The Midwich Cuckoos

So, we’re on to the final book from the London trip.  This time it’s John Wynham’s The Midwich Cuckoos, read on my way back to the sticks from the big city.  It’s one of those books that make me think I should really prefer the city.  Messed up things happen in the country.  There are fucking alien children in the country (spoiler).  Even the one that does escape to London ends being drawn back to the village of Midwich.  The country is clearly a dangerous place.  The book itself is another sci-fi/ horror classic that I knew a bit about.  I haven’t seen the Village of the Damned, but I’ve seen The Simpsons parody of it and other things influenced by the book.

The entire population of the sleepy village Midwich mysterious fall unconscious for around 36 hours over a couple of days one September.  Upon waking they not only discover that they’ve miss their favourite TV shows (and with nary an iPlayer or even a VCR have no way to catch up) but that also all the women are pregnant.  Considering this is 1957 and many of the women are unwed, this causes complications.  Of course, the alien foetus story does sound a lot more convincing when it’s happened to all the women within a two mile radius, so the village moves on and in nine months develops an alien baby problem instead.  Fast forward nine years and due to their accelerated aging this has developed into a fully-fledged alien teenager problem.  They do all the things normal teenagers do, stay out late, disobey their parents, murder locals with psychic powers and hive mind.  After a fair amount of bloodshed, order is resolved.  There’s also some background nonsense going on with the shadowy Grange and its researchers, but that can pretty much be ignored.

Reading this book, one of the weirdest things for me was the pregnancies themselves.  As I mentioned earlier it was released in 1957 and back then IVF wasn’t a thing.  After some panic, the explanation that the scientists come up with (using delightful terms like “host mother”) is basically IVF.  It’s mad to think that of all the things that sci-fi gets so appallingly wrong, this is one of the things that became true.  To me however, the unsettling part of the pregnancies is the complete lack of consent by the women who are impregnated.  Rather than being mystified or amazed that such a thing could happen, I am appalled on behalf of the women whose autonomy has been violated.  The men don’t really seem to care about this point.  There’s one point in the novel in which Wyndham mentions that the men have never seen the children as their own, but the women accept them much more freely as they nurtured them in the womb.  This is such bullshit.  There’s only one woman who chooses to abandon her baby (rightly stating she is not responsible for it) and get the hell out of dodge and there’s definitely a feeling that she’s judged for this decision. 

Like The Day of theTriffids, this is a classic of British sci-fi, but it’s very much of its time.  The attitudes to women in places are simply disgraceful and the Midwich killings only start after a parallel Russian village is destroyed.  Although it’s not as famous as The Day of the Triffids, I get the feeling that this book is more important because of its influence on culture rather than the book itself.  Wynham was not the first to realise children are creepy as hell, but he used that fact so effectively.  The influence of it is clear in things like Hot Fuzz, The Omen and almost anything with creepy children in, really.  There are also some nice little parallels with its contemporary works The Minority Report (the original short story) near the end, which I quite enjoyed.

I’ve now moved on to The Ground Beneath Her Feet by Salman Rushdie.  At the time of writing, I haven’t even started it, but doubtless by the time this has been posted it’ll be long finished.