The Little Strangers

THE MIDWICH CUCKOOS (247 pp.)--John Wyndham--Ballantine ($3.50).

As a rule science fiction is neither; most writers of real talent believe that their place is in the home, not in outer space. An exception is John Wyndham. a British novelist who manages to be in both places at the same time and to apply a sort of documentary style to the description of a world of sinister flapdoodle.

Novelist Wyndham well knows the first rule in writing a chiller--effective specters must be ectoplasmatter-of-fact--and so he takes the dullest, most ordinary village in England to populate with his monsters. Nothing much noteworthy has happened in Midwich since the Black Death. One day something very odd does happen: every living thing falls into a trance. All who pass through an invisible perimeter pass out. Traffic piles up. Some victims are hauled out by hooks from the edge of this zone of silence: they wake up unharmed. Promptly, of course, official hush-hush seals off Midwich and its sleeping citizenry. After two nights and a day the mysterious influence lifts, but the villagers awake to an even odder situation than their unreal coma.

One by one every woman of child-bearing age in the village, including the most repellent and chaste, turns out to be pregnant. There are, naturally, cases of attempted suicide and abortion and indignant husbands and shame-stricken spinsters. What seems to be an outbreak of mass parthenogenesis has raised problems of theological, scientific and political interest. This is nothing to what happens when the village doctor has his busy days and the little strangers prove to be stranger than is customary even in science fiction. The fathers, it is now clear, came from outer space, and left no forwarding address. Nor did they leave any clue as to why the children (60 in all) should have golden eyes and be gifted with the power that all ordinary children want but do not always get--the ability to command the adult world.

This outbreak is not unique. The news seeps out that a similar occurrence took place among the Eskimos, who superstitiously exposed all the strange children to death, and in Russia, which ideologically blasted the unwelcome visitors out of the world with an atomic cannon. How will the commonsensical British deal with this nonsensical problem? Author Wyndham expends the imagination and skill of a serious novelist on resolving the question. Incidentally, he gives a depressingly convincing picture of British social life. Wyndham has chosen to write about the impossible but has the talent to prove that it happened in an all-too-probable place.

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