Trouble With Lichen

Trouble with Lichen is a 1960 scifi novel by John Wyndham. The story revolves around the discovery of a new type of lichen that dramatically slows down the aging process in humans.

I really enjoyed John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids, but couldn’t help notice the author’s unfortunate case of Retro Scifi-itis, and the women characters were all pretty one-note. In this one, our protag is Diana, a beautiful biochemist who goes so far from the flat Chrysalid women into almost idealized Mary Sue territory.  She’s smart, beautiful, independent, educated, and fashionable, with a loving family, an interesting job in her field when she wants one and a large private income when she doesn’t. She’s also explicitly Not Like Other Girls, as noted by several characters. In Wyndham’s defense, there are multiple interesting female characters in this book, but they’re each highlighted as very different from the rest of the dim and pretty homemakers…. more on that later.  At times, it’s a bit hard to GAF about perfect Diana’s non-struggles, but fortunately the plot moves us along well.

Diana is a bright and brilliant young science grad with a new post at a prestigious Darr House labs, when she and her brilliant, handsome, successful older boss, Francis Saxover — no, seriously, roll with the perfections, the good part of the book is coming — notice that a bit of milk forgotten in the cat’s saucer hasn’t turned. That part of the milk must have touched a certain lichen their lab was investigating for antibiotic prosperities. Francis and Diana each end up researching it separately, in secret, and both independently discovering a strain of lichen that slows human aging.

Saxover uses it on himself and his children, without their knowledge, which is slightly creepy and paternalistic, but highlights how Saxover wants longevity for his own family while Diana wants it for women.  Meanwhile, Diana leaves research and starts a cosmetics company, and her clients really do look wonderfully young and lovely.

Sometimes it’s hard to accept wild science fiction inventions, but Wyndham grounds it in just enough realistic information to make  it thoroughly believable.  Diana explains that the lichen “really comes from Hokiang which is a province of Manchuria, and lies north of Vladivostock.” and later says that “Mr. McMurtie made arrangements by which it is taken down to Dairen, and eventually shipped here via Nagasaki.” It’s not at all the point of this book but I found myself wanting to join the McMurties and MacDonalds going on cool botany trips in the Far East. I guessed that Hokiang is a slight fictionalization of Heilongjiang, based on the location of Manchuria, Dalian, and Vladivostock, but maybe it’s specifically Hejiang, only a province for a couple years in the 1940s, and folded into Heilongjiang by the time the book was published in the 1960s. The author gives us just enough detail to work — I know where Dalian is, and Manchuria, so I can work out the rest of it for a realistically distant location.

Anyway, lichen and fungi are weird and cool, which helps make a new lichen with special properties more believable, doesn’t it? That makes the whole immortality plot easier to accept.

Diana’s overall motivation to use the long-life lichen and share it with other women is her awareness that a woman is forced to choose motherhood or her own education and career, in a way that men are not. While parts of the novel are dated, the overall worry about missing one’s chance at motherhood definitely isn’t. A recent essay in The Cut describes the situation perfectly  “a time problem comes closing in. If she would like to have children before 35, she must begin her next profession, motherhood, rather soon, compromising inevitably her original one.  … If she freezes her eggs to buy time, the decision and its logistics will burden her singly — and perhaps it will not work. Overlay the years a woman is supposed to establish herself in her career and her fertility window and it’s a perfect, miserable circle. By midlife women report feeling invisible, undervalued; it is a telling cliché, that after all this, some husbands leave for a younger girl. So when is her time, exactly? For leisure, ease, liberty?” No one was freezing her eggs in 1960, of course, but Wyndham’s Diana Brackley could have written the rest. (The author of that The Cut essay raises excellent points about the pressures of work and motherhood, but then suggests marrying an older, wealthy established man as the solution, not lichen.)

Wyndham, through Diana and Francis’ daughter Zephanie, discusses the choices that women must make to have children or not have children. Diana has some good comments about not wanting or needing a family. In The Chrysalids and The Midwich Cuckoos, there’s an overall expectation of a maternal instinct, so I was very pleased to see a woman who wasn’t particularly interested. Perhaps because Diana doesn’t have her own children, she isn’t tempted to use the lichen just on her own family, like Francis did.

There’s a humorous vibe in Trouble with Lichen, as the scifi novel takes a look at beauty trends and journalistic tactics. Reporters from shady papers pretend to date Diana’s employees and at least one customer to get inside information, that a silly girl might let slip, perhaps after a few drinks, but instead, the women see what’s coming and plant fake information. We still don’t get much interior life, but the women in this one are much more complex and interesting, and the joke is very much on the journalists and spies who think a cocktail or a bracelet will get the girls talking secrets.

The newspaper coverage is mostly sarcasm about the fountain of youth, mixed with selling snake oils. There’s an old-time fiction device with imaginary quotes from real newspapers, I find this charming and dated at the same time.  It’s particularly charming here because there’s a funny look at British tabloids and sensationalized stories.  When there’s a possible link between a silly frivolous cosmetics company and real science advancement, the editors carefully put it in the women’s pages because “you can, if necessary, brush off an article slanted at women more easily than one that purported to give reliable news to men,” Diana notes. The idea that a cosmetics company is actually at the forefront of scientific discovery is all head-exploding emoji, in a ’60s British tabloids kind of way. At this point in the book, I realized that Wyndham wasn’t being a typical male scifi writer with the book’s earlier comments about the sweet little dears with pretty faces. Wyndham’s may not have written very convincing woman characters, but he definitely sees women.

I enjoyed these light-hearted sections a lot. There’s an insightful humor here, plus it makes a nice counterpoint for all the intensity about immortality and moral questions about living longer or living well.

But eventually, news of the lichen breakthrough must get out, and it ignites debates about its implications for society and human nature. Wyndham looks at social class and gender roles here, with interesting ideas. When we think about the potential for an extra century of life, we imagine enjoying time to travel or to really excel at a creative form, don’t we? We think about world leaders making more thoughtful decisions because they’ll be around to see the consequences of their actions. But Trouble with Lichen imagines an extra century of drudgery for working classes, decades without a promotion for the middle classes, and a completely stagnant government, all in a rapidly overpopulating, underfed world.

Of course, Diana has already anticipated this and planned for it. By this point, Diana’s starting to feel like Wade in Ready Player One, who just happens to have already become an expert in every challenge, and just like in Ready Player One, the twists of the plot pull me along past the skeptical eyebrow.  Behind the scenes, Diana has already carefully chosen her cosmetic clients, selecting the wives and daughters of the most powerful men in England. (A+ snark and strategy!) Naturally, these women are not going to do anything to lose their extra century or their youthful appearance, and they’ll pressure their husbands and fathers for it.  I love a character who has a fake identity all set up in advance, just in case things go sideways. Since the beginning of the novel, Diana has admired her dramatic suffragette aunt and her wild actions for women’s rights, so her own extreme actions for the cause work well.

This part become a real page-turner. That cool location of the lichen comes back, with the possibility that the Chinese will close the border or otherwise cut off foreign access. Since it’s right next to Russia, and this is the 1960s, there’s also the threat of Russian attack or invasion to get the lichen. The possibility of the baddies getting immortality leads Diana to take drastic actions, and adds tension and drama.

Re-Birth/The Chrysalids and The Midwife Cuckoos both had kind of a qualified happy ending, a solid Happily Every After for our main duo, with collateral damage elsewhere.  This has similar vibes, with the almost-immortality from the lichen sorting out the age gap between Diana and Francis, even as the rest of the world learns to cope with the social upheaval of longevity.

Despite being written over six decades ago,  Trouble with Lichen is very readable today.  The central themes are still relevant. Women still have pressure to have children when you’re young and strong, but also pressure to wait until your education is finished and your career and finances are settled. The book raises thoughtful and intense questions about social class and who benefits from new advancements, which are still very relevant today.  And the parts of the book that aren’t really relevant are kind of charmingly dated.