The Trouble with Lichen
by John Wyndham.
Penguin Books, 1987 (1960).
‘There’s more in that girl that she is allowing to meet the eye. She has a way of smiling at the wrong things. Should be surprising, sooner or later.’
Significantly, the cat that turned its nose up at the saucer of milk was called Felicia, from the Latin root meaning happy or lucky. But was it really lucky happenstance that both Diana Brackley and Francis Saxover individually decided to secretly investigate the properties of the lichen that had stopped the milk from going sour?
John Wyndham’s speculative fiction title from 1960 was rather different from what I’d expected after enjoying his action-packed dystopian thrillers, though the po-faced humour was familiar from his 1954 short story collection Jizzle. Superficially a sorcerer’s apprentice type of narrative, it definitely had the whiff of a narrative with the genie let out of the bottle: once a discovery is made you can’t undo it.
What I wasn’t expecting though was the hint of a proto-feminist message which, though presenting as a little laboured and muddled several decades later, ran counter to much of the SF penned by male authors of that period and even later. Though not quite perfect The Trouble with Lichen still has much to challenge and enlighten us in the 21st century as a novel of ideas.
Continue reading “Genie out of the bottle: #SpeccyFicChal”
Calmgrove Books 