Skip to main content

"The Midwich Cuckoos" by John Wyndham

Why I read it: It had been lying around my house for a long time. I think I got it from my friend Shari when she got rid of most of her books when she moved to England like seven years ago. The boy has been reading "The Chrysalids", also by Wyndham, for English class at school. I was wondering if this would be a good thing to recommend to him, now that he's finished the Twilight series for the second time, so I read it. I'm not sure it's a good choice for the boy, because it doesn't really have kid protagonists.

Also, I might be going through a stage of "reading from the stash" just a little bit.

Tastes like chicken: HG Wells, which is referenced a lot later in the story, and maybe the new Battlestar Galactica.

Bookmark: One of those cheque-ordering forms from my chequebook.

What I liked: The very British style. There were moments that were quite funny to me, because they were just so deadpan. I love the deadpan style. I liked the way it didn't really seem like science fiction; it was just a story. And I liked the ending. I knew something was up. I thought the candies were poisoned, though it did seem like there was an awful lot of equipment going to that film showing...

What I disliked: When I was reading this last Saturday at the YMCA, I had to ask one of the physicians that were standing around (there were at least two in the room) what an occiput was. Then I got in a pointless argument with a non-physician about whether occiput and Oxycontin have a similar root. I think not.

Lessons learned (what I can steal): It was nice to read a science fiction book that I enjoyed, because I've been going through a spell of wondering if maybe science fiction is not for me.

In other news: I let Ed read Watcher, and he didn't say it was crap. I think I removed the right thousand words.

Popular posts from this blog

Best TW feedback ever

Over at the dayjob, SMEs are feverishly trying to get documents back to me all marked up, in preparation for the release that's supposed to happen the week I'm back from VP. Today's best comment: Unfortunately not true. SMEs, they're so cute.

Moraine

So a couple of days I thought I was done with this short story, and I wrote the last line of the story. I even dated it (that's how I can tell it's over). It was a little long, at 6600 words (I was aiming for 5000). But then I was walking to work, and I thought, "My, that was a lame ending. My endings are all crap." So yesterday morning, I scribbled out the date and wrote a bit more. And this morning I wrote a bit more again, and I dated it and called it done. And still, that ending seemed lame. So a few minutes later, in the last paragraph, I scratched out "the Oak Ridges Moraine" and wrote in "that stupid moraine". Much better. Now I can move on. But in the meantime, I was doing a little research about the Moraine, and I discovered that EGTourGuide lives on it. Only by one or two hundred feet, but I thought it was funny. Good for you, EGTourGuide, with all those excellent plants growing on that substandard soil, where in the olden days (you kno...

What I read: March 2024

  LHC #240: "Vita Nostra" by  Maryna and Serhiy Dyachenko. Translated by Julia Meitov Hersey. All I knew going in was dark academia. This was a neat thing to read after A Deadly Education last month. The students can leave this school at summer and winter break, but maybe they shouldn't. Also, interesting education method, providing Sasha with a CD player and punishing her if she leaves it in the mode where it plays all the tracks in sequence.  "Norse Mythology" by Neil Gaiman. When I finished Ragnarok by AS Byatt (last month? January?) I was thinking it might have made more sense if I had any knowledge of the subject matter. The boy had left this lying around, and it was not a tough read.  LHC #241: "Science on a mission: How Military funding shaped what we do and don't know about the ocean" by Naomi Oreskes.  I deferred this once because it was so long. History of science is challenging for me to read, because of the need to get a grasp on dispr...