was born near Birmingham 10 July 1903. Father a solicitor. Brother Vivian born 16 Nov 1906. Little autobiographical information publicly available at his death in 1969**.

Lived in Edgbaston until parents separated in 1911 - stayed with mother thereafter in lodgings until she put him in various prep schools (including Shardlow Hall Derbyshire - now an animal research centre). Went to Blundell's public school, where his health suffered during WW1, and mother then moved him to Bedales, the progressive school in Sussex.

Could not afford to go to university. No particular occupation after school, though he always wanted to write. Followed various occupations: Sheep Farming (near Banbury), Law, Commercial Art and Advertising. Journalism. He even tried his hand at detective stories. In the late 1920s he discovered the American pulp magazines (people used to buy them from Woolworth's and called them "Yank Mags"), and in Feb 1930 he won $100 for suggesting a slogan for Air Wonder Stories. He was already a great fan of H G Wells and Jules Verne. He began to send his stories to America and get them published - they were cliched space operas, and are almost forgotten today. He also managed to get a couple of novels published in England, where the SF market was much smaller. He did not call himself "John Wyndham", but used other combinations of his names.

Moved into a residential club in London, and in 1932 met Grace Wilson whom he would marry only in 1963. He regarded the overlap of the "ON" at the end of "Wilson" and "ON" at the end of "Beynon" as a sign of good luck, and he always gave his heroes and heroines "ON" names - they are called Bill Mason and Josella Playton in DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS. Grace Wilson was a grammar school teacher, but Wyndham must have just been scraping a living. He knew the small group of scientists and science fiction fans who used to meet in a London pub, but their recollections of him are of a quiet, retiring man. Arthur C Clarke wrote a collection of stories about his group, called TALES FROM THE WHITE HART.

When war broke out he became a civil servant working in the censorship department, but for the last three years of the war he served in Signals Intelligence with the Guards Armoured Division, and he was in the spearhead of the D Day invasion and occupation of Germany. Late in 1946 he was demobilised. It must have been those three years which introduced him to the powers of technology, and clarified his thinking about human nature.

His brother was a failed actor, who'd spent the 1930s living at Smedley's Hydro in Matlock Derbyshire (now the Derbyshire Council Offices). Just before the war Vivian had joined the local (Alderwasley) Fire Brigade, and so was enrolled in the National Fire Service when war broke out. In November 1940 Vivian was in Coventry on the night of Operation Moonlight Sonata. He suffered a nervous breakdown, and never worked again. As he and Wyndham corresponded nearly everyday, Wyndham must have kept a particular vision of destruction, having discovered the effects of the German bombing through his brother, and then seen Europe after the invasion.

When he could get away from London Wyndham used to escape to the south coast, close to the location of his Bedales schooldays. Walking down a lane with Grace one night in the late 1940s they were caught by brambles. Wyndham remarked how dangerous they would be if they could think and move. The idea of the Triffids had been conceived. (George Orwell thought of ANIMAL FARM during a similar country walk).

Wyndham then had the biggest stroke of luck anyone could imagine - the American "slick" magazines, such as Collier's and the Saturday Evening Post started to take a few science fiction stories. They did not want "space opera", they wanted something more thoughtful, and they found it in John Wyndham's Triffids. They serialised "The Revolt of the Triffids" (as they called it, in January and February 1951). The book became a best seller when it was published in Britain and the USA later that year.

THE KRAKEN WAKES 1953

THE CHRYSALIDS 1955

THE MIDWICH CUCKOOS 1957

THE TROUBLE WITH LICHEN 1960

CHOCKY 1968

These works seem to fall into pairs: the two disasters DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS and THE KRAKEN WAKES; two accounts of mutants, where people cannot cope with superhuman children, THE CHRYSALIDS and THE MIDWICH CUCKOOS; then stories based on symbiosis, LICHEN (which gives immortality) and CHOCKY (where an alien intelligence enters a boy's mind).

He published collections of short stories as well, some of them science fiction, others horror.

The novels can be read in a number of ways: some people think of TRIFFIDS as an adventure story, but it is much deeper than that. Wyndham, though, had become such a good writer that readers looking for thrills were satisfied while others who looked deeper could find more as well. The disaster in TRIFFIDS does not just happen - events have to come together; the world has to be blinded before humanity is totally at the mercy of the walking, stinging plants. But, of course, the existence of the plants has to be explained as well. That's what Wyndham manages to do - TRIFFIDS manages to contain a lot of the discussions about Genetically Modified Organisms that we are having fifty years after it was published; and Wyndham also manages to show why the satellites with the blinding technology are there as well. (It is rather grimly ironic that as I type today December 26^th, the Russians have announced that they have lost contact with the Mir Satellite).

The 1950s also saw many social changes. Wyndham did not bother to write about "Teddy Boys" - he saw that new attitudes would ultimately be far different to those we know now. THE MIDWICH CUCKOOS takes the Generation Gap to its logical conclusion.

Whether or not it is now in the National Curriculum, Wyndham's work has been a popular book in secondary school classrooms. Some science fiction critics in the 1970s and 1980s called Wyndham's work "cosy catastrophes", in which the British were allowed to show their stiff upper lips, but more recently we have been looking more closely at what Wyndham actually wrote and this tends to turn things around. For instance, if you count up the deaths in DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS, as Bill Mason goes around the country he sees more people killed by other people than people killed by Triffids. The Triffids are almost killing machines, but after a disaster everyone would hope that their neighbours would not turn into psychopaths, nevertheless under the strain it might happen. So the lesson is, Don't let it happen. Let's not get into a state where we could be blinded and put at the risk of plants which have an inbred threat. Perhaps let's not breed plants like that.

If we find it difficult to cope with the logic of the "Triffid economy" (it is a bit like workers in a munitions works - they want their jobs, but it would be too awful to think that they wanted to products to be used), how much more difficult would we find it to understand alien intelligences, or higher intelligences? A lot of people would be frightened and act irrationally because of their fear, perhaps provoking retaliation. Simply looking at the generation gap should be a warning to us to make the far greater preparations required for crossing the inter-species gap.

Writers have been threatening the world for many years - there had been other stories before H G Wells wrote THE WAR OF THE WORLDS in 1898. Wyndham managed to show that after 1945 the threats from all parts of life - science, politics, human nature - would find new and worse weapons to fulfill themselves.