John Wyndham (1903-1969) is one of my very favourite authors. I have a lot of his books on my shelves, so when I was offered this new collection to review I grabbed it with both hands, confident that I’d already read most of it. That proved to be the case—only one of the stories here was new to me. That’s because, as the book cover tells us (albeit in smaller font), this isn’t a new collection at all. Technical Slip is almost a straight reprint of Jizzle, Wyndham’s first collection—note that Technical Slip is the collected, not the complete stories—which was originally published in 1954. I happen to have an old paperback copy of Jizzle, complete with lurid and deeply inappropriate cover (which Technical Slip also adapts, in more muted form) from the New English Library, so I checked to make sure. Technical Slip has reordered the table of contents very slightly—“Jizzle” is moved from the opening story to penultimate place—and there is added, at the end, an unconnected mystery novella. Otherwise, it’s the same book. Different title, though. The short stories “Technical Slip” and “Jizzle” are included in both collections. “Jizzle,” if you were wondering, is a corruption of “Giselle,” the name given in that story to a particularly talented monkey. Perhaps Modern Library thought it too reminiscent of something else.

Now that we’ve got that sorted out, onto the review.

Wyndham is an excellent novel writer. His short fiction is, on the whole, better than average. There are two stories of his that stick with me, albeit for different reasons: “The Wheel” (included in Technical Slip; first published in 1952) and “Survival” (not included; first published in 1952 and which can most easily be found in Wyndham’s 1956 collection The Seeds of Time). “Survival” is arguably the better of the two. It is deeply horrifying, as is “The Wheel.” The latter, however, is perhaps more relevant to Wyndham’s body of work. It is especially relevant to one particular novel.

The Chrysalids, published in 1955, is in my opinion one of the finest science fiction novels ever written. I love it unreasonably. A small and fundamentalist religious community in Labrador is struggling to cope with mutation in the aftermath of nuclear war. Nonhuman mutants are destroyed; human mutants are sterilised and forced into the wilderness. A group of children are born with telepathic capabilities: they are able to survive undetected for a while, but their eventual discovery sees them flee to a distant community in what is the postapocalyptic equivalent of New Zealand. Being from New Zealand, and raised in the shadow of our national nuclear-free policy, the thought of my country existing as a future scientific and nonreligious utopia was terribly exciting. This piece of backstory is relevant because “The Wheel,” to me, is a clear prefiguration of The Chrysalids. It’s Wyndham working out theme and character for his best novel in advance. At least, I assume it is. The similarities are too great to ignore.

Religious fundamentalism, in “The Wheel,” is set against technology instead of mutation. Both deal, implicitly, with the prospect of evolution: of new design becoming more effective and more fit for survival. In another post-apocalyptic world, the small communities that survive do so by eschewing as much technological development as possible. Afraid of the consequences of that innovation, and believing that the invention of the wheel will inevitably lead to the distant development of the apocalypse-inducing devices that sent them into near-extinction in the first place, the wheel is banned. Devices found containing wheels are ceremonially burned, as are their inventors.

Children are raised with the knowledge that wheels are bad, but they’re not actually told what wheels are. So when one young boy—Davie, who shares a name with David, protagonist of The Chrysalids—innocently creates a wagon to drag about, he nearly dooms himself. Only the intervention of his grandfather, who publicly takes the blame and the burning in his place, and who secretly tells Davie not to be afraid of new ways of living and thinking, saves the child from immolation.

It’s a horrific little story, especially in its illustration of how fundamentalism destroys families. Davie’s mother turns on him; his grandfather does not. Again, this is repeated in The Chrysalids. David’s parents are unreliable, especially his brute of a father, but the parents of the other mutated children, including the mothers of Rosalind and Sophie, for example, do their best to help and protect their offspring in the face of dogma. It is David’s uncle Axel, however, who best fulfils the philosophical role first inhabited by Davie’s grandfather. He secretly encourages David to question the world in which he lives, and readers of “The Wheel” will note the significance of his name.

Davie’s grandfather, explaining the restrictions against technological development in their own society, states that “there’s times when a man gets an idea that turns out to be pretty nearly a Wheel—maybe like rollers, or screws, or somethin’—but it’ll just pass so long as it ain’t fixed in the middle.” In other words, so long as it doesn’t have an axle. Whether technological or biological, the ability to induce or to inspire change is anathema to any sort of fundamentalism.

That same theme reappears again in “Confidence Trick.” On an initial read, much of the story does not appear promising. I remember reading it for the first time and wrinkling my nose and making a charitable effort to think that every author has an off-day, but I was being suckered. The first two thirds are corny, and deliberately so: a handful of passengers on the London Underground find themselves on a train that disembarks in hell. There are all sorts of devils prancing about the place, bright red, with forked tails, and they’re selling analgesic ointment and torturing prisoners in various silly ways, and it’s every indifferent, unconvincing stereotype brought to cartoonish life. And just when every sensible reader is at the point where they can’t refrain from rolling their eyes at this tat anymore, one of the just-arrived victims, a physicist named Christopher Watts, has the exact same reaction as those readers. “Dear me, what nonsense this all is!” he says, and his immediate and aggressive refusal to credit any of this ridiculous bullshit collapses hell in on itself and returns the passengers to the world of the living.

