Word: wyndham
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Died. Dorothy Wyndham Paget, 54, onetime British debutante who gave up sports-car racing for horse breeding, in her lifetime spent close to $10 million (from a horsecar and trolley fortune inherited from her grandfather William C. Whitney, Secretary of the Navy in Grover Cleveland's Cabinet), saddled the winners of 1,532 races, including the peerless Golden Miller, winner of the Grand National in 1934; of a heart attack; in Chalfont St. Giles, England...
...MIDWICH CUCKOOS (247 pp.)-John Wyndham-Ballantine...
...rule science fiction is neither; most writers of real talent believe that their place is in the home, not in outer space. An exception is John Wyndham. a British novelist who manages to be in both places at the same time and to apply a sort of documentary style to the description of a world of sinister flapdoodle...
...Novelist Wyndham well knows the first rule in writing a chiller-effective specters must be ectoplasmatter-of-fact-and so he takes the dullest, most ordinary village in England to populate with his monsters. Nothing much noteworthy has happened in Midwich since the Black Death. One day something very odd does happen: every living thing falls into a trance. All who pass through an invisible perimeter pass out. Traffic piles up. Some victims are hauled out by hooks from the edge of this zone of silence: they wake up unharmed. Promptly, of course, official hush-hush seals off Midwich...
...news seeps out that a similar occurrence took place among the Eskimos, who superstitiously exposed all the strange children to death, and in Russia, which ideologically blasted the unwelcome visitors out of the world with an atomic cannon. How will the commonsensical British deal with this nonsensical problem? Author Wyndham expends the imagination and skill of a serious novelist on resolving the question. Incidentally, he gives a depressingly convincing picture of British social life. Wyndham has chosen to write about the impossible but has the talent to prove that it happened in an all-too-probable place...