"One of the most thoughtful post-apocalypse novels ever written.
Wyndham was a true English visionary, a William Blake with a
science doctorate." -- David Mitchell
"Sometimes you just need a bit of soft-core sci-fi, and Wyndham's
1950's classic, newly back in print, fully delivers." --Thicket
Magazine
"It is quite simply a page-turner, maintaining suspense to the
very end and vividly conjuring the circumstances of a crippled and
menacing world, and of the fear and sense of betrayal that pervade
it. The ending, a salvation of an extremely dubious sort, leaves
the reader pondering how truly ephemeral our version of
civilization is..." --The Boston Globe
"[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." -The
Observer (London)
"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." -The Guardian (London)
"[A]bsolutely and completely brilliant…The Chrysalids is
a top-notch piece of sci-fi that should be enjoyed for generations
yet to come." -The Ottawa Citizen
"John Wyndham''s novel The Chrysalids is a famous example
of 1950s Cold War science fiction, but its portrait of a community
driven to authoritarian madness by its overwhelming fear of
difference - in this case, of genetic mutations in the aftermath of
nuclear war - finds its echoes in every society." -The
Scotsman
"The Chrysalids comes heart-wrenchingly close to being John
Wyndham''s most powerful and profound work." -SFReview.net
"Re-Birth (The Chrysalids) was one of the first science
fiction novels I read as a youth, and several times tempted me to
take a piggy census. Returning to it now, more than 30 years later,
I find that I remember vast parts of it with perfect clarity…a book
to kindle the joy of reading science fiction. -SciFi.com
"A remarkably tender story of a post-nuclear childhood…It has,
of course, always seemed a classic to most of its three generations
of readers...It has become part of a canon of good books." -The
Guardian, September 15, 2000