Kraken Wakes - MXHDR BookWyrm

256 pages

English language

Published Feb. 12, 2022 by Random House Publishing Group, Modern Library.

ISBN:: 978-0-593-45010-9

(2 reviews)

The Kraken Wakes is an apocalyptic science fiction novel by John Wyndham, originally published by Michael Joseph in the United Kingdom in 1953, and first published in the United States in the same year by Ballantine Books under the title Out of the Deeps as a mass market paperback. The title is a reference to Alfred Tennyson's sonnet The Kraken.

13 editions

Ian Brown reviewed Kraken Wakes by John Wyndham

C'est toujours l'écroulement.

5 stars

Content warning Mild spoiler alert. Read the book first. It is a good one.

A fantastic (and perhaps prescient) account of the end of the world. Aliens or climate change, the ultimate cause of our doom will be the limits on our ability as a species to rise above the limits of our humanity. As with any good apocalypse story some aspects of humanity are quickly disposed of, just not the ones needed to carry the day.

AvonVilla@ramblingreaders.org reviewed The Kraken Wakes by John Wyndham

An Alien Invasion Like No Other

4 stars

Alien invaders covet our ocean deeps and start a war with humans to submerge the whole planet. Their weird incursions to the surface are terrifying and genuinely alien. The rising sea levels depicted in the story are similar to today's cli-fi, but were written decades before it became a thing.

This was Wyndham's first book after "The Day of the Triffids", and while it falls short of that masterpiece, it retains some of its vivid inventiveness. The husband and wife who operate as professional equals reflects Wyndham's own relationship, typical of Wyndham's progressive views, so contrary to a lot of the sexist tripe which pervaded the genre in those days.