I first read The Chrysalids when I was 16, would have done so a lot sooner given the chance, but my mother would not let me up till then. She thought it might be too old for me.
Well, it was an unforgettable treat for me when I did. That is the strange thing about certain kinds of science fiction - and I do not by that mean the spaghetti gung-ho kind of read, I mean the ones which speculate most about where human beings are going. Certain kinds of SF seem to address certain areas of interest of mine so keenly, it is almost as if the writer were directly addressing a fellow Chrysalid, Cuckoo, or a Chocky. Other writers whom I admire for similar reasons include Philip K Dick, Phyliss Gottlieb, JG Ballard, Robert Silverberg and Michael Moorcock, to name just a few.
There is the pessimism about where technology is heading, the fascination of following a world, whilst futuristic, has been rendered archaic by its desruction of an inadequate race gone insane, as the Sealand character so eloquently puts it, as she views a ruined Northern Hemisphere from the safety of her cockpit.
Brian Aldiss at Worldcon 2005 in Glasgow, August 2...
sealand-x
sealand-againThe way Uncle Axel depicts the horror of the Badlands, where genetic mutations in a poisoned world have gone wild, is particularly evocative.
Brian Aldiss would no doubt sympathise, it is all pretty gothic. He did something similar in his own novel Greybeard, of course.
I should think that current concerns about the prosecution of anything different is all too topical currently too: human nature does not change that much after all, as any child with either physical or mental handicaps can surely testify, through ensuing generations of bullying at school. Did Wyndham have a close relative with Asgerger,s for example?
But The Chrysalids...