Seekers of Tomorrow (17 page)

These achievements made Harris the toast of London's science-fiction circles. In an interview in the January, 1937, issue of scientifiction, "The British Fantasy Review," Walter H. Gillings hailed "John Beynon (Harris) on his British triumph" and made the assessment that, "judged from the standpoint of literary ability, Harris is probably the best of our modern science-fiction authors."

At the time this seemed a daring assumption, for another British author, W. J. Passingham, had appeared in passing show with a science-fiction novel,
When London Fell,
and contemporaries Benson Herbert, Festus Pragnell, and J. M. Walsh were achieving the eminence of hard covers in Great Britain for novels that had run in American science-fiction magazines. None of these others was destined to sustain his writing efforts, however, so Gillings' appraisal, in hindsight, was essentially justified. When Gillings succeeded in convincing World's Work to issue a test science-fiction magazine, tales of wonder, in 1937, Harris contributed a humorous farce,
The Perfect Creature,
to the first issue. Far more substantial, however, was his writing to order a sequel to
Stowaway to Mars,
titled
Sleepers of Mars,
in 1938, for the second issue of tales of wonder. This sequel told the details of the fate of the Russian expedition to Mars and may well have contributed substan-tially towards the establishment of tales of wonder, for a regular quarterly schedule was thereafter announced. This coup was destined to prove nonexclusive, for George Newnes Ltd., possibly encouraged by tales of wonder's acceptance, decided to experiment with a British science-fiction magazine of their own, fantasy, edited by T. Stanhope Sprigg, the first issue of which reached the newsstands on July 29, 1938. Newnes was thoroughly experienced in periodical sales as owner of the renowned magazine wide world, as well as a number of other adventure magazines. When Harris was asked to contribute, he could scarcely refuse his book pub-lishers. The first issue of fantasy contained his
Beyond the Screen,
concerning the invention of an electronic screen that projects an attacking armada of 1200 Nazi and Fascist planes into the far future. Under the title of
Judson's Annihilator,
this story was reprinted in the October, 1939, amazing stories, and was the first appearance of the John Beynon pen name in the United States.

Hitler's attack on Poland and the entry of England and France into the war put an end to the new magazine, fantasy, after only three issues. Harris had a story under the Beynon name in each of them, and a fourth,
Child of Power,
under the nom de plume of Wyndhame Parkes in the third issue. That story, a smoothly written tale of a child born with the ability to hear radio waves, even those from outer space, ended with a flash of lightning and a clap of thunder "blind-ing" the extra sense. "That's all," the youth had said, "that was the end of it."

So it was for Britain's bid to develop a science-fiction market of its own. For all practical purposes it was also to prove the end of the John Beynon pen name.

The excitement, the pressures, the uncertainties of war made writing difficult. Civil liberties taken for granted during peace time were restricted, and Harris, working in civil service in Censorship from August, 1940, to November, 1943, partcipated in their curtailment. Then, at the age of forty, he found himself a Corporal with the Royal Signal Corps, work-ing as a cipher operator. He next was deposited on the beaches of Normandy. Many of his past science-fiction stories had dealt with war:
The Third Vibrator,
The Spheres of Hell, Beyond the Screen
and
Trojan Beam,
but all of them had been composed within the subjective atmosphere of his study. This was the real thing.

"I had a constant feeling I was there by mistake," he recalls. "Possibly that was because I had spent much of my schooldays expecting in due course to be in the Kaiser's war, though it ended when I was still too young. Nevertheless, I could not get rid of the feeling that
that
had been my war, and now I had somehow got into the wrong one. It produced odd moods of detached spectatorship, shot with flashes of
deja vu.
I took to writing sonnets because you cannot carry a lot of paper on a campaign, and they are more interesting than crosswords. When things grew more static, I tried my hand at translating a French play or two, but lost the translations somewhere in Germany."

