Wyndham (John) Web

London, Michael Joseph, 1979.

First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jacket.

John Wyndham’s last novel, published by his estate ten years after his death. The millionaire Lord Foxfield plans a Utopian community on the remote Pacific island of Tanakuatua. Unknown to him, the island has been placed under a taboo by its evicted inhabitants and has also been the site of a nuclear test. The narrator, Arnold Delgrange, a widower who joins the venture to escape his grief, tells how the colonists discover that the island belongs to spiders that have evolved to work together. The islanders call them the “Little Sisters”, and the jacket describes them as spiders “who cooperated like bees and planned like beavers”. The SF Encyclopedia compares it to H. G. Wells’ ‘Empire of the Ants’, “but with spiders in place of Ants”.

The Guardian called it “the perfect apocalyptic fable”.