James Nicoll Reviews

John Wyndham’s 1955 The Chrysalids is a stand-alone post-apocalyptic coming of age novel. The Chrysalids was also published under the title Re-Birth.

David Strorm lives in Waknuk, a thriving backwoods community in Labrador. The Tribulation that erased the Old People and their semi-mythical civilization left much of the world an uninhabitable desolation. Labrador and nearby Newf are exceptions, but even here the Tribulation left a legacy that has shaped the local culture.

Beware spoilers.

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Although 1951’s The Day of the Triffids was not John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris’ first novel, it was the first that he published under the name John Wyndham. It established him as the master of the Cozy Catastrophe.

His eyes bandaged thanks to an injury, Bill Masen cannot see the wondrous meteor shower that lights up Earth’s sky. As a consequence, he is spared the side-effect that manifests the following day: total blindness. As most of the human population had ooh’d and ah’d at the sight, most of them are blind. 

It gets worse. 

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