Consider her ways & others

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John Wyndham: Consider her ways & others (1983, Chivers)

277 pages

English language

Published Oct. 6, 1983 by Chivers.

ISBN:
978-0-85119-225-3
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4 stars (1 review)

Consider Her Ways Jane Waterleigh has no memory of her past wakes up and discovers that she is a mother of some description, in a bloated body that is not her own.

Odd is a tale of how an ordinary man profited from an extraordinary time paradox when he stops to help a man seemingly lost and confused, and then learns the reasons why.

Stitch in Time concerns an elderly lady reflecting on a lost love and, thanks to her sons' experiments with time, finally discovering the reason why her lover abandoned her so many years ago.

Oh Where, Now, is Peggy MacRafferty? is a social satire on Hollywood glamour in which a bright, individual young Irish woman becomes part of the celebrity circuit, and loses all that makes her special in the process of becoming a star.

Random Quest combines romance and parallel universes.

A Long Spoon is the …

4 editions

The main story is Wyndham at his best, and an early examination of gender

4 stars

"Consider Her Ways", the longest and by far the best story in this collection, is unforgettable. Wyndham used time travel and its paradoxes repeatedly in his short fiction, and here it's a device to explore a future without men, an imagined society which comes across as a nightmarish dystopia to the the visitor from our time. His depiction of female characters is usually in a different league to his male contemporaries. Here he goes further and writes in the first person. I'm sure he would have consulted his partner Grace in his research, especially for this tale. She was his secret weapon.

Modern readers might recoil at the protagonist's horror to see an all-female future, and consider as redundant her defence of our sex and gender conventions. It would be an interesting exercise to write the same story from the point of view of the future historian who gives an …