JOHN WYNDAM
Really good! I like to have the occasional author binge - the current object is John Wyndham. I read the Day of the Triffids for the Dystopian Lit course I did, and wanted a bit more. Next on the list was The Chrysalids and I've just finished the the Cuckoos. I really enjoyed it, the plot worked well, there were some decently strong women - though even the in charge ones were rather domestic. It was also very, very light reading after the trial that was making it through The Last Man, the philosophising character of Zellaby keeps his ruminations to a page at most rather than the four page diatribes of Shelley's characters. But whilst the book is quite snappy, the questions it poses are less quickly dismissed - what do you do with children that are clearly 'other' but look pretty like normal? An alien invasion is easy to fight (even if it is hard to win), but the Midwich problem is much more like the frog in heated water problem - does the humanity attack before it boils to death? And how hot does the water need to get first?
It was a little odd that last night as I was up to the final chapters I happened upon a film called 'The Fifth Wave' - clearly I'm a bit blind on YA dystopia at the moment, but I completely missed this one - I just thought it was going to be an amusing alien invasion type thing. It was, but it also had aliens are humans plus plague which seemed just a tiny bit derivative of the two vintage books I've just read. It made for some confusing cross-over dreams.
And for the next on my list... well - the YA trilogy I was just talking about obviously. Then I might have to read something non disaster orientated.