Argosy, September 1955 — page 112: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

‘ . i.e We os \ . IIo — CHRYSALIDS © Here is neither moon magic nor Martian horror. Discarding ray gun and spaceship, Argosy offers a new sf story with all the originality and compelling power one would expect of the author of those enthralling novels, ‘‘ The Day of the Triffids,’’ and ‘* The Kraken Wakes.”’ ‘“ We are no longer so interested in this or that scientific marvel,’’ says John Wyndham. ‘* We want to know what VEN when I was a small child I would sometimes see a place : like this. vl The picture of a city would come into my mind: there would i be streets lined by buildings that were quite unlike anything I had ever really seen; there were machines, utterly strange to me, : running along those streets; there were even machines flying in 2 the sky above it. Sometimes I would see it by day; sometimes : by night, as an unbelievable carnival of lights .. . When I was still young enough not to know any better I asked my elder sister where this place could be. She shook her head, and said there was no such place. Perhaps, she suggested, I might somehow have been dreaming about the world that the Old People é had known; the world as it had been before God sent Tribulation. | But after that, she warned me very seriously not to mention it to anyone else: other people did not have such pictures in their heads, so it would be unwise to speak of them. That was good advice, and it was lucky for me that I heeded it. Everybody where I come from has a swift eye for differences; and I was already under a slight cloud for being left-handed .. . But now that I am here, now that I can be myself among people of my own kind, and do not need to be for ever on my guard, I feel it a duty to put on record some account of what life can be like for people of our sort in other parts of the world, and I think the best way I can do it is to tell my own story. It is the time round about the day when my young sister Petra was born that is marked for me in half a dozen ways. Although I would be about eleven and a half then it was rather as if there had been no sharp marks in all that time. I had just been there and growing slowly and not noticing the world about me much commicloooks.Cconn