Change and adaptation in the fiction of John Wyndham

This thesis examines the writings of the British author John Wyndham (1903–1969), whose body of work comprises fiction, including science fiction (SF), crime, horror and fantasy, as well as published and unpublished SF criticism. Wyndham’s career spanned almost half a century, during which he wrote 12 novels and over 70 stories, using nine different pseudonyms. The commercial success of Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids (1951) prompted critics to firmly divide his career into two periods: the early fiction written predominantly for the emerging American SF pulp magazine market, and his more mature work geared towards the general British audience. The thesis challenges this demarcation, which rests on deliberately overlooking Wyndham’s early fiction, and instead, it argues for continuities in his work. Wyndham’s unwavering fascination with the concepts of change, including biological, evolutionary, environmental, scientific and social change, and adaption to that change, serves as a framing mechanism that enables the discussion of his early and more obscure fiction alongside his later works. Chapter 1 examines critical and archival material to illustrate how Wyndham’s journey as a writer mirrored the evolving nature of SF, and how, at the same time, the subject matter of his fiction remained fundamentally unchanged. Chapters 2 to 5 illustrate these points through analysis of his works. His fiction is grouped thematically, according to the main themes dominant in SF: science and technology (Chapter 2); apocalypse and dystopia (Chapter 3); aliens and space exploration (Chapter 4); and time travel (Chapter 5). Appendix 1 examines the artwork accompanying Wyndham’s publications throughout his career. It illuminates why his early fiction, due to its pulpish associations, was often mistakenly treated as a separate period in his career. Appendix 2 is a detailed and updated chronological bibliography, whose aim is to verify, correct and supplement the existing bibliographical information. Wyndham’s early fiction was published and serialised under different pseudonyms in a variety of magazines in both Europe and America. The aim of Appendix 2 is to further illustrate that this dispersion was the reason Wyndham’s early fiction went unnoticed by critics and became separated from his later career. The thesis contributes to the following fields: American and British SF studies, ecocriticism, feminist studies, and British and American pulp fiction magazine culture.

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University of Galway

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Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

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University of Galway Theses (PhD Theses)