Francis Saxover and Diana Brackley, two scientists investigating a rare lichen, discover it has a remarkable property: it retards the aging process. Francis, realising the implications for the world of an ever-youthful, wealthy elite, wants to keep it secret, but Diana sees an opportunity to overturn the male status quo by using the lichen to inspire a feminist revolution.
As each scientist wrestles with the implications and practicalities of exploiting the discovery, the world comes ever closer to learning the truth . . .
TROUBLE WITH LICHEN is a scintillating story of the power wielded by science in our lives and asks how much trust should we place in those we appoint to be its guardians?
John Wyndham’s unique human-centred look at technology gives his books a timeless relevance.
“… Brackley, whose suffragette great-Aunt went to prison in 1913 for throwing fire-crackers in Piccadilly … sets up a beauty clinic which attracts the wives of the powerful and gives them the drug without telling them, the idea being to inspire a feminist revolution. “It will make them grow up … they simply won’t be able to go on for 200 years leading the nugatory piffling sort of lives that most women do lead; nobody could stand it”
Sci-fi and women do not, traditionally, keep the same kind of company. And, moreover, the British satiric tradition, when it addresses anything progressive, tends to poke fun at it. So for a while I was wondering when John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Benyon Harris, b. 1903, was going to show us all how silly these women are really being. But it becomes fairly clear, fairly quickly, that this isn’t going to happen. Diana Brackley is simply too sympathetically drawn, although an unreconstructed male in 1960 would have been pretty terrified of her. (The scene in which she makes a complete fool of a BBC interviewer is a delight.)
But it’s not all froth. We are occasionally reminded that there are serious issues here, and when one cabinet minister worries that the results of an anti-ageing drug entering the marketplace could be “apocalyptic”, a civil servant assures him that that is “the mot juste”. The end of the world is perhaps always at the back of Wyndham’s mind …” The Guardian
