LOGICAL FANTASY: David Dyte has drawn on his vast knowledge and love of Wyndham’s work, to produce this unique selection of 18 stories. For some of them, this is the first time they have appeared in print since they were first published in literary magazines during John Wyndham’s lifetime. As Gary K Wolfe puts it, “even readers familiar with his stories will have a good deal to discover” here.
Here is Gary Wolfe’s description of some the stories in the book.
The Lost Machine: an intelligent machine from Mars is stranded on Earth after its spaceship crashes, killing its human companion. The narrative is split between the viewpoints of the scientist and his daughter who find the machine, and the machine itself, whose frustration at finding only dumb machines on Earth adds a comic overtone.
Spheres of Hell: a fad for raising pumpkin-like growths – originally designed as a kind of biological warfare – quickly gets out of control.
The Man from Beyond
Beyond the Screen: a superweapon device projects a field that annihilates anything in its path without a trace, and Nazi officers are the villains. But objects ‘‘annihilated’’ by the field are projected into an alternate timeline.
Child of Power
The Living Lies: on Venus the population is rigidly segregated according to skin colours, which turn out to be entirely artificial
The Eternal Eve: one of the few women colonists on Venus becomes the only hope for the continuation of the human race after the Earth is destroyed – but she refuses to be objectified: ‘‘I’m me; my own self. They won’t make me belong to one of them.’’
Pawley’s Peepholes: a British city plagued by time-travelers finds a way to turn the tables
The Wheel
Survival: the only woman aboard a Mars rocket that goes off course into deep space, with little hope of rescue, at first appears shy and withdrawn, but then exerts her survival skills to bring about a horror-story ending.
Chinese Puzzle: a newly hatched Chinese dragon is pitted against a traditional Welsh dragon as a test of national pride – which the dragons themselves are not at all interested in.
Perforce to Dream begins with two women having independently submitted almost identical novels to a publisher, after having had a succession of similar dreams.
Never on Mars
Compassion Circuit: a woman is persuaded to buy a domestic robot because she’s wearing herself out with housework.
Brief to Counsel
Odd: an investor from 1906 somehow finds his consciousness briefly thrust forward to 1958, where he learns about plastics
The Asteroids
A Stitch in Time briefly permits an old woman to reunite with her lover, who has temporarily been brought fifty years forward in time.
“It’s been more than a half-century since the posthumous The Best of John Wyndham was published in England (apparently it never even appeared in the US, although a separate small-press retrospective appeared in 2003). Interestingly, only four of the stories from The Best Of appear among the 18 selections in Logical Fantasy: The Many Worlds of John Wyndham edited by David Dyte, so that likely even the relatively few readers familiar with his stories will have a good deal to discover.
… The real strength of Wyndham’s stories are not the gimmicks or the sense-of-wonder gotcha moments, but the increasingly graceful prose, the ingenious structures, and the credible, sympathetic characters faced with oddities, paradoxes, and mysteries. It’s a long ride from those pulp beginnings, and something of a shame that Wyndham’s best short fiction – of which this is only a sampler – remains almost unknown today.”
Gary K Wolfe in Locus Mag
