Wyndham sticks with his theme of a small English town by telling a very calm story about middle class citizens dealing with supernatural events. The cuckoo chick then pushes all the other eggs out of the nest like a parasite.

Let’s take a look at The Midwich Cuckoos (1957), which has quite an interesting premise, wouldn’t you agree?Ĭuckoo of course refers to the cuckoo bird, famous for laying its eggs in the nests of other birds. John Wyndham was a reasonably successful British science fiction writer in the 50s and has a handful of SF novels on his name that are considered classics and are still in print today: The Day of the Triffids (1951) in which everyone gets blinded and attacked by sunflowers, The Chrysalids (1955) in which mutant children fight for freedom in a post-apocalyptic world, and this one. They all give birth to identical boys and girls with blond hair and golden eyes. Until a mysterious silver object falls from the sky, and afterwards, all the women in the town are discovered to be pregnant. The clutch that have been fathered by Aliens promise to make the human race look as dated as the dinosaur.In the quiet, unremarkable town of Midwich, all is calm. As they start to grow at enormous speed, it becomes clear that they all have telepathic abilities. Nine months pass and the pregnancies run to their natural term, producing 61 'Children' – all with blonde hair, pale skin and golden eyes. It's some weeks before the realisation grows that all the women in the village of child-bearing age are mysteriously impregnated. In that time, aerial reconnaissance and photographs reveal not only that the affected area is a hemisphere, but also that, at the centre of it, a strange shape can be seen.īut as suddenly as the village was affected, everything returns – apparently – to normal. The rather sleepy village of Midwich finds itself becoming even sleepier when one night in September all those in it – and nearby, within a precise circular boundary – fall suddenly into a state of unconciousness that lasts for over 24 hours. The mysterious powers of the alien children start to become destructive.Ĭuckoos lay eggs in other birds' nests. There are moral and security issues when all the women of child-bearing age in the village of Midwich simultaneously become pregnant by an alien force. The mystery deepens when all the residents of the rural village of Midwich suddenly fall into a state of unconsciousness.Ĭolonel Bernard Westcott. Music by Roger Limb of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop BBC World Service, first broadcast betwen 9 and 23 December 1982

The cuckoo of midwich