Dear colleagues, this talk is to introduce or perhaps reintroduce the author, John Wyndham.
He's known chiefly for his works of fantasy or science fiction.
He's been in my mind since the beginning of the pandemic because she has a gift for introducing his stories by describing a setting of pleasant,
ordinary scenes of daily life. The terrifying thing manifests itself gradually, and people are slow to realise what's happening.
I can think of no other writer who's able to create this kind of calm prelude to disaster.
I'm going to talk about the crackdown weeks, probably one of his best known.
In the spring of 2020, as the pandemic took hold, people talked of the Black Death,
and I was thinking that the young people of the Cameron were lucky.
The exile lasted only 10 days had it gone on for 18 months.
Just think what a huge volume of stories that would have been.
But I felt as no doubt many did that are smiling English countryside was somehow poisoned with menace.
Remember what a beautiful spring we had on another topic that urgently concerns the world today?
At the end of the crack and weeks,
the story is frighteningly like predictions of what'll happen as climate change takes hold and the waters rise all over the world.
One thing that will happen, as we know, is panic buying.
It does in the book the may for all I know, be a conspiracy theory out there that we should be blaming the Kraken and not mankind's own stupidity.
You first heard it here. The scene at the beginning of the section, called Phase three, is chilling.
The narrator and his wife try to win through to Cornwall in a tiny boat, but they fail.
This short and understated account, given without prior explanation, is later extended into the final part of the story.
Conspiracy theories also feature in this book dished up by our couple, our couple's friend, Tunie.
She embodies all conceivable tabloid rubbish in her talk.
However, my talk is not about what Wyndham thinks of our modern civilisation.
I'm focussing on the book Is fantasy not a science fiction?
Let me begin with the legend, though, I'll not attempt to trace every mention of the Kraken in English, let alone world culture.
As far as I can discover, the monster called Kraken was thought to be malicious and aggressive.
It attacked ships at sea in the form of an enormous squid big enough to wrap its arms around the vessel and drag it into the deep.
It belonged to northern folklore and goes back to the 13th century or earlier,
given the prediction of water levels rising as the result of polar ice melting that I mentioned earlier.
I can't resist adding the names of two sea monsters found in late 13th century version of the old Icelandic saga half Kufa,
perhaps to be identified with the Kraken means sea fog.
And this is how the phenomenon manifests itself in the book,
the mysterious deep sea menace succeeds in multiplying and then melting icebergs, resulting in great blankets of fog.
The other one, Ling Becker, may be identified with the giant whale on one cannot help remembering Tolkien's faster talk alone,
which is hostile, as well as Brendan, the navigator friendly Whale Island.
It's interesting to note that Tennyson's crackdown is dormant.
It will arise only if warmed by the latter fire and come to the surface, only to roar and die.
There's no suggestion that it will attack mankind.
There are any number of sea monsters in literature, and I'm sure they've all been thoroughly studied.
But before I go on, I'll just mention Kipling's sea monster in his story.
A matter of fact here the creature is thrown up by a volcanic eruption and dies under the sorrowing gaze of its mate on the ship.
The narrator and his journalist colleagues watch incredulously.
The story is so fantastic it cannot be sent to the newspapers.
It can be published only if it's recast as fiction, which is what Kipling as narrator does with it.
The other thing Kipling does is to make us feel overwhelmingly sad at the sight of its terrible death.
His story in many inventions has been admired as a precursor of English science fiction.
We're not supposed to feel sorry for the Kraken in Clash of the Titans.
However, you may be familiar with Natalie Haynes, in which she stands up for the classics.
Her programme is much to be recommended. Clash of the Titans is a film she favours introducing her talk on Medusa with enthusiastic reference to it,
in spite of the way it unblinkingly rewrites Greek mythology.
For a start, there was never a titan called Kraken.
Nobody has suggested that Ocean is one of the 12 titans, according to his yacht, was called Kraken.
In the film, Kraken is said to be the last of the Titans.
My point is that Jupiter orders the Kraken to be released says to punish the heroine's mother for blasphemy against the gods.
But here, luckily, Perseus is at hand with the head of the Medusa to turn the monster to stone.
Are the gods with the Greek or Roman releasing the Kraken in Wyndham's novel to punish the presumption of mankind?
Judging by the author's ferocious satire on world politics, Jupiter, propoganda, Mercury and military establishments Mars.
The answer may be yes. It's interesting that not only Mars but also Jupiter are mentioned or invoked by the characters,
and perhaps significantly, Diana, just before the narrator's wife, Phyllis herself, is attacked.
Dr Bowker, whom Phyllis calls her favourite ologist, is almost the only sympathetic scientist or authority figure come to that.
He suggests at one point that the planet Neptune or God of the sea is the most likely source of the invasion.
The name Kraken is never used of the creature or creatures.
The opening scene of the novel introduces us to the narrator and his wife,
an affectionate couple who tease each other and instantly endear themselves to the reader.
At the beginning of phase one, Phyllis says Mars is looking pretty angry tonight, isn't he?
But even before this ominous moment, Phyllis and Nic are looking back and discussing how they're going to write the book.
Phyllis cites an imaginary author whose lines from the Pink Nursery book she'd use as her epigraph.
But mother, please tell me, what can those things be that crawl up still fully out of the sea?
This nursery law sounds just about as suitable for small children as Edward Gore is ugly or struggle, Peter.
Given the terrible things that are going to crawl up out of the sea in the novel, I'm definitely with Phyllis on this one.
But Nick wins the argument. Tennyson's poem, not the nursery book, prefaces phase one as the story begins.
Phyllis is definitely the brains of the outfit, and her vision and visions must be Wyndham's own.
Both husband and wife are highly intelligent and cultured,
so it's not surprising that any number of literary references are scattered through the book, mostly in their conversation.
Nick is much teased because of his name, which is Watson.
We are indirectly reminded that Conan Doyle wrote fantasy novels, including a story about Mary Celeste,
which is several times mentioned amongst other aquatic mysteries such as the Loch Ness Monster.
Given the situation, it's to be expected that these references to figures such as King Canute,
Cassandra and T.S. Eliot, the world ends not with a bang, but a whimper.
Ex Africa, semper e-liquid, Novi is from Pliny the elder, probably based on a Greek saying Jules Verne is here,
and so are Somerset Maugham on life in the tropics and the fictional Hornblower,
as well as Coleridge is sacred river and Kipling's recessional religion gets the briefest look in as somebody is likened to Elijah.
The invaders are pronounced to be devils, and the Kraken is identified with Leviathan.
But Wyndham seems to have his work cut out, describing the antics of the establishment all over the world,
and his sideswipe barely mentions the antics of what he or rather Nick calls the more classically minded citizens.
The science aspect of this book, considered a science fiction,
is about the exploration of deep oceans in search of the menace and hypotheses about its identity.
Different strategies attempted to protect ships, defend the coasts.
Attack the invader. The end happens offstage,
as it were when Phil and Nick learn there's a successful weapon has at last been
developed and deployed so that human life on Earth can begin to rebuild itself.
Much academic ink has been spilt over the question of genre,
and deciding whether this book is science fiction or fantasy is, in my opinion, not important because I read it as fantasy.
Many of the greatest works of science fiction have at least one powerful myth underlying their story.
Windham has invoked a fantastic supporting fabric of literature and legend to
create a classic novel out of what would otherwise be a tale of stark horror.