Wyndham (John) and Lucas Parkes [both pseuds. for John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris]. The Outward Urge

London, Michael Joseph, 1959.

First edition. 8vo. Original black boards lettered in white. Dust-jacket.

The pseudonym saga achieves its final, magnificent absurdity: a collaboration between John Wyndham and Lucas Parkes, i.e., between the third & fourth names of John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris, a man now formally credited with co-writing a book with himself. The fig-leaf logic was branding: this is hard, nuts-and-bolts space fiction rather than the domestic catastrophes the Wyndham name had come to promise, so ‘Parkes’ was wheeled out as notional technical collaborator to manage expectations. The book itself is a future history in four episodes at fifty-year intervals, following successive generations of the Troon family from the first space stations to the Moon, Mars and Venus, as the powers of the northern hemisphere obligingly destroy each other and leadership in space passes elsewhere. A fifth Troon story, ‘The Emptiness of Space,’ was added to the 1961 Science Fiction Book Club edition.