yes - if you can consider the two apart, which I find impossible. I merely repeat that we have struck some barrier and been thrown up like so much jetsam."
"Then there may be others, besides ourselves?"
"As many others as made faulty time-travellers.""

(John Wyndham: Wanderers of Time, 1933)


"(Del said:) "This vehicle is radically different from ours. It does not plunge instantaneously through the time-flow. Instead, it has the property of slowing down its contents, so that the world outside slips by at high speed by comparison. A slow, inefficient machine - but it worked."
"I don't understand."
"I mean that both our machines, yours and mine, work similarly to the extent that they insulate us entirely from time - that is to say, ages pass by us in a flash and we are not affected. But this is not a complete insulating machine; it works with a kind of drag action. For instance, if the operator turns this main dial to indicate a speed half-way between the normal time-flow and complete insulation, events inside his chamber will take exactly twice as long to happen as they would in the outer world. During the period which seems an hour to him, the events of two hours will take place outside. If he turns the dial further, the events of a week, or a year, flash past in what appears to be an hour. See, he even has a window through which he can watch the happenings of the world fly past."
Roy noticed a square of glass set in one wall.
"I think I understand. But what happened?"
"He must have made a mistake somewhere, just as we did; but unlike us, he was travelling so slowly, even at his top speed, that before he reached this date he starved and died on the way - another martyr to experiment...""

(John Wyndham: Wanderers of Time, 1933)

"Del shook his head gently: "You don't realise. There are no towns."
"No towns?"
"Neither towns, nor men."
"You're foolin' me! They can't all be dead."
"They must be, or the insects would not be ruling."
"But - but do you mean the ants have killed all the men?"
"It seems unlikely. Probably men just stopped."
"I don't get you."
"Men did not kill off the great reptiles who ruled the world before them - the reptiles just stopped. It seems to me that man, too, has "had his little day and ceased to be."""

(John Wyndham: Wanderers of Time, 1933)
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