Inspiring Older Readers
The Outward Urge by John Wyndham and Lucas Parkes
This is a pretty odd mish-mash of a book. I’m generally a fan of Wyndham even though his work feels irredeemably dated. However, despite my general appreciation of his books, this is one I’ve never read before. To be honest, I’ve been skipping it for a couple of reasons: firstly, it’s more hard line science fictiony-spacey stuff than he normally goes for; and, secondly, I always assumed it was a collaboration with another author and that always makes me nervous. But in this latter assumption, it turns out I was wrong. Lucas Parkes is in fact John Wyndham – a pen-name for a pseudo-collaborator was trumped-up to signal to mainstream Wyndham fans that this was a book dealing with material that was not his usual bill of fare.
Science fiction – especially that which tries to imagine the nature of space travel in the future – is very much a historical hostage to fortune and this one is no different in this respect. Published in 1959, Wyndham could only imagine a future bounded by the hegemonic truths of the world he lived in and so for that reason, his future looks almost quaintly absurd. There are four main sections to the novel which are virtually free-standing short stories linked by a common theme with a final, rather odd, fifth section added which isn’t directly related to the body of the book and appeared elsewhere in a magazine prior to popping up here.
The common thread in this book is the history of a pioneering family, the Troons, who play historically important roles in the story of space exploration over two hundred years from 1994 – 2194. The Toon men, we discover are all driven by a mysterious need to be in space – the ‘outward urge’ of the title.
We start with how ‘Ticker’ Toon becomes a hero of British involvement in the creation of space stations orbiting the Earth when he prevents the station being blown up by a hostile explosive mine. His self-sacrifice earns a posthumous V.C. and, we discover, he has a son born on Earth that he will never see.
This, of course, signals to us that the space race would be essentially a military race and when we move forward to 2044 we discover a British moon base, managed by Toon’s son, is sandwiched between a US and a Soviet station all tooled-up for nuclear war. Down on Earth that nuclear war is raging and in the process of laying waste to the whole northern hemisphere while on the moon, it has unexpected consequences.
Jump forward then to 2094 and we discover that following the nuclear devastation, Brazil has emerged as the world power and the Toon family has relocated to that country. Here we meet Geoffrey Trunho (a Portuguese name change) who is part of a crew that makes the first Mars landing but which itself becomes a disaster that strands our hero on the Red Planet. But not before he has left behind a seed of the outward urge in a child who will in turn produce a member of the first successful landing on Venus. By this time the name has reverted again to Toon because the family has moved to live in the new, emerging power, Australia.
The outward urge, we discover, has prompted a new evolutionary step and spawned a new generation of humans – one’s not bounded by the destructive considerations of country and borders but who are citizens of ‘space’.
As I suggested at the beginning of this review, the book feels like it’s been rather bolted together and definitely lacks the imaginative power of his masterpieces like Day of the Triffids or The Midwich Cuckoos. The space race setting of the story seems to limit his imagination – scientifically and politically – and in the end this looks more like a relic from the Cold War than an imaginative speculation on the future of mankind.
Terry Potter
April 2020