Review of “The Female of the Species” (1937/1953)
John Wyndham (writer).
Read in 2026.
Read, as a reprint of “The Female of the Species” from 1953, in The Flying Sorcerers, with an acknowledgement of the original 1937 version—by the same author under a pseudonym—having had a different plot.
A mad scientist, able to create life of a sort, makes the mistake of picking sexual reproduction and then miscalibrates the relevant hormones.
There are two references to The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) in this story, and one to a mystical “life force”. Despite the mysticism and the obvious implausibility of a single researcher leaping so far ahead, I appreciate both the loving emulation of Wells and the harder-edged, Lovecraftian unsentimentality that Wyndham brings to the design of Una. His description of the sound of her voice, as a “sepulchral public-address system”, is worthy of The Shadow out of Time (1936).