Through the entire war period only one story appeared,
Phony Meteor,
in amazing stories for March, 1941, telling of a tiny spaceship mistaken first for a Nazi secret weapon and then for a meteor. All its passengers, minute buglike creatures sent to establish a colony on earth, are destroyed by insect spray without there ever being the slightest realiza-tion of their intelligence. During his army sojourn, Harris came to the decision that he would work in fantasy, not science fiction, when he resumed writing, because of the wider latitude it permitted. Upon his release in 1946, he gave himself two years to make good, but as the allotted time passed and the rejections mounted uninterruptedly, he faced an agonizing reappraisal. His accumulated savings were virtually exhausted and he either must write something that people would buy or try to get a post in the civil service again. Science fiction had changed greatly since John Beynon Harris, reborn John Beynon, was first choice for England's leading science-fiction writer. A more sophisticated brand of fiction, much more comfortable in the depths of the galaxy than in the solar system or on the planet Earth, prevailed. In this new fiction, action was often only implied and the plot could turn on a psychological quirk, a Freudian slip, or a philosophical misinterpretation. The circumstances leading up to the story were frequently taken for granted, resulting in stylized backgrounds. Explanations, logical or otherwise, of the wonders that abounded, were often simply omitted.

In a good many respects it was superior to the type of science fiction most popular before World War II, though in the process of refinement some of the substance had been lost. Harris wasn't sure he could write it, and wasn't sure he wanted to write it, but it began to look as if he would have to try. The last science-fiction story he had seen published was a novelette,
The Living Lies,
a rather obvious allegory of color and racism on the planet Venus, in the second issue of new worlds in 1946. To write himself back into shape would take time and money.

Then, one of his near-to-life fantasies,
Jizzle,
a short story of an artistically vindictive female monkey (a variation of the female pig in John Collier's
Mary),
was sold to collier's in the United States and was published in the January 8, 1949, issue under the John Beynon byline. The parallel in Harris' situation was remarkably close to that of the dying man in
Technical Slip
(arkham sampler, Spring, 1949, one of Harris'

few postwar fantasies to see print), who had a special arrangement whereby for 75 per cent of his accumulated wealth he would be permitted to replay his life from boy-hood. This was a second chance to make it. First he was to try his neglected skills as a science-fiction writer on a short-length story. The result was
Adaptation
(astounding science fiction, July, 1949), a delicately wrought, superbly handled, heartstring-tugger about a baby girl who is scientifically adapt-ed to live on another world. No question now existed of Har-ris' ability to compete with the best writers of modern science fiction.

It was in the novel that Harris had made his greatest success prior to World War II, so now he proposed to try a new one. He joined two ideas in his files, one on the theme of universal blindness and the other on a plant menace. The latter was illuminated in his mind when he was startled one night by the manner in which the wind made a sapling in a hedge appear to be making jabs at him. Other stories that may well have influenced his handling of the two major plot situations in
The Day of the Triffids
were
Seeds From
Space
by Laurence Manning (wonder stories, June, 1930), with its intelligent plants grown from unknown spores, and Edgar Wallace's short tale,
The Black Grippe,
from the March, 1920, Newnes' strand magazine, in which the entire world is stricken blind for six days.

On the surface, the ideas were old ones and the approach "pulpish." In execution, the novel exhibited stylistic strengths which were instantly recognized by the reviewers and a Gibraltar-like foundation of scientific logic that was not. This last, to a degree, was developed by reverting to Hugo Gernsback's insistence on detailed explanation and back-ground in wonder stories.

Harris's ideas for
The Day of the Triffids
and the many works that followed were adapted from many sources, since he was a regular reader of science fiction and thorough-ly familiar with its various gambits. His rhetoric, on the other hand, appears to have been persuasively influenced by only one major writer, H. G. Wells. Great ingenuity at ap-proaching an old idea from a fresh slant was characteristical-ly his own contribution.

Almost instantly following the appearance of
The Revolt of the Triffids
in collier's, a spate of short stories by John Wyndham began to appear in U.S. science-fiction magazines. There was little question that Harris could now sell anything he wrote. However, he calculatedly decided to stick with the novel and the world menace theme.
The Kraken Wakes
appeared in boards in England with the Michael Joseph imprint, and in the United States in paperback as
Out of the Deeps.
With echoes of Karel Capek's
War with the
Newts,
it chronicles in fascinating detail the attempts of an alien race, who have settled in our ocean depths, to destroy humanity. As in
Revolt of the Triffids,
Harris has no final answers, but merely acts as an overly literary reporter. His penchant for walking away from a resolution of the problems he proposes has been criticized, but his stories succeed in spite of this tendency.

The Kraken Wakes
quickly multiplied editions in England, and was followed by
The Chrysalids
from the same publisher (issued in the United States by Ballantine Books as
Re-Birth).
Here, a postwar remnant of civilization ostracizes and attempts to destroy any creature, plant or human, showing variance from the norm. A six-toed girl thus finds herself in deadly peril until she finds she is one of a new telepathic race which is slowly evolving.

Those years that Harris did not have a new novel for the book publishers they put together collections of his shorts
(Jizzle,
1954;
The Seeds of Time,
1956) which, astonishing-ly, seemed to sell nearly as well as his novels.

Harris had written a dozen or more stories with a time travel theme. It seemed to be his private form of fun and relaxation, and the best of these stories, such as
Pawley's Peepholes
(science-fantasy, Winter, 1951), where prying intangible tourist buses from the future are sent scuttling back where they belong by the use of vulgarity, appeared to have nothing else in mind but light entertainment. Not so with the time travel story,
Consider Her Ways,
a new novelette specially written for a Ballantine collection,
Sometime, Never,
in 1956. Through the use of drugs, a woman doctor of our time turns up in the future as an obese "mother" in a world without men, where selected females produce children like the queen bees. The high point of the story is the dialogue on whether the world is better off with or without men, which introduces a highly original and dis-turbing point of view (at least, to a man) on the subject. Because of the international success of
Day of the Triffids,
the feeling was prevalent that Harris had made his mark with that novel and everything that followed was to be anticlimactic. In fact, it was felt that whatever opening of doors there was to be in the future could only be done by using the phrase, "by the author of ...."

That was when Harris set off another time-bomb. A new novel of his,
The Midwich Cuckoos,
had been shown in manuscript to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and purchased for what would eventually appear as the motion picture
Village of the Damned
(1960).

A flying saucer lands on the green of the British town of Midwich and twenty-four hours are blotted from the mem-ories of everyone in the community. As of the following day, every woman in the town turns out to be pregnant. When the children are born they are distinguished by great golden eyes. By the time they are nine they have developed a community mind and a community will, special powers which they admit will ultimately doom mankind. Disposing of them poses a seemingly insoluble technical as well as moral problem until they are destroyed through their trust in the man who has educated them. Wyndham, for this story, reworked the plot of
The Chrysalids,
directing the sympathy of the reader away from the children and toward humanity. He accomplished this by mak-ing the method of their conception illegitimate and nonhu-man, and their actions so cold-bloodedly extreme as to di-vorce them from reader sympathy. The devices of the amor-al superior child and the desirability of the community mind both seem to have been adapted from Olaf Stapledon.

The motion picture proved to be extraordinarily effective and was followed by a much inferior sequel,
Children of the Damned.
It may well be that in these sinister children a new menace has been created which will evolve into a nonstop series similar to those following the appearance of
Franken-stein
and
Dracula
on the screen.

As successful as
Village of the Damned
as a film is
Day of the Triffids,
released by Allied Artists in 1963. A reasonably faithful approximation of the novel, it is fulfilling its destiny by frightening audiences around the world.

The realization that he was becoming typed as a horror writer may well have caused Harris to write four connected interplanetary novelettes, all appearing in new worlds dur-ing 1958. The novelettes deal with the contributions of four generations of the Troon family in the building of a space station and in the first explorations of the Moon, Mars, and Venus. Atomic war comes, new powers emerge, but progress continues. Published as
The Outward Urge
by Michael Joseph in 1959, the book was represented as a collaboration of John Wyndham and Lucas Parkes. The reason for the collaboration was to head off John Wyndham's propensity for producing such phenomena as Triffids, Krakens, or golden-eyed children, "and keeping him to the more practical prob-lems of tomorrow." Since "Lucas Parkes" uses but two of Harris'