The Chrysalids

The Chrysalids, by John Wyndham, is a 1955 science fiction novel set in a post-apocalyptic world. Some unexplained worldwide nuclear event, called the Tribulation, has led to mass deaths and mutations in plant and animal life, with a small human settlement trying to eke out an existence in a hostile environment. The book is from the 1950s, so naturally a nuclear disaster is the enemy. It’s never made entirely clear how nuclear war came about or many details about the Tribulation, but humans definitely led to their own downfall, which contributes to the society’s obsessive discovery and destruction of any mutations now. The book is sounding a warning about nuclear destruction and humans’ threat to other humans, so reading this book now is particularly interesting, without a strong nuclear threat but with climate change bringing unseasonable, shocking, once-in-a-century storms pretty much constantly. 

Young David, a boy growing up in Waknuk, discovers a telepathic ability to communicate with certain other people. These seven telepaths, all other young people in surrounding Labr, are able to chat mentally across local distances. There’s a hint that there’s a genetic component, but it’s not explicitly clear, since David himself doesn’t full understand it.  Having these special friends is a comfort in the repetitive farming life of Waknuk, but since David and his friends are deviations from the norm,  they naturally work to hide their telepathic abilities from anyone else. This add tension to the storyline, which otherwise begins as sort of a factual account of life in Waknuk. 

When David’s youngest sister, Petra, is born, she starts to show signs of telepathy too, but much stronger than the others. Her telepathic cries for help and screams of enjoyment threaten the secrets of the other telepaths. But as she gets older and begins to develop her abilities, she makes contact with someone outside the other seven, and outside Labr entirely, setting off a page-turning adventure in a harsh future landscape. 

The religious aspect of Waknuk is a bit heavy-handed, it’s much more Scarlet Letter than science fiction. Yes, sure, people can use the Bible to say whatever they want, that’s not exactly a plot twist or a surprise. So it’s the subtler aspects of post-Tribulation society that drew me in. The people of Waknuk are farmers reclaiming arable land from the Fringes, mostly with the technology level of Tudor Monastery Farm, and religious, Puritan authorities responsible for ensuring that no crops, livestock or humans are deviations. There’s no acknowledgement of pregnancy or birth until the newborn has been inspected, found healthy and complete, and then given a certificate of normalcy. Health and normalcy of babies is placed on the women, with an old-timer telling David about the old days when a woman with multiple deviations would be punished. 

Individual parents might attempt to keep their children safe and hidden, but society watches out for any signs of deviation.  When David discovers that a childhood friend actually has six toes, he agrees to keep it secret. A tiny extra toe is such a small deviation, isn’t it?  This felt like AI art that looks like a realistic photo, but gives people an extra finger or toe or tooth. (I asked an AI image generator for a bookstagram pic with the cover of a retro scifi book called The Chrysalids, and it created these thematic, pretty, and just-slightly-off images. )

The book suffers from Retro Scifi-itis, which is when a male author is able to imagine and share a creative possible future, with solid worldbuilding and believable connections to our own and a message and a theme… but the female characters exist to be pretty, fall in love, and care for babies. Protective maternal instinct can be a great motivator in fiction, and it works here several times, but wouldn’t it be cool if a woman in this novel could have basically any other thoughts? David’s relationship with his cousin and girlfriend Rosalind is pretty flat, because she doesn’t really have any characteristics. It’s still readable and interesting, but it would be even better if women got to have interior lives and thoughts. 

A few notes about the ending. When — 70-year-old spoiler alert! — Petra’s contacts arrive from New Zealand, they apply a strange new technology to trap and kill the evil-doers. It makes sense for David and Rosalind to accept the mass deaths of the people who threatened their lives, but it seems harsh and intense from the society that seems to be successful. Maybe the author was pointing out that even the wonderful future society wasn’t above a lil mass murder to achieve their goals, which is starting humans back on their path to the worldwide destruction that caused the Tribulation. 

There’s one small plot point that hinges on running out of fuel, which is of course a legit  thing that can happen to any machine that needs fuel! But still feels very retro scifi somehow, a bit The Cold Equations for me. The futuristic genius society bounced back from disaster with wild technology, but didn’t pack a spare battery or an extra tank? They have exactly enough left to get across the globe? It feels forced in a way that the mutations, telepathy and post-apocalyptic society didn’t. It’s still a strong story, and in some ways, one moment of MacGuffin highlighted how I just accepted the rest of the worldbuilding. 

Overall, The Chrysalids presents a fascinating post-apocalyptic world, with thoughtful points about environmental destruction. Because the world has been mostly destroyed, there aren’t those goofy descriptions of zany future technology that can date retro scifi and can pull modern-day readers out of the story.  The one-note female characters do make the book feel a bit dated, but the adventure story and the overall themes about the fragile environment and about intolerance continue to work well for modern reading.