Chocky

Product Information

This quirky alien-meets-boy story “remains fresh and disturbing in an entirely unexpected way”—for fans of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time ( The Guardian). While the 1968 novel was set in an unspecified 'near future', the TV adaptation was set contemporaneously in the mid-1980s in Surrey. The Gore family acquire a second generation Citroën CX car which was marketed as being technologically advanced at the time. You should be employing your resources, while you still have them, to tap and develop the use of a source of power which is not finite…." What if your son had an imaginary friend with whom he often conversed, answering questions that nobody had apparently asked, and behaving as though this invisible and seemingly immaterial Other were the most natural thing in the world? Many parents will probably have observed such a thing with their own children. But what, then, if the idea started to take root, a small but nevertheless nagging doubt, that this imaginary friend was not imaginary at all, but something objectively real, which had inhabited your child’s brain and was capable of speaking directly to him through some form of thought-transference?

John Wyndham - Chocky - First Edition 1968 John Wyndham - Chocky - First Edition 1968

Wyndham singlehandedly invented a whole pile of sub-genres of SF. It’s as if . . . in the 1950s he was plugged in to the world’s subconscious fears and articulated them one by one in short, amazingly readable novels.”When David Gore, the narrator, overhears his adopted son, Matthew, having a conversation with what he assumes is an imaginary friend he becomes concerned. Apart from the fact that Matthew is almost twelve years old and so surely past the age when he should have an imaginary friend, it also seems to be a very strange conversation, with questions no twelve-year-old would normally ask. As is common with authors writing in and of the period, the women are decorative and domestic, but largely sidelined in a friendly way. Younger sister Polly is plausibly annoying, but not given many redeeming qualities. However, in in the collection Consider Her Ways and Others (see my review HERE), a couple of the stories have a strong female/feminist slant. The story is told from a first-person perspective. In suburban England, David Gore is married to Mary with two children. The eldest, Matthew, is adopted, whereas the youngest, Polly, arrived after it seems having children for the couple was impossible. By using Matthew's adoptive father as the narrator Wyndham is able to employ him as the voice of reason contrasting him with the emotional response of his adoptive mother. The only thing they agree on is that, although Matthew doesn't seem at all frightened or unhappy, his behaviour is certainly not normal. All in all, this was an engaging read. Not a Wyndham major work, but still one worth reading if you can accept the dated elements from another time. And it has now made me want to go and re-read some more Wyndham!

Chocky (TV Series 1984) - IMDb Chocky (TV Series 1984) - IMDb

No, no. This is still a rational world in this short novel. Of course, if King wrote it, I would expect something with a death toll, a very, very angry alien, and a kid hounded by pitchforks. Alien telepathy. I mean, hello! Since light is the speed limit, the only reasonably efficient method of exploration has got to be SOMETHING ELSE. Especially if you want to send real spaceships to other intelligent races, you need to make sure you're welcome. :)Science fiction always tells you more about the present than the future. John Wyndham’s classroom favourite might be set in some desolate landscape still to come, but it is rooted in the concerns of the mid-1950s. Published in 1955, it’s a novel driven by the twin anxieties of the cold war and the atomic bomb…Fifty years on, when our enemy has changed and our fear of nuclear catastrophe has subsided, his analysis of our tribal instinct is as pertinent as ever.” Wyndham] was responsible for a series of eerily terrifying tales of destroyed civilisations; created several of the twentieth century’s most imaginative monsters; and wrote a handful of novels that are rightly regarded as modern classics.” A pioneering science-fiction master confronts an enigma as strange as anything found in his classic works, The Day of the Triffids or The Chrysalids: the mind of a child.