The Seeds of Time

The Seeds of Time by John Wyndham
Published: 1956
Length: 222 pages

John Wyndham is one of my favourite writers, but before last year, I hadn’t read any of his short stories. He’s mostly known for his novels, but he was a prolific short story writer, publishing them throughout his entire writing career. Wikipedia has seventy stories listed. The first, Worlds to Barter, was published in 1931, a few years after his first novel under a pen name was published and twenty years before his first novel as John Wyndham. The last non-posthumously published story, A Life Postponed, came out in 1968, a year before his death.

I really dislike reading short story collections in one go, so I used to avoid them, but I discovered in the last couple of years that I really enjoy the occasional short story between novels or during reading lulls. Now I try to have one collection always on the go. This one took me about half of 2018 to get through.

• Chronoclasm (1953) – A humourous (and slightly incest-y) take on time-travel.
• Time To Rest (????) – After earth has been destroyed, a human man roams Mars and debates whether to settle down with a Martian family or keep moving. A very quiet and contemplative story of a human trying to come to terms with being one of the few survivors of a decimated race.
• Meteor (1941 as John Beynon) – Brilliant and funny story of an alien race coming to Earth. A heartbreakingly impotent Wars of the Worlds that subverts the reader’s expectations.
• Survival (1952) – A group of people travelling to Mars on a spacecraft find themselves adrift without engine power. They don’t have enough food to last until a rescue ship can arrive, and we watch what unfolds. Horrific but riveting. A bit more sexism than you’d usually find in a Wyndham story, which looking back was maybe for plot purposes? Maybe wishful thinking.
• Pawley’s Peepholes (1951) – Time tourists from the future have found a way to come back in ethereal form to watch people living their lives, both in public and in private. A story that only becomes more eerie with age.
• Opposite Number (1954) – Parallel dimension story. A man is confronted by himself from another dimension. His other-self is with his ex-girlfriend, but in their dimension, they’re still together.
• Pillar To Post (1951) – Interesting story in which a being from the future swaps his consciousness with a WWII veteran living in extreme pain, sending the veteran’s consciousness into the future. The swap is supposed to be temporary, but the veteran is trying everything he can to not go back.
• Dumb Martian (1952) – A man takes a trip to work in space for a few years to earn some money and hires a Martian woman to come along with him, treating her like an animal. It’s easy to see where this one is going from the beginning, but that doesn’t make it any less satisfying.
• Compassion Circuit (1954) – A woman is being cared for by a robotic nurse, and the nurse begins to make too many decisions on her own.
• Wild Flower (1955) – Despite this being the last story of the collection, I have very little memory of it beyond the fact that I really wasn’t a fan. It’s about a woman who loves flowers, maybe as a contrast to the potential disasters of the technological world? That’s about all I can tell you.

My favourite of the bunch was probably either Meteor, Pillar To Post or Dumb Martian. This was a great collection, overall. The only one that really fell flat for me was Wild Flower.

Wyndham really is a great short story writer, and I supposed that does make sense. He was full of brilliant ideas. His novels can sometimes be seen as thought experiments, and once he’s done with an idea, he can end a story quite early in what feels like the overall plot, such as in Trouble With Lichen. In many ways, he’s almost better suited as a short story writer, as the format really allows him to follow his imagination with less constraint. I still love his novels, and thankfully have two left to read, but I’m happy that I’ll have a number of these collections to go through as well.