From new Thu Jun 16 18:48:13 1994 Path: liuida!sunic!EU.net!uunet!decwrl!pa.dec.com!hildy.zso.dec.com!rcrowley From: rcrowley@hildy.zso.dec.com ("Rebecca Leann Smit Crowley") Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.written Subject: _The Midwich Cuckoos_, John Wyndham Date: 17 Jan 1994 23:56:09 GMT Organization: Canaries For Freedom Lines: 113 Message-ID: <2hf8ip$plv@usenet.pa.dec.com> Reply-To: rcrowley@zso.dec.com NNTP-Posting-Host: hildy.zso.dec.com X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.2 PL0] In between rereading a large stack of Bujold novels and after ditching Gunnarson's _Dragons on the Town_ about twenty pages into it, I picked up _The Midwich Cuckoos_. This proved to be a very good idea. Dani's already done a better job than I could of succintly reviewing this book, and, at any rate, I'm more interested in writing about the Zellaby character and his ethics/morals anyway. Spoilers follow: All vertebrate life in a hemisphere centered on a sleepy village in England -- Midwich_ -- is rendered unconscious for a little more than a day. Birds fly in and crash. People walk in a topple. Vehicles grind to a halt. No serious tragedy occurs, altho a plane is lost when MI tries to get photos of the mysterious object which has appeared near the ruined abbey. When the people wake up, the object is gone. A few months later, it is discovered that every woman able to bear children. . .is. The town rallies, MI helps keep it out of the news, and nine months after the initial Dayout, 60 odd babies are born, apparently human, but with golden eyes and a few less obvious differences from run-of-the-mill humanity. The women who moved away from Midwich find their few month old babies compel them to return; several successfully abandon their children to the village. The children grow at approximately twice normal rate; it becomes clear, over time, that the 60 odd children are telepathic within sex (all the girls are mutually telepathic; likewise with the boys). The town sage (_not_ the viewpoint character, which I think was a neat trick, and very effective for a variety of reasons), an author, is Zellaby. He is married (3rd wife) and his daughter (via the 2nd wife) is twenty something. Both become pregnant. His wife bears a normal human child (she was pregnant already, presumably); his daughter, one of the Children. The Zellabys raise both. The connection between the Dayout and the pregnancies is obvious; all seem well aware that the children are not human, but for a variety of reasons (it seemed like a good idea at the time, and we're civilized, dammit, they're *our* children), the Children are raised more or less normally. The men feel cuckolded (altho they were not); the women are coerced; the Vicar and his wife wonder what it all means. The viewpoint character is watching to see what happens; his wife is substantially less charitable towards the Children. But Zellaby is fascinating. While he recognizes that these Children are not human at all right from the beginning, while he realizes their ability to coerce humans will eventually result in a racial death struggle between Us and Them, and tho he notices their childish cruelty to those who even accidentally harm them* , he maintains a level of compassion and will to understand and even love them which is, well, saintly. Therein lies the power, for me, of this novel. Zellaby is a really good guy, he's _not_ stupid, he knows _exactly_ what the score is. But he doesn't hate, he doesn't blindly destroy, nothing. He listens, he learns, he thinks. He loves, he befriends -- to the limit the Children will permit. He gains their trust. I spent a good chunk of the book getting more and more depressed, because I thought Zellaby was right; on the other hand, I had a horrible feeling the Children would win because of his actions which, at least in context, would be Wrong. So when our dippy, myopic protagonist trots over to the school with Zellaby to help him carry his film cartons for the movie that all the Children had gathered to see because they liked Zellaby, who had taken the trouble to teach them compassion, and a sense of humor, well, let's just say I chortled with relief. This is an even better example of the kill-the-one-you-love motif than DKM's _The Last Dancer_ (which was confused by the fact that there was reason to believe the "victim" wanted to die). Anyway, it's a very good book, not long at all, and it has aged remarkably well. *(Their justification for this is interesting, and very reminiscent of some stuff in Card's _Ender's Game_. The idea is that if someone hurts you, intentionally or otherwise, and you have a choice between stopping them, and stopping them plus hurting them real bad -- counterattacking -- then counterattacking is justified, to teach them a lesson. So they'll try *real hard* not to ever let it happen again. Makes an impression, etc. Card's use of it was a lot different, however. Ender is being hassled by a group, and it was clearly intentional. Nor was he able to see a way to just stop his attackters; any defense he made required counterattack. To save the time and pain of beating up a lot of people, he beat one up, really bad (dead). The Children, however, had the ability to just _stop_ people. They didn't. Was the counterattack justified? After all, several other places Children were born, they were destroyed outright; Midwich is the last group, and they are panicking. I don't think, in the end, it mattered whether their attitude was justified; like all good tragedies, this at least apparently necessary attitude, this "virtue", was also their fatal flaw, in view of the fact that it probably was a factor in motivating Zellaby's later actions. Certainly it suggested that it would never be possible to make a treaty with the Children; they were bent on the destruction of the human race and so thoroughly believed that one species' survival entailed the other's destruction that no accomodation could ever be found. Zellaby tried tho; I think if Zellaby believed he could ever convince them they could exist side by side, in peace and mutual prosperity, so to speak, he probably would have let them live and taken the risk of the slow tide of evolution. But they wanted to hurry things up.) -- Rebecca Crowley standard disclaimers apply rcrowley@zso.dec.com Successful Accidents and Unlikely Certainty