BOOKS READ 11: CHOCKY BY JOHN WYNDHAM
A! LIE! NS!
Isn’t this cover fantastic? All the past ones look either incredibly dated or freakishly weird.
The book is about an alien (“Chocky”) who talks to an 11 year old boy, making him notice things, feeding/teaching him intelligent thoughts, and also mocking current human accomplishments.
It’s interesting, on the back cover it made the alien in this book seem sinister, manipulative, just overall a bad entity, but in the actual book, it’s actually the humans, the more “intelligent” ones (psychologists, doctors who have graduated from places like Oxford) that are dangerous and not to be trusted. Because in the end it seems, power and greed are what drives the people who can make things happen, and they will exploit any means as much as possible to do so.
The book was able to build up to this really important point/climax and to explain it so succinctly and effectively in a brief amount of pages.
Although it is a strong book, it is not nearly as good to me as Wyndham’s other book, “The Day of the Triffids”. If you haven’t read any John Wyndham books, I suggest you start with that one. Or end on that one, depends how you are.
Wyndham writes about aliens, human eating plants, futures where if you aren’t genetically perfect you are killed, typical sci-fi stuff, stuff that you kind of only take half seriously for entertainment’s sake and can easily be laughed at and written off, but the way Wyndham writes, these things and worlds seem…normal, possible, and nowhere near crazy. There is a sense of comfort, sureness that these things could exist, and that if they do exist, it’ll be alright because there are people, normal people who will remain level headed and get themselves and others through the mess. It showed that even though the world could go through or go to shit, he has faith that humans will know what do and will make it.
