Cuckoo children (novel)
Cuckoo children (engl. Original title: The Midwich Cuckoos ) is the name of a science fiction - novel , which the British author John Wyndham was written 1957th There are several new versions of the novel.
Summary
The novel tells the story of a fictional English village in which, after a day of mass unconsciousness, all young women are pregnant and finally give birth to 61 children of almost identical appearance, who in the course of the story reveal an unexpected malevolence. The original novel is written first-person, with a former officer and villager named "Richard Gayford" as the main character, from whose point of view the story is told.
action
The inhabitants of the English village of Midwich lead a peaceful life until one morning all the residents and animals suddenly pass out. The phenomenon occurs within a two mile radius and is sharply demarcated around the village.
The police and the military became aware of the incident because around ten o'clock in the morning all telephone connections were cut off and two houses went up in flames, but no fire brigade went out. The authorities set up a blocking line. Nobody, not even officials and residents of Midwich, may exceed the calculated restricted radius. It turns out that the edge zone runs perfectly circular around the village and the effect area forms a hemispherical dome. The mysterious fainting effect affects everyone who crosses the blocking line, but ends just as suddenly as soon as the person concerned leaves the effect zone. The faint does not seem to have any side effects. Investigations and questioning of victims also remain inconclusive. However, aerial photos by the military show a pale, oval object on the ground in the middle of the village.
After a day, the ominous object and the fainting effect disappear. The villagers wake up to find that no one has apparently been injured. A month later, a regular medical check-up reveals that all of the principally fertile women in the village have become pregnant. More detailed follow-up examinations show that the fetuses were apparently not naturally conceived, but implanted on the very day of the mysterious blackout . This realization initially causes dismay, because 61 women in the village became pregnant at the same time.
When the babies come into the world, everything seems normal and, moreover, very healthy. All of them have hydrogen-blonde hair, the shafts of which are shaped like a capital "D". Another thing they have in common are the gold-colored eyes, whose gaze is always perceived by the viewer as "rigid" and "penetrating". The skin color is also unusually light, shimmering almost silvery. A total of 31 boys and 30 girls are born. It turns out that the gender distribution of the babies was originally supposed to be the same - but at the time of the blackout , one of the women was already pregnant. A short time later, a boy and two girls die of an illness.
The surviving children have nothing genetically in common with their parents. Still, all mothers want to keep their children. The children grow up unusually quickly, and by the age of nine they have reached the anatomical level of sixteen. As children grow up, they reveal telepathic abilities, but spiritual contact between children always seems to be restricted to their own gender. So the boys can learn something at the same time when a single boy learns something, but not when a girl does it. The girls cannot learn anything that a boy appropriates. The telepathic powers grow with the age of the children and influence outsiders. The children take advantage of this fact coldly as soon as they are threatened. So they get a young man to drive his car into a wall and kill himself after he accidentally hits one of the children. When they are chased by a runaway bull, the children get the animal to drown itself in the village pond.
As such incidents pile up, the villagers begin to hate the children. One day the situation escalates and an angry mob tries to set fire to the boarding school where the children have been housed from the start. The plan fails, however, because the children can now sense thoughts directed against them from a greater distance . When the angry mob reaches the building, the children step outside and force the villagers to set fire to each other.
The military has since found out that Midwich is not the only village where " cuckoo children " have been born after a one-day mass blackout . The same thing happened in an Inuit community in Canada , a community in Australia, and a small town in Siberia . However, the Inuit killed their children because the virgin births had broken all of their taboos . The Siberian village is being exterminated by the Soviet forces using a guided missile. Officially, this is declared an "accident".
The children become aware of their threat and act increasingly ruthless. When routinely questioned by the military authorities, the Midwich children make it clear that they will not be easily killed. They back up their threats by crashing all scout planes as soon as they get too close to the village. They call on the military to help them escape Midwich and put them in a secret location. The military is just as perplexed as the villagers. But the village teacher Gordon Zellaby decides to do something. Since he himself has a serious heart condition and is possibly close to death, he wants to sacrifice himself to destroy the children. On the pretext of having found an ideal place for them, he shows the children a film about the Aegean islands . However , there is a bomb hidden in the film projector , which the village teacher detonates when the children concentrate on the film and let it out of their sight. The bomb kills both the children and Gordon Zellaby.
Idea for the book
As a basic concept and inspiration for his book, John Wyndham used the cuckoo , which lays its eggs in the nests of smaller songbirds in order to leave the breeding work and care to the host parents. It is a similar story for the residents of Midwich: they too are being foisted with cuckoo children. In the novel, however, there is a difference in the care for the involuntary offspring: the cuckoo children rigorously take care of themselves and do not tolerate any interference from their foster parents.
In the novel, the "cuckoo phenomenon" ends when the mental powers that the children have at their disposal become visible. Until then, however, the basic idea is fascinating that the greatest danger could come from the specially raised "brood", which otherwise looked so human. This scheme is still widely used in science fiction novels and films to this day.
The German translation of the novel has the very freely formulated title It happened on day X , while the original English title describes the story of extraterrestrial invaders who are placed in an earthly "nest" according to the principle of the cuckoo more accurately.
Film adaptations
The work has been filmed twice so far, once in 1960 by the German director Wolf Rilla and again in 1995 by the US director John Carpenter . Both films are titled "Village of the Damned" (in German "The Village of the Damned").
expenditure
- John Wyndham: The Midwich cuckoos . Ballantime Books, London 1957 (first edition)
- John Wyndham: The Midwich cuckoos . Evans Brothers, London 2005 (new edition), ISBN 978-0-237-52689-4
- John Wyndham: It happened on day X ... . Heyne, Munich 1965 (German first edition, translated by Gisela Stege)
- John Wyndham: Cuckoo Children . Fantastic Library, Volume 277, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 1991, ISBN 3-518-38393-0 (new translation by Christiane Schreiter)
literature
- Adam Roberts : John Wyndham's "cuckoo children" as a Holocaust novel , in: Pandora. Science Fiction and Fantasy , Vol. 3, edited by Hannes Riffel and Jakob Schmidt, Shayol Verlag, Berlin 2009, pp. 180-183. ISBN 978-3-926126-77-1
Individual evidence
- ↑ Jean Harris Hendriks, Tony Kaplan, Dora Black: When Father Kills Mother: Guiding Children through Trauma and Grief . Routledge, London 2000, ISBN 978-0-415-19628-4 , p. 145, with explicit reference to Wyndham's novel.
- ↑ Gary Westfahl, George Edgar Slusser: Nursery Realms: Children in the Worlds of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror . University Press, Georgia 1999, ISBN 978-0-8203-2144-8 , p. 94, also with explicit reference to Wyndham's novel.
- ↑ Information on "Cuckoo Children" and "The Village of the Damned" on Grauen.de