Event Details

The Future of Human Reproduction Project invites Dr Christie Oliver-Hobley to lead a discussion of John Wyndham's novel The Midwich Cuckoos (1957). Christie will give a short presentation on his work which will be followed by a reading group session focussed on the novel.

Dr Christie Oliver-Hobley is an early career researcher specialising in contemporary literature and literary theory. He has interests in speculative fiction and textual scholarship, with a particular focus on John Wyndham and his contemporaries. Christie’s first monograph, Subjectivity, Literature and the More or Less Human is forthcoming with Routledge, and he is currently working on an edited collection exploring Wyndham’s early SF writings, alongside a proposal for a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship focused on sf and critical psychedelic studies.

n The Midwich Cuckoos, the fictional English town of Midwich is hit by a strange event: all women of childbearing age are impregnated by a mysterious alien force before birthing psychic children. Reading Wyndham’s novel in light of Lee Edelman’s writings on heteronormative temporality, and situating it in its late 1950s British context and the author’s wider oeuvre, this talk will argue that Wyndham satirises the image of the “Child” that “reproductive futurism” invokes. By familiarising the Children, even as it depicts their conception, births and behaviour as aberrant, Wyndham helps us see that this image of the future Child, while remaining a speculative extrapolation, co-opts and curtails—concretely—the cultural imaginaries of our present. In the workshop, we will confront Wyndham’s problematic account of nature as progress and try to chart an ethical course through a text often criticised for its apparent amorality.