I do not recommend this book. However, there are some excerpts from it that I wish to preserve.






My grandfather, in the aspect he wore when presented to me by my father, appeared to have been a man of somewhat tediously unrelieved virtue. It was only later that I pieced together a portrait that was more credible, if less creditable.








I saw my father pause on the step and survey the group of horsemen, then he, too, noticed the man in the middle of them. For a moment he stood staring, just as I had done - then all his colour drained away, and his face went blotchy grey.

I looked quickly at the other man. He was sitting absolutely rigid on his horse. The expression on his face made something clutch suddenly in my chest. I had never seen hatred naked before, the lines cut deep, the eyes glittering, the teeth suddenly looking like a savage animal's. It struck me with a slap, a horrid revelation of something hitherto unknown, and hideous; it stamped itself on my mind so that I never forgot it....








It was the sort of uninformative answer my father would have given. I was disappointed to have it from Uncle Axel, and told him so. He grinned.

'All right, Davie boy, that's fair enough. So long as you'll not chatter, I'll tell you something about it.'

'You mean it's secret?' I asked, puzzled.

'Not quite that,' he said. 'But when people are used to believing a thing is such-and-such a way, and the preachers want them to believe that that's the way it is; it's trouble you get, not thanks, for upsetting their ideas.'








Sometimes when the people are friendly you can't understand a thing they're trying to say and they can't understand you, but more often if you listen a bit you'll find out that a lot of their words are like our own but pronounced differently. And you find out some strange, disturbing things. They all have pretty much the same legends of the Old People as we have - how they could fly, how they used to build cities that floated on the sea, how any one of them could speak to any other, even hundreds of miles away, and so on. But what's more worrying is that most of them - whether they have seven fingers, or four arms, or hair all over, or six breasts, or whatever it is that's wrong with them - think that their type is the true pattern of the Old People, and anything different is a Deviation.

That seems silly at first, but when you find more and more kinds just as convinced of it as we are ourselves - well, you begin to wonder a bit. You start asking yourself: well, what real evidence have we got about the true image? You find that the Bible doesn't say anything to contradict the people of that time being like us, but on the other hand it doesn't give any definition of Man, either. No, the definition comes from Nicholson's Repentances - and he admits that he was writing some generations after Tribulation came, so you find yourself wondering whether he knew he was in the true image, or whether he only thought he was....








It was odd, I felt, how many people seemed to have positive, if conflicting, information upon God's views.








'Sometime there will come a day when we ourselves shall have to give place to a new thing. Very certainly we shall struggle against the inevitable just as these remnants of the Old People do. We shall try with all our strength to grind it back into the earth from which it is emerging, for treachery to one's own species must always seem a crime. We shall force it to prove itself, and when it does, we shall go; as, by the same process, these are going.'















I have a paper copy of The Chrysalids by John Wyndham in my possession.

Some details from the first few pages:
- First published by Michael Joseph 1955
- Published in Penguin Books 1958

I transcribed the excerpts above manually, using a weight on top of the book to keep the pages flat.