All Hail John Wyndham!

You Know, That Author Chappy
Technically he was "John Wyndham Lucas Parkes Beynon Harris", so it's no wonder he abbreviated his pen name a little.  A bit greedy of him, hogging all those middle names; why, your humble scribe only has two himself.  They did provide an interesting author alibi for "The Outward Urge", which Art will illustrate -

Very droll, John.

     The idea was that, because this was a lot more along the lines of rayguns-and-rockets science fiction, rather than his usual 'fantastic realism', he'd better have an excuse/reason/escape clause (delete where applicable) and this feller Lucas Parkes fitted the bill exactly.  It's a good read, and that notably picky and acid critic Damon Knight ranked it as one of the 10 best sci-fi novels of 1959.*  We shall come back to this.
     John addressed several issues very presciently, which might have seemed ridiculously far-fetched at the time, but which we are getting to know all too well today.  Conrad is prettttty sure nobody at Monsanto has read "The Day of the Triffids"  -Art? 

No Lucas, eh?

or taken note of the contents, because at one point a commentator,  commentating (as commentators are wont to do**) in what he thinks is hilariously comic style after screening a clip of a triffid bimbling along, wonders if scientists can't breed a variety of potato that will walk into the pot.
     Quite.
     You take it from me, the day Monsanto start to breed vegetables that can walk, the days of Hom. Sap. are numbered.
     Then there's global warming and the melting of the ice caps, which has been a topic of concern amongst Hom. Sap., especially those who live at the seaside.  O wise John!  O clever John!  For he addresses this very issue in "The Kraken Wakes".

Lucas?  No?

     Mind you, the polar ice caps in TKW are melted by alien invaders from the abyssal depths of the oceans, rather than humans mucking up the environment, so there is a divergence from reality there.  Sorry if there were any spoilers there!
     Now, back to guns in space!  No - hang on, I'm jumping around in time now - that's what watching 'Doctor Who' does for you when typing a blog -
     I happened to be watching a Youtube channel about "Guns In Space", which states that you can fire a modern firearm in a vacuum, because contemporary ammunition contains it's own oxidiser.  You don't need an external source of oxygen.

A gun.  Just so we're clear.

     Firing a gun in a vacuum does pose a few novel issues.  If you happen to be in space, rather than on a planetary body, then the bullet you fire will carry on forever, until or unless it hits something or is captured by the gravity well of a planet.  Thus, if you are carrying out an EVA, there is a (verrrrry small) risk of being hit by ordnance fired by the Benadryls ten million years ago and a dozen light years away.

A Benadryl.  Or perhaps a motley?

     The other problem about firing a gun in space is that, if you are aiming it from the shoulder in proper military style, then you are going to be given a tumbling motion thanks to Newton and his Laws of Motion.  This would also apply on bodies of low mass like the Moon.
     And here we return to TOU.  In one story John has the garrison of Perfidious Albion's base on the Moon take up positions to intercept approaching Ruffians.  The Brits are armed with automatic weapons but none of them have ever fired their weapons on the Moon; as John points out, a single bullet costs tens of pounds by the time it arrives on-base and at that price, you don't waste any of them.  The economics of lunar freight!  The Brit base commander, who has actual combat experience in micro-gravity, warns his men that they need to brace themselves against a rock face, boulder or similar, to avoid that very same tumbling motion if they open fire.

Here we see a British Vacuum Commando (First Class) taking up his ambush position.

     One potential issue that John brings up in a story is that of a longevity treatment derived from a rare species of lichen, found only along the shores of a lake in China.  

Does what it says on the tin.  Still no Lucas?

This is a bit of a McGuffin, as the utter chaos and havoc such a treatment creates would happen however the medicine is made.  Imagine the impact on civilisation if you could take a drug that would extend your lifetime to well over 200 years -

"Tell me more."

     Uh-oh.  Time, I think, to rapidly be somewhere else - oh, wait a minute, there's someone at the door.  Let me just peek out from behind the curtains -
     How odd.  A Monsanto van.  I wonder what they want?

     Later!



*  The year when it was written.  He didn't pick it out of a hat.
**  The unspeakable swines!