The Midwich Cuckoos

I tend to avoid sci-fi, but when I heard that John Wyndham—a grandparent of the genre—had written a novel considered an example of “cozy catastrophe,” well, resistance was futile. Along with the English village setting, the characters, dialogue, and sensibility of The Midwich Cuckoos definitely qualify as cozy, but the author referred to his work as “logical fantasy.“ It’s less about plot (which is spare but well-built) than the questions it raises. Published in 1957, the story evokes the preoccupations of a community just freed from the threat of Fascism, and now deep in the Cold War. Alas, the conundrums posed are ones western democracies are still pondering. Modern Library has just reissued The Midwich Cuckoos and four other Wyndham novels (all with creepy-cool covers and intros by contemporary writers) and I can’t wait to read more of these brainy entertainments.