But here’s the part where it really turns into a Wyndham story. One of these passengers has sincere and deeply held objections to being saved. Mr. Forkett doesn’t want to go to hell, not at all, but he considers its destruction to be “anti-social, if not actually subversive.” Hell is an institution, he argues, and should be respected, lest society fall into, you know, all the doom and gloom that hard-core conservatives say it will should any possible change be contemplated.

Watts doesn’t take this seriously, but he is a scientist. Experiments can be repeated. And the Underground has disgorged them in front of the Bank of England. He brings all the force of his disbelief on this institution, preparing to deny, in full daylight, every bit of its legitimacy and power. The Bank begins to shake. It’s like an earthquake … and then Forkett pushes Watts in front of a bus. He’ll hang for murder, he says, but that’s all right. The institutions—of power, of banking, of justice—they’re the important things, and they’re worth preserving.

It’s that fundamentalism again: the unwillingness to question, the dearth of debate and scepticism. We know what these problems are. We see them and their depressing results all round us. In the people we live with, mostly: neighbours and colleagues and family and friends. Wyndham’s antagonists, reliably, are ordinary people, doing their very best to be ordinary. And the extraordinary thing is that his heroes, too, and his heroines, tend to be ordinary people doing their level best to be exactly the same.

It’s a triumph of ordinariness, and underneath there tends to be a gentle, good-humoured sense of iconoclasm. The stories are products of their time, of course, but when something incredible happens, whether it’s time travel or the sudden appearance of dragons, it’s all too frequently presented through a veneer of domesticity and everyday life. The dragon story is case in point. In the delightful “Chinese Puzzle,” Hwyl and Bronwen are sent an egg by their son, posted overseas. It hatches into something very unexpected, and between house-training the dragon and trying to get the company that insures their house to cover the new fire risk and building a suitable hutch in the garden and making sure the dragon isn’t too bothered by neighbours coming for a look (Bronwen makes a sign, PLEASE NOT TO TEASE, and the neighbours generally go along with that, because it’s a living creature and it’d be unkind to bother it) the real conflict arises.

It’s what the dragon means for the local union branch. Workers unite, but there’s always one (and we all know them: the neighbour or colleague or family or friend who is otherwise okay but won’t shut up about their own particular bugbear, the muppet) and this one is seriously obsessed about what an Imperial dragon says about solidarity in one Welsh village. “A symbol, it is, of the oppression of Chinese workers and peasants. And shocking to think that in our village we are keeping such an emblem. What is it that the free people of China will be saying of Llynllawn when they will hear of this, am I asking?”

There’s always one, and Idris is it. You know an Idris. We all do. He’ll volunteer as rugby coach for the kids and do your shopping for you if you’re sick and he’ll be the first to donate blood or buy a ticket for the local fundraising raffle, but then a dragon turns up and you find yourself thinking, Mate, can you just fucking not?

Ordinary people. They’re terrifying. They’re also wonderful. Bronwen with her little note, Hwyl defending the dragon from accusations of chicken-stealing. Doing their best to look after a mythical creature because their son tried to comfort a dying man by making a promise to look after an egg, and that should be respected.

It was Brian Aldiss, I think, who characterised Wyndham’s stories as “cosy catastrophes.” Arguments can be made as to the accuracy of that characterisation, but there is some merit there, and it lies in the importance of small, close-knit communities as central to his work. Such is the case in Technical Slip, and it occurs as well in the one story I hadn’t read: the mystery novella The Curse of the Burdens. It’s a straight mystery, despite the title curse, and it’s very much in the cosy mystery genre. Imagine The Hound of the Baskervilles if it were written by Agatha Christie, and you have the tone of Curse, if not the competence (or lack thereof, although that’s a relative assessment compared to both Christie herself and Wyndham’s later work).

The novella’s … okay, I guess. Overly convoluted. Wyndham published it under the pseudonym of John B. Harris in 1927, and subsequently “suppressed” it, according to David Ketterer in A Companion to Science Fiction. Possibly because it’s just not that great. In Wyndham’s place, I might want it forgotten too. Searching the catalogue of the University of Liverpool Library, I can’t find a copy of Curse, and they have special collections on both Wyndham and science fiction. I’d also point out that even the nineteen-page stapled pamphlet bibliography of Wyndham by Phil Stephensen-Payne and Gordon Benson Jr., updated in 1987, doesn’t mention it. (Yes, I checked. I actually own that too, if you can believe it.)

I assume the odd placement of this mystery novella alongside fifteen speculative shorts is entirely due to the above “cosy” factor. I have to assume, because there is no introduction explaining the rationale behind this choice. That is a significant lapse. (It is not a lapse occurring in the other Wyndham collection released this year: Logical Fantasy: The Many Worlds of John Wyndham from Subterranean Press, which has an introduction by Michael Marshall Smith.) Wyndham is a significant writer in the speculative canon. New readers will be most attracted to his novels, or adaptations thereof—back in 2017, I reviewed The Fallen Children by David Owen for Strange Horizons, which is a YA adaptation of Wyndham’s 1957 novel The Midwich Cuckoos. Short stories tend to be less attention-grabbing in general, I think, especially for the general reader. Many Wyndham fans will already own Jizzle, and if Modern Library wants them to pick this up, it could have offered a little more effort than the unremarked inclusion of a perfectly adequate but not terribly exciting, and not terribly well connected, novella that even Wyndham himself might have wanted gone.