Plan For Chaos

John Wyndham’s Plan for Chaos is a lost-and-later-found Wyndham oddity in which Nazis, clones, conspiracy, post-war unease, strange doubles and science-fiction melodrama all gather in the same room and begin behaving as if subtlety had been rationed. Written before Wyndham became the master of polite catastrophe with The Day of the Triffids and The Midwich Cuckoos, it has the energy of an author trying several alarming levers at once and discovering that, yes, the machine does make a noise.

The plot begins with Johnny Farthing, a photographer who notices that several women in different places appear to look exactly like his sister. This is not, in most families, an encouraging development. Before long he is pulled into a web of doubles, secret organisations, suspicious deaths, hidden science and the lingering shadow of Nazi ambition, because the twentieth century, having misbehaved globally, apparently still had some paperwork left over.

This is Wyndham in thriller mode, with science fiction leaking through the floorboards. There are secret plans, sinister genetics, underground schemes, authoritarian fantasies and the old pulp pleasure of discovering that the odd little detail in chapter one may in fact be part of a world-endangering plot. It is less tea-and-triffids apocalypse than conspiracy adventure with biological unpleasantness, but the familiar Wyndham anxiety is already there: humanity improving its tools without improving its judgement.

The irony of the title is that chaos is rarely improved by planning, yet human beings persist. Give a fanatic a laboratory, a doctrine and a filing system, and sooner or later someone will call it order while everyone else reaches for the exits. Plan for Chaos belongs to that post-war moment when the defeat of Nazism did not entirely end the fear of what modern science, bureaucracy and ideology might do if locked together overnight.

Because it was unpublished in Wyndham’s lifetime, the book also has the charm of a recovered specimen: not the polished canonical Wyndham everyone was assigned later, but a stranger, rougher, more feverish cousin. It shows the writer before he fully settled into his most famous voice, rummaging through invasion fears, identity, heredity, political nightmare and adventure mechanics with admirable lack of calm. One can almost hear the later Wyndham forming, adjusting his tie while the earlier one blows something up in the next room.

For readers of John Wyndham, vintage British science fiction, lost novels, Nazi-conspiracy thrillers, cloning stories, and books where the future arrives in a trench coat carrying bad documents, this is a fascinating shelf-piece. It may not be the first Wyndham to read, but it is absolutely the sort of Wyndham to own if you enjoy seeing the workshop as well as the showroom.

Good copy, as sold by Crappy Old Books. A solid Penguin paperback of a rediscovered Wyndham curiosity, ready for anyone whose science fiction shelf has room for doubles, plots, genetic meddling and the deeply human belief that chaos will behave if only given a proper plan.

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