The Midwich Cuckoos: Now a major Sky series starring Keeley Hawes and Max Beesley

Product Information

An elderly, educated, Midwich resident (Gordon Zellaby) realises the Children must be killed as soon as possible. As he has only a few weeks left to live due to a heart condition, he feels obliged to do something. He has acted as a teacher of and mentor to the Children and they regard him with as much affection as they can have for any human, permitting him to approach them more closely than others. One evening, he hides a bomb in his projection equipment while showing the Children a film about the Greek islands. Zellaby sets off the bomb, killing himself and all of the Children. As soon as the doctor and the vicar catch on to what is happening, they team up to from a female-lead committee to calm and support the masses - assure them that they have done nothing wrong, and stop these young women from trying to commit suicides and dangerous illegal abortions. The first mysterious occurrence is what people in Midwich refer to as the "Dayout," - within a certain invisible boundary surrounding Midwich, all living beings - humans, cows, birds, et al.- slump to the ground unconscious for a considerable time and thereafter regain consciousness with no apparent ill effects. In the sleepy English village of Midwich, a mysterious silver object appears and all the inhabitants fall unconscious. A day later the object is gone and everyone awakens unharmed - except that all the women in the village are discovered to be pregnant.

The Children themselves form two basic entities - male and female - split into 61 "components". By the end they have lived for nine years, look sixteen, and have immeasurable intelligence. The characters in the novel assume a working formula of a 16 year old human's multiplied by the power of 30, but both they and we know that any human comparison is useless. Here Boy speaks for all the Children, trying to explain their position as they request to be moved elsewhere, and thereby putting off the inevitable confrontation between species which would lead to humanity's extinction. I would have liked more of the story to really involve the perspective of one of the surrogate mothers: their story is always conveyed to the reader second or even third-hand. The experience of being a living incubator for an alien offspring would have been a fascinating thing to explore more deeply. The story might also feel a little dated to modern readers: aliens among us are not a new trope, but when Wyndham penned this book, it hadn't been used to death yet, and must have been very fresh and frightening to his readers. Quite interesting, as a thought experiment, and ending on an ambiguous note. Is trust good or bad? Should the individual or the collective be valued more?

Retailers:

Though even he can’t stop the carnage that’s set to come as fires break out and when the adults turn on the Children, they use their abilities to force the villagers to harm themselves instead of them. It then emerges that the Children aren’t the only ones of their kind to arrive like this, with similar occurrences happening around in the world. One day vanishes off the calendars of a peaceful village of Midwich. When everyone goes to sleep for an entire day and wakes up to find all the women of the village to be pregnant. The children when born are all identical physically with golden eyes and sharing only two consciousness; one shared by all the females and the other by all the males. Apart from that, they are not normal children. They are children with a capital C, having super psychic powers and such reasonable arguments to make as are unable to grasp by any normal person living on the planet.

If you can ignore this hogwash, or at least smile and be amused, you will get through this book fine. I found it amusing. Some months afterwards, Midwich women discover they're pregnant and eventually give birth to a batch of babies with striking physical traits, including distinctive golden eyes. Equally alarming, none of the children have their mothers' features. I really enjoyed this retro sci-fi book. It was very interesting. Of course, you have what is now seen as "old-fashioned" discourse on the differences between men and women, such as:The children get born and then we are in the Village of the Damned (in case anyone missed the connection). Good story and a few cool twists that kept interest up. Unfortunately it fell apart a bit for me at the (inevitable) end, when Wyndham uses the entire storyline as a basis for a existential/ethical discussion that felt very contrived.

Life gets less ordinary still when the inhabitants wake up 12 hours later and find that every woman of childbearing age is pregnant. There is a lot of placing of hands on bellies and gazing in wonderment up at the sky as expressions of incredulous delight creep slowly across faces, instead of a more plausible mass panic. This is when you know you are in for eight hours of traditional fare rather than any dizzying innovation, and so it proves. I didn’t really get the scary sense of menace from the Children or slow build up to a chilling climax that maybe a modern day writer would have achieved. In the book, the Children all look very similar, often indistinguishable from one another, but that obviously wouldn’t be possible for the TV series where they are all of diverse ethnic origins. Another enjoyable weird tale by Wyndham, who brought us The Day of the Triffids (which everyone thinks they know how the story goes until they read it and find out about all the blind people...). In this book - wait - you can tell from anything ever written about it including the blurb - but, if you managed to avoid and are extremely sensitive to "spoilers" please get off at the next stop, ok? El ritmo del libro es lento, no hay acción apenas y vemos como es el discurrir en el pueblo de Midwich con ese extraño alumbramiento masivo. The writing is good - Wyndham is surprisingly funny and does a fair job of characterization - Gordon Zellaby is a particularly strongly written character, although he isn't our protagonist.The novel has been adapted into a seven-part TV series by David Farr. It was shown on Sky Max in June 2022. It stars Keeley Hawes as Dr Susannah Zellaby, and Max Beesley as a local police officer. [16] A number of Wyndham’s novels involved an existential struggle between humanity and a newly appeared threat, usually alien invaders. This one is on a small scale in the sense that all the action takes place in a single village in 1950s England, but that doesn’t detract from the level of threat the aliens pose to humanity. Si uno no está cegado por la seguridad de su propia indispensabilidad, debe admitir que, al igual que los reyes de la creación que nos han precedido, estamos llamados a ser reemplazados un día. Esto podrá producirse de dos maneras: sea por nosotros mismos, por nuestra autodestrucción, sea por la invasión de una especie que no podamos dominar por falta de medios técnicos suficientes. Bien, henos aquí ahora frente a una voluntad y una inteligencia superiores. ¿Con qué podemos oponernos a ella?"