Bibliography Early novels published under other pen names

• Foul Play Suspected (1935) (as John Beynon)

• The Secret People (1935) (as John Beynon)

• Planet Plane (1936) (as John Beynon; also known as The Space Machine and Stowaway to Mars)

Novels published in his lifetime as by John Wyndham

• The Day of the Triffids (1951) (also known as Revolt of the Triffids)

• The Kraken Wakes (1953) (published in the US as Out of the Deep)

• The Chrysalids (1955) (published in the US as Re-Birth)

• The Midwich Cuckoos (1957) (filmed twice as Village of the Damned)

• The Outward Urge (1959)

• Trouble with Lichen (1960)

• Chocky (1968)

Posthumous = посмертный novels

• Web (1979)

• Plan for Chaos (2009)

Short story collections

• Jizzle (1954)

• The Seeds of Time (1956)

• Tales of Gooseflesh and Laughter (1956) (features stories from the two earlier collections)

• Consider Her Ways and Others (1961)

• The Infinite Moment (1961) (US edition of Consider Her Ways, with two stories dropped, two others added)

Posthumous collections

• Sleepers of Mars (1973) a collection of five stories originally published in magazines in the 1930s: Sleepers of Mars, Worlds to Barter, Invisible Monster, The Man from Earth & The Third Vibrator.

• The Best of John Wyndham (1973)

• Wanderers of Time (1973) a collection of five stories originally published in magazines in the 1930s: Wanderers of Time, Derelict of Space, Child of Power, The Last Lunarians & The Puff-ball Menace (a.k.a. Spheres of Hell).

• Exiles on Asperus (1979)

• No Place like Earth (2003)

Most of Wyndham's novels have a contemporary 1950s English setting. Brian Aldiss, another British science fiction writer, has disparagingly labelled some of them as «cosy catastrophes», especially his novel The Day of the Triffids. The critic L. J. Hurst dismissed Aldiss's accusations, pointing out that in Triffids the main character witnesses several murders, suicides, and misadventures, and is frequently in mortal danger himself.

This approach by Wyndham (itself more than a little reminiscent of that taken by H. G. Wells in The War of the Worlds) was a reaction against what he described as the "galactic gangsters in space opera" style of much science fiction up to then. In his longer tales he is more concerned with character development than many science fiction writers. Wyndham's science fiction may be considered trendsetting in its insistence that interplanetary catastrophes do not just happen to «other people» (e.g. those best-equipped to face them) and would in fact be extremely difficult for our delicate and highly interconnected civilisation to deal with.

Similarly ahead of its time is the emphasis that Wyndham put on disruptions=(нарушения) to the biosphere as a whole, as when the aliens in The Kraken Wakes begin to engineer our planet for their own purposes without asking us first. He consistently views man as part of the biosphere, and nature as «red in tooth and claw» (as Tennyson put it). Perhaps a reflection of his ideas are the similar, usually middle-class characters that he employs throughout his main novels. For example, in Midwich Cuckoos, Day of the Triffids and The Kraken Wakes, the main characters are a sensible man and woman. The similarities of these characters between the novels are great; a self-made educated man, a successful woman who is headstrong yet quite dependent on the man at times.

These are a reflection of Wyndham's self-described style – that of «logical fantasy». In Triffids, Kraken, and Midwich Cuckoos, the characters and settings are all very reasonable, sensible, and in some sense, properly English. This is the theme at the heart of these works: take the «sensible» and rational society we have now, and introduce one (or in the case of Triffids, two) extraordinary factors. The works then take a very analytical approach to our reactions to these situations. The results are always grim, as we rational beings, most notably in Kraken, at every step attempt to rationalise extraordinary situations into our present day view of our planet. In this sense Wyndham exposes our rationality as purely protective, and, in the end, detrimental. Only when no hope is left can we actually face facts – this is just when hope presents itself as one last flicker= мерцать of the human potential.