The great joy of John Wyndham’s work is his continuing interest for contemporary readers. This I think is due to the strength of his imaginative ideas; his anchoring of his stories in the lives of ordinary people going about their working lives and his ability to suggest rather than explain. He lets the reader’s own knowledge and imagination complete the picture. Plus Wyndham is also quite good at strong female roles. There are some time travel tales, stories about the painfulness of adjusting to life in a far off place, when someone is away so long it might not be worthwhile returning home, intergalactic visitors and the perils of giving birth in space. Dumb Martain - a man buys a companion for his work on Jupiters moon. Just goes to show that people do not forget being mistreated and with a bit of patience we can get what we want in the end. It becomes more existential as we learn how long Bert has been doing this and why. Is Bert still an Earthman, and if not, what is he - what can he be? This story about parallel universes has an original ending that made me question the veracity of everything before it.

A strong anti-racist, anti-slavery, pro-education, feminist story, with a battle of wits towards the end that makes it more fun than my preachy-sounding description.

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If you can look into the seeds of time, and say which grain will grow and which will not, speak then unto me.”

Survival is the closest these stories get to pure horror. It has all of the classic themes of man's inhumanity to man and monster within that is released when one's existence is threatened. It is the second story that features Mars but here Mars is an unattainable goal. Terry lost his legs in an explosion and then something of his mind from constant use of strong painkillers. One day he wakes to find himself, with legs, in a futuristic place that is not as utopian as it first seems. Near-immortality has a price, and two people attempt to outwit each other to survive at all. Survival” is a brutal story that I was not expecting. Precision machined deconstruction of humanity. “Dumb Martian” is also a brutal little piece of revenge, and much like “Survival” gives us another woman who will not be cowed. “Wild Flower” is poetic and melancholy. Survival": a young couple along with other passengers on their way to Mars find themselves in a horrific situation after something goes wrong with the ship.A twee story, unlike the others. Felicity Fray is a teacher who loves nature in a way that reminds me of Wodehouse’s Madeleine Bassett who thinks “the stars are God's daisy-chain”, but without the charm or clever plots. If you could travel to the recent past to see your forebears, what would you expect or want to gain by it? Survival - a meek woman accompanies her husband into space. Everyone underestimates her, considering her to be too soft and unable to survive, but she 'showed them' - just goes to show how you cannot judge by outer appearances, people can find inner determination when they have no choice - loved the ending. Wild Flower – a strange little story foreshadowing the whole nature/technology debate that is still going on today. Not the most successful of the stories in terms of entertainment but still interesting.

Meteor - a ship containing 1000 survivors from an apocalypse land on an unknown planet. This was one of my favourites. The battle for survival from a different perspective; reminded me a bit of the 1960s tv show Land of The Giants.

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Meteor – a threatened species sends explorers out into space to find a new home, and the planet they find is Earth. Comedy and tragedy all rolled into one – a beautifully imaginative story, this one. Pillar to Post: Other fave - a physically disabled war veteran has his consciousness transferred via body swap to a future society as part of an experiment by said future scientist, then decides he doesn't want to leave. Funny and sad in equal measure. A charming pastoral tale where Bert travels the Martian canals on an improvised boat, living a tinker's life, befriending some of the “utterly unmechanical” Martian families he regularly visits, and noting the scenery and plants.

Dumb Martian" On a remote asteroid, an abusive misogynist gets his comeuppance from his supposedly idiotic Martian wife. Meteor plays on the notions of perception and assumption as it follows the disasterous attempt of a slow ship to colonize a far away world.Survival – when a systems failure leaves a spacecraft drifting in space, the passengers and crew must find a way to eke out their food supplies till help arrives. There’s only one woman aboard and she is desperate to find a way to ensure her unborn child survives. Gruesome, horrific and yet kinda fun too… If the woman in this story weren't a Martian (and I think she was a human but of a multi-generation Martian lineage), the story would just be a cautionary tale against domestic abuse. There are serious, satirical, and outright comic examples of travelling to another place or time, sometimes with the intention of settling there. Wyndham is clearly against the historical human pattern of dominating and enslaving or obliterating those already there and was perhaps a multiculturalist before the word was coined: