Reading List

Authors Like John Wyndham

John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris tried farming, law, commercial art and advertising before he began writing in 1925, and published under five other combinations of his own names before settling on ‘John Wyndham’ in 1951. In the war he was a censor at the Ministry of Information, then a cipher operator in the Royal Corps of Signals, and landed in Normandy a few days after D-Day. The Day of the Triffids (1951) opens with Bill Masen in hospital, eyes bandaged, on the morning after a green meteor shower has blinded everyone who watched it. In The Midwich Cuckoos (1957) a whole village falls unconscious for a day, and months later 31 boys and 30 girls with golden eyes are born. Brian Aldiss dismissed such books as ‘cosy catastrophes’. The ten writers below share Wyndham’s question: what ordinary people do when the world stops working.

By Lisanne Swart · 10 authors · British science fiction · Catastrophe · Updated October 2026

Quick answer

If you love John Wyndham, start with John Christopher, whose The Death of Grass (1956) sends two families across an England falling into anarchy, and Nevil Shute, whose On the Beach (1957) waits in Melbourne for the fallout. For an argument with Wyndham, read Brian Aldiss, who called his novels ‘cosy catastrophes’. Below are seven more, from the Martian invasion of 1898 to a Canadian pandemic novel of 2014.

10 authors like John Wyndham

01
The invasion begins in England

H. G. Wells

British · The Time Machine (1895), The War of the Worlds (1898)

Wells (1866–1946) trained in science before he wrote fiction. In The War of the Worlds Martians land in Surrey and lay waste to southern England, seen through the eyes of one narrator trying to survive and reach his wife.

Wells is the source of the form Wyndham used: an alien threat seen from an English town by one ordinary, observant narrator. Suits readers who want the book behind The Kraken Wakes and Triffids.

— Lisanne
02
The end, politely

Nevil Shute

English, settled in Australia · No Highway (1948), A Town Like Alice (1950), On the Beach (1957)

Nevil