John Wyndham Covers part 4: The Outward Urge and Plan for Chaos

The seventh of the Wyndham books I did was Outward Urge. Final cover pictured above. The book was… maybe the least enjoyable to read. Kinda boring. It’s comprised of a set of three stories, one for each member of three successive generations in a family line, each of whom is involved in some endeavor to get deeper into space and further from Earth. The first is involved in the building of a space station, the second is stationed on the moon, the third on Mars. The first story, about the progenitor helping build the first space station, which comes under a mysterious attack, was easily the most compelling and dramatic – a well-told, if standard late-20th century astronaut drama. And maybe for that reason it’s the one that ended up featuring in two of the three sketches (the second of which was selected as the final, above). There was some other vaguely interesting future-casting about geopolitics and space travel in the future, specifically the rise of Brazil as a superpower and the continued existence of the Soviet Union.

I actually liked the third sketch a lot (directly above). I’d done six Wyndham covers by this point and it was nice to do a very different kind of composition and break up the frame a bit. I might have been sorry not to take this one to finals if I hadn’t stumbled on some NASA photographs of nebulae while looking for reference. In the end it seems pretty clear that the second sketch was the one.

The only real difference from sketch to final is that the figure gets enlarged slightly. I also tried playing with the text placement a bit in some of the sketches, but in the end saw sense that consistency is a virtue.

Oh, and the ‘co-author’, “Lucas Parkes” is just another pseudonymn of Wyndham’s. His full name is John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris. Quite a mouthful. He used various combinations in his first few years as an author in pulp magazines, which is where Outward Urge was first published.

In contrast the eighth book, Plan For Chaos was a much more compelling read. It was written around 1950, around the same time as Day of the Triffids, but was never published in Wyndham’s lifetime, only coming out in 2009, forty years after his death. That fact makes sense in a way — It’s a bit of a mess. But to my taste it’s a mess in interesting ways. Whereas most of his later/post-war books are fairly tidy thematically, Plan for Chaos sprawls a bit and ends up being more genuinely weird than any of his other works. Which I liked.

The book starts out as a pretty straightforward mystery novel, in which the protagonist, a news photographer, stumbles upon a series of mysterious deaths of apparently identical women – who also happen to look exactly like his (still living) girlfriend. The idea of ‘clones’ was apparently not a thing yet at the time of writing, and so the process ends up eventually getting described as a kind of bio-engineered twinning, which is… novel. Then his girlfriend vanishes, and he sort of accidentally smuggles himself aboard a flying saucer. Which is designed to melt itself to avoid detection. Then there are more clones, a colony of fugitive Nazis bent on rebuilding the third reich, some complicated family dynamics… etc. Fun and weird.

The final is above. Here are the sketches:

Those, are the ones I submitted to the art director. I had started on a fourth one, which I still think had potential but wasn’t moving in quite the right direction. And I had three others I was happy with, so I didn’t pursue the last one. But there’s something about it that sticks in my head, maybe just the idea of the retro-futurist computer panel/console. Some other time, perhaps.

Anyway, the choice was probably obvious. I definitely knew which one I wanted to work on for the final, and happily the AD and editorial team felt the same way. I flattened the flying saucer for them and that was about it. This might be my favorite of all of the covers, with the possible exception of Day of the Triffids. One element I was happy to be able to return to was the ovoid/eye shape in the upper third of the page… which I had originally imagined as one of the design throughlines for the series. Other artists versions of Outward Urge are below. There aren’t many of interest for Plan for Chaos.

At the time I finished these there had been two more covers to do, but one of them, The Secret People, was eventually dropped. The last book, Foul Play Suspected will get posted soon.