The novel “The Midwich Cuckoos” by John Wyndham was published for the first time in 1957.

One day, for mysterious reasons, in a hemisphere that has its center in the English village of Midwich all living creatures enter a strange sleep state. Anyone who enters that area fall to the ground and when they’re pulled out by someone outside of the boundaries of that strange hemisphere they come to. After about a day, all living beings suffering from the phenomenon awaken without anyone being able to understand its cause. A strange silver object photographed by air isn’t found when the authorities investigate in the village.

Shortly thereafter, all fertile women who were at Midwich during what was called the “Dayout” discover they’re pregnant. When the Children are born, they seem completely normal except for their golden eyes and skin with a silvery hue. The villagers are trying to return to a normal life after that inexplicable incident but over time the Children start manifesting strange abilities and their relationship with “common” humans become tenser and tenser.

“The Midwich Cuckoos” was adapted into a movie twice: in 1960 in the classic “Village of the Damned” and in the 1995 remake “John Carpenter’s Village of the Damned”, unfortunately disappointing. In 1963 “Children of the Damned” was produced, an ideal sequel of the first movie. The novel has also been adapted in various radio versions by the BBC.

John Wyndham was a master of British science fiction and the deep roots that he had in his homeland can be seen very well in “The Midwich Cuckoos”, set in an English village that is very normal, so much that it’s dull, one of those villages where nothing remarkable ever happens.

The beginning of “The Midwich Cuckoos” is slow because John Wyndham takes a long time to describe the village of Midwich especially explaining how ordinary it is. This dullness contrasts sharply with the strange events of the “Dayout”, spent by residents in a unnatural sleep, the subsequent discovery of fertile women of the village that they’re pregnant and the babies born nine months later.

In the face of these events, the people of Midwich still try to maintain their normality, also helped by the representatives of the Government sent to investigate the “Dayout” and the Children, always indicated with a capital C. The authorities are puzzled and, in the absence of obvious threats, not knowing how to act they simply keep an eye on the village. In the other towns of the area, also normal British towns, people get the idea that the Midwich inhabitants are a bit weird but nothing more.

The story is narrated by Richard Gayford, a Midwich inhabitant who by chance wasn’t in the village at the beginning of the “Dayout”. Gayford tells in first person what he saw but also other events he’s told by other people. About half of the novel is dedicated to the “Dayout” and its immediate consequences until a few months after the birth of the Children. Subsequently, Gayford and his wife move to Canada but after about nine years, during a trip to England, he returns to Midwich and resumes telling the story of the Children, now grown up.

This second half of the novel becomes the story of an abnormal invasion, not carried out through a war but in subtle ways. The title refers to the cuckoo, a bird that lays its eggs in the nest of other birds that hatch them as if they were theirs.

After nine years in fact it’s become evident that the Children aren’t normal and the Midwich inhabitants are struggling more and more to maintain their facade of normality. More and more people become hostile towards them but the Children know how to defend themselves. The tenser and tenser relationship between the Children and the other Midwich inhabitants and their possible consequences are the subject of discussion between Richard Gayford and his friend Gordon Zellaby, who from the beginning has been curious about what happened in the village and pondered about the possible clash that could happen in the future between the Children and the normal human beings.

The final part of “The Midwich Cuckoos” is in many ways an ethical discussion about the possible ways that humans have to deal with the problem of the Children. This is definitely not an action novel and the pace is that of a British village. For some readers, this may be a flaw but it’s one of the bases of the novel.

Some elements of “The Midwich Cuckoos” now seem obsolete. Of course, at the time the tests that could be carried out on the Children were limited while in a similar story written today they’d be subjected to a thorough analysis of their DNA and other modern tests.

Even the style of the novel reflects the era in which it was written, for example the fact that the narrator is a man and the other most important character is a man too in a story in which the trauma of the “Dayout” is experienced mostly by the women who become pregnant with the Children.

Nevertheless, “The Midwich Cuckoos” remains a great science fiction classic and it’s a must-have in the collection of every fan and anyone interested to learn more about this genre.