Trouble with Lichen by John Wyndham (1962) [video] | Hacker News Reader

Trouble with Lichen by John Wyndham (1962) [video]

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20 pointsjohntfella13 comments

This is one of my favourite SciFi books; I like Wyndham's style, it's rather twee, very 1950s rural England, reminds me of the early map of a game of Transport Tycoon game. And not much action, more of a slow burn of ideas. Trouble with Lichen is about longevity treatments, touches on class warfare and women's lib.

Another of his that I really like is The Outward Urge (with Lucas Parkes) on the idea of yearning for space travel as a heritable thing passed down several generations of a family, over an implied world war and shifting of nation powers.

Another good more popular one is The Midwich Cuckoos (filmed as The Village of the Damned); all the women in the village became pregnant overnight, what did it mean and what to do about it? (Spoiler below). "Midwich was not the only - or even the first - village to have a dayout".

One I liked less, Chocky, an alien "invasion" by telepathy which turned into a bland rushed lecture on wasting fossil fuels and had no interesting conclusion.

(spoiler: aliens)

I'm a big fan of the FreakAngels webcomic by Warren Ellis and Paul Duffield.

From wikipedia

> The story grew out of Ellis' question as to what would have happened if the Midwich Cuckoos had survived and grown to "disaffected and confused twenty-one-year-olds." The story builds on the legacy of John Wyndham's style of disaster fiction

The www.freakangels.com website appears to be down, unfortunately which might have something to do with Warren Ellis' more recent disgrace (https://www.somanyofus.com/) but it used to have the whole story available for free.

There is a recent video adaptation available too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ppb1OnVEF7A

Dagnammit - I thought it was going to be a video version, but it's just audio.

As a John Wyndham fan, I reckon it's about time there was a film version of The Kraken Wakes.

it would be pretty cool to see netflix or amazon pick up the various forgotten stories of Wyndham, hell even some HP Lovecraft. Lately I've been buying up vintage books and vinyls to give to nephew as he enters the age of discovery so to speak. what I linked I just thought was too neat not to share. hope others enjoy it as much as I did.

The Chrysalids would be another choice of mine to be filmed - a post-apocalyptic coming of age drama.

I'm a big Lovecraft fan and have tried to watch as many of the video versions as possible, but most of the adaptations turn out to be fairly rubbish. Color Out of Space was good fun though. I think the best Lovecraftian films are not directly related and I'd recommend AM1200 as an excellent short that gives a really good Lovecraftian feel.

There's a game based on The Kraken Wakes, released early 2023.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2100380/The_Kraken_Wakes/

Shame it doesn't look to have SteamDeck support or hasn't been tested for that.

I recently watched Chocky on youtube. I kind of forgot that 80s children's TV in the UK had no problems being disturbing.

Mind you, we also had Jim'll Fix It so a bit of horror wasn't the worst.

There was a *phenomenal* series called How To Be Cool in the mid-80s, written by Philip Pullman, about a rather disturbing group called The National Cool Board (a play on words from The National Coal Board), profoundly weird shit.

Unfortunately it had Gary Glitter in it playing a fairly major character so unless someone dumps a ropey old VHS of it onto Youtube it's never going to be seen outside of Granada Television's deepest murkiest vaults.

There's a couple of follow on series, Chocky's Children and Chocky's Challenge.

Couldn't agree more - make the central characters TV reporters instead of radio, tweak it a bit, and bob's your uncle a parable about global warming.

Though I'd love to see it done as a faithful alternate history/retro-futurism thing too.

You own a bunch of high-def video cameras already.

Go make it.

I always find the special effects are better on the audio-only versions.

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