A book like this is the reason I love science fiction. It is pure, unadulterated genius. It is also one of the very first science fiction books I ever read, and definitely contributed to the burgeoning taste for all things speculative I was cultivating in my pre-adolescence. Along with John Christopher’s White Mountains Trilogy, with which it has a lot in common, The Chrysalids introduced me to not only the dystopian esthetic, but also the use of SF to shine a light onto some of the wackier societal concepts we all too often accept as true without complaint or contemplation, simply because we are told that is The Way Things Are.

I may not have understood the religious metaphor of the Narnia series just a few years prior, but here, I got it almost at once.

In The Chrysalids, we meet our narrator, David Strorm. He takes us to his childhood in rural Labrador, which is no longer the Canadian winter wonderland it is now. In David’s time, perhaps thousands of years hence, it is valuable farmland, and David’s father is a prosperous landowner in a well-situated district. A proud and devout man, the elder Strorm is ever watchful for signs of “Deviation”, for it says in Nicholson’s Repentances that “Only the image of God is Man”, and there are a whole bunch of strictures about the disposal of any living thing, whether it be animal, vegetable or even a child, that is differs even a little bit from the norm.

When David is ten, he meets a little girl called Sophie, and he learns that she has two extra toes, one on each foot, and yet is otherwise perfectly lovely. So he starts to question whether Deviations are therefore all bad. He talks to his well-travelled sailor uncle about the wider world, and learns there are places where it is considered wrong to not have webbed toes, or to have any hair pigment at all. Uncle Axel talks of scarred black lands to the south bearing upon them the glowing ruins of once great cities that, if you should get too close to them, cause you to waste away and die, all because God sent a Tribulation on the Old People and…

(Ah! So there was a nuclear war, it has caused radiation sickness and mutation throughout the world, and this Nicholson fellow thought to try and eliminate the unclean from the gene pool by making them taboo in his corner of the world. No matter that it would mean the slaughter, or simple exposure, of infants.

My eleven-year old self was outraged. And, reading it again, things haven’t changed much. Damn you, Nicholson!)

Little though he may be aware of how it might be perceived by his elders, and the local Inspector (for someone must be on hand to pronounce newborn babies properly human, after all), David was keeping more than one Deviation a secret. He has one of his own; he’s a telepath, and not the only one. His cousin Rosalind, and several other neighborhood children, speak into each other’s minds, and David keeps having visions of a shining city where large “fish” swim in the sky. Of course, a telepath was hardly going to pass muster in a house in which the violent and pompous patriarch likes to shout things like “Accursed is the Mutant!”

So when David’s little sister Petra, a far stronger telepath than he, starts to manifest her own Deviation, the whole group of them are endangered and must strike out on their own; the two siblings and their cousin head out into the wild hinterlands known as the Fringes and make all kinds of shocking discoveries about the nature of their pious family. It’s all quite harrowing for a while, but happily, Petra’s telepathy is so strong that she manages to make contact -- remember, she’s in Canada -- with a woman in the advanced country of Sealand (New Zealand), which is home to a population who value telepathy and whose remoteness from Northern Hemisphere political tensions has, one assumes, allowed it to retain a certain level of technology, even after the probable nuclear holocaust. So, to Sealand they must go!

If you have not read this book, I really wish you would. It is a fairly slim volume, and need not take you long, but it will stay with you long, long after you have finished it. Wyndham’s prose is elegant and entrancing, and you will be utterly overcome by his easy facility with words and his undeniable flair. When I think post-apocalyptic fiction, this is the first book that always springs to mind, and when I think of essential works of classic science fiction, this book is top of the list.

   -- Rachel Hyland