Sci-Fi & Fantasy

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.

London, Michael Joseph, 1960.

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

The last of the novels published in Wyndham's lifetime under the famous name at full stride, and the one whose reputation has travelled furthest: a lichen extract, the "antigerone," is found to slow human ageing - and the two discoverers split on what to do with two or three centuries of life. A thriller plot wearing a genuinely radical argument about gerontocracy, cosmetics and female emancipation; sixty years on it gets cited in bioethics discussions more than anything else he wrote. Very good in equally good Hugh Marshall wrapper.

London, Michael Joseph, 1961.

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

The mature Wyndham in short form, led by the novella that first appeared sandwiched between Golding and Peake in Sometime, Never (1956) and here gives its name to the collection: a woman wakes in a future without men, the male half of the species eliminated by an escaped virus; her amnesia making her the reader's guide to a society of castes and functions that works perfectly well, which is precisely the problem...