The Outward Urge - John Wyndham

***** An interesting alternative present and future

In 1959, when this book was published for the first time, we had yet to go to the Moon (it would happen ten years later, a few months after the author’s death) and the conquest of space was seen as a normal extension of the so-called Cold War. This far from optimistic scenario is the background to the story of a family of astronauts unravelling for two hundred years.

Wyndham’s pessimism, which I had already seen in his post-apocalyptic novel “The Day of the Triffids”, contrasts with the optimism of many other authors of the now-defined classical science fiction who imagined human beings travelling in space a few decades later; if they were still alive, they would be disappointed to learn that we are still struggling to go to Mars.

On the contrary, in “The Outward Urge” the conquest of space proceeds slowly, much more than in reality, and is closely linked to events of a warlike nature. With leaps of fifty years, the author tells us about four space adventures (a fifth was added in the second edition) of men belonging to the Troon family (English, as the author), plus the one of an aviator during the WWII, who was the grandfather of the first of these astronauts. Through their stories we are shown a grey future that for us is, fortunately, an alternative one, in which astronautics is the tool of a destructive war that leads to upsetting the political balance of our planet. Every story brings with it a gloomy atmosphere and is resolved in a depressing ending, except for the last one, about Venus (the Asteroids story wasn’t included in the edition I read), which ends with a positive note.

The speculative exercise of Wyndham seems almost a warning to the men of his time. It is as if the author had sublimated his worst fears within this novel in an attempt to find, at the end of the tunnel, a light of hope. To be able to appreciate it today, especially in the light of current scientific knowledge that highlights the ingenuity of the science narrated in this novel, we must try to put ourselves in the shoes of the author, who a little more than a decade after the beginning of the Cold War fears for the future of the world and try to imagine what would happen if its worst fears became true.

Reading this novel in a sense made me feel good, because the assumptions on which it is based no longer exist and its dramatic development nowadays seems absurd, but at the same time it has led me to reflect on how the perception of the world and the future can change dramatically over the decades.

The Outward Urge on Amazon.