John Wyndham

John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris was a science fiction author who was born in Knowle, Warwickshire, England on July 10th, 1903. He began selling detective and science fiction short stories to American science pulp magazines under the pen names of 'John Beynon' in 1931. Wyndham's style was a reaction against what he described as the "galactic gangsters in space opera" style of much science fiction up to then. In his longer tales, he was more concerned with character development than many of his contemporaries. His first science fiction novel, The Secret People was published in 1936. The novel was set in the year 1964, and featured a British couple who found themselves held captive by an ancient race of pygmies dwelling beneath the Sahara desert. Like many of Wyndham's early works, The Secret People was written under the early pen name, John Beynon. Wyndham followed The Secret People with Planet Plane, which was published by George Newnes Limited in 1936 and has also been released under the title Stowaway to Mars.

In the 1940s, John Wyndham served in the Second World War. He was a censor in the Ministry of Information, then joined the army, serving as a Corporal cipher operator in the Royal Corps of Signals. After the war, Wyndham returned to writing and began publishing stories under the pen name John Wyndham. His best known work from this era is the 1951 novel The Day of the Triffids, a tale about a society rendered permanently blind due to the effects of a passing meteor shower. The Day of the Triffids has since been adapted into a 1962 feature film, a 1981 six-part mini-series and a 2009 two-part mini-series. He went on to write and publish six more novels under the name John Wyndham, all of which appeared in his lifetime.

In 1953, Wyndham wrote The Kraken Wakes, which was originally published by Michael Joseph in the UK and first published in the United States in the same year by Ballantine Books under the title Out of the Deeps. The title is a reference to Alfred Tennyson's sonnet The Kraken, which describes a Scandinavian sea monster.

In 1955, Michael Joseph published Wyndham's next novel, The Chrysalids, which was later adapted for BBC radio by Barbara Clegg in 1982. It was was published in the United States under the title Re-Birth.

Wyndham's next novel, The Midwich Cuckoos was published by Ballantine Books in 1957. A story of a society of children whose origins are the product of xenogenesis, The Midwich Cuckoos was adapted into films in 1960 and 1995, both under the title Village of the Damned.