October 1961
This is also a collection of stories by an author, some of whose work, at least, almost everybody must have read. The Day of The Triffids is not easily forgotten - nor is The Midwich Cuckoos. Most of these stories deal with confusions about time - the confusion induced by drugs, electronic experiments, and so on. Unfortunately, they don’t seem up to Mr. Wyndham’s high and demanding form. I suppose when the fantastic fails it is demoted to being merely far-fetched - meaning that the reader has not been gripped and temporarily convinced by a possibility, however remote, in the way he wants if he reads this kind of work. The first story, about a young woman doctor who through taking an experimental drug discovers herself way in the future in a women’s world, seems more unpleasant than it is anything else. The last story, about a man who, playing a tape of his own voice backwards at slow speed, accidentally summons a devil, is easily the best: this seemed to me neat, funny and well-shaped throughout. Three of the others have a curiously old-fashioned taste to them: at one point I even thought that the author was parodying Conan Doyle: it is not simply that everyone drinks stiff brandies whenever their sense of time - or the lack of it - gets too much for them; there’s also a kind of dogged pace and structure which doesn’t go with the stream lined inventions employed. I suppose pawns don’t date, and this is partly what makes these characters able to hop or lurch from one stretch of time to the next, without in most cases, anyone being any the wiser. This sounds rather savage when one has had so much entertainment from Mr. Wyndham’s earlier books - the truth is that he has conditioned one to expect almost too much of him.