The Outward Urge
I’m a big John Wyndham fan, but there’s a reason this book is the only one that’s no longer in print. It’s difficult for futuristic stories to last when the time has come and gone. 1984 will last, Brave New World might. But this hasn’t, couldn’t, because he focused solely on technology when the big changes have been social.
The way people talk now is entirely different (or perhaps people never spoke the way Wyndham thought, but it’s not noticeable in his older books). He’s got characters using classical metaphors when even the smart people I know would never consider such a thing. The feminist revolution certainly never happened in his world (no surprises there, he was a bit of a misogynist) and neither did the sexual revolution – in his 1994, celibacy means not being married. There’s a reference to a guy with initials GMT meaning “Greenwich Mean Time” and thereby him getting called “ticker” – well, we don’t have watches that tick any longer, and I bet if you did a survey half the population wouldn’t have a clue what GMT stood for.
He has a series of stories going from 1994 to about one hundred years later, following one family. There’s no language change over that period of time, there’s wars but no real sense of racial or social alteration, and considering he wrote in the fifties it’s kind of surprising, when you look at the massive change just in Europe let alone Asia post WW2. They’re adventure stories, not particularly exciting, with a twist that isn’t particularly surprising. So on the literary front it isn’t great stuff, and it’s obvious why, because he is writing about technology and his gift, I think, was always the human factor.
I always wish I could go back in time and talk to writers like this, surprise them with the way the rest of their century turned out; more wars, utter social upheaval, the whole focus on civil and human rights, and the way information slowly became the most important commodity of all. But I don’t know if I’d want someone to appear from fifty years in the future to inform me.
The way people talk now is entirely different (or perhaps people never spoke the way Wyndham thought, but it’s not noticeable in his older books). He’s got characters using classical metaphors when even the smart people I know would never consider such a thing. The feminist revolution certainly never happened in his world (no surprises there, he was a bit of a misogynist) and neither did the sexual revolution – in his 1994, celibacy means not being married. There’s a reference to a guy with initials GMT meaning “Greenwich Mean Time” and thereby him getting called “ticker” – well, we don’t have watches that tick any longer, and I bet if you did a survey half the population wouldn’t have a clue what GMT stood for.
He has a series of stories going from 1994 to about one hundred years later, following one family. There’s no language change over that period of time, there’s wars but no real sense of racial or social alteration, and considering he wrote in the fifties it’s kind of surprising, when you look at the massive change just in Europe let alone Asia post WW2. They’re adventure stories, not particularly exciting, with a twist that isn’t particularly surprising. So on the literary front it isn’t great stuff, and it’s obvious why, because he is writing about technology and his gift, I think, was always the human factor.
I always wish I could go back in time and talk to writers like this, surprise them with the way the rest of their century turned out; more wars, utter social upheaval, the whole focus on civil and human rights, and the way information slowly became the most important commodity of all. But I don’t know if I’d want someone to appear from fifty years in the future to inform me.
posted by Carly at 7:50 am
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