[The] ideas for The Day of the Triffids and the many works that followed were adapted from many sources, since [John Wyndham] was a regular reader of science fiction and thoroughly familiar with its various gambits. His rhetoric, on the other hand, appears to have been persuasively influenced by only one major writer, H. G. Wells. Great ingenuity at approaching an old idea from a fresh slant was characteristically his own contribution. (pp. 128-29)

[Wyndham] had written a dozen or more stories with a time travel theme. It seemed to be his private form of fun and relaxation, and the best of these stories, such as Pawley's Peepholes …, where prying intangible tourist buses from the future are sent scuttling back where they belong by the use of vulgarity, appeared to have nothing else in mind but light entertainment.

Not so with the time travel story, Consider Her Ways…. Through the use of drugs, a woman doctor of our time turns up in the future as an obese "mother" in a world without men, where selected females produce children like the queen bees. The high point of the story is the dialogue on whether the world is better off with or without men, which introduces a highly original and disturbing point of view (at least, to a man) on the subject.

Because of the international success of Day of the Triffids, the feeling was prevalent that [Wyndham] had made his mark with that novel and everything that followed was to be anticlimactic. In fact, it was felt that whatever opening of doors there was to be in the future could only be done by using the phrase, "by the author of…."

That was when [Wyndham] set off another time-bomb…. The Midwich Cuckoos, had been shown in manuscript to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and purchased for what would eventually appear as the motion picture Village of the Damned (1960).

A flying saucer lands on the green of the British town of Midwich and twenty-four hours are blotted from the memories of everyone in the community. (pp. 129-30)

Wyndham, for this story, reworked the plot of The Chrysalids, directing the sympathy of the reader away from the children and toward humanity. He accomplished this by making the method of their conception illegitimate and nonhuman, and their actions so cold-bloodedly extreme as to divorce them from reader sympathy. The devices of the amoral superior child and the desirability of the community mind both seem to have been adapted from Olaf Stapledon. (pp. 130-31)

The realization that he was becoming typed as a horror writer may well have caused [Wyndham] to write four connected interplanetary novelettes…. [They] deal with the contributions of four generations of the Troon family in the building of a space station and in the first explorations of the Moon, Mars, and Venus. Atomic war comes, new powers emerge, but progress continues…. [The] book was represented as a collaboration of John Wyndham and Lucas Parkes. The reason for the collaboration was to head off John Wyndham's propensity for producing such phenomena as Triffids, Krakens, or golden-eyed children, "and keeping him to the more practical problems of tomorrow." Since "Lucas Parkes" uses but two of Harris' generous supply of middle names, this may well be one of the few official collaborations of an author with himself.

The next fictional problem Harris occupied himself with was that of how to go about informing the public of a means of doubling or even tripling the life span, without creating a world catastrophe. The book was published … as Trouble With Lichen in 1960. (p. 131)

Perhaps the most unexpected turn of John Wyndham's success, was that the moving picture approach to his novels, coupled with the reportorial believability of his writing approach, created a special type of terror—one based solely on a scientific buildup—that proved far more effective and memorable than any previous horror stories he had attempted utilizing stock fright devices. (p. 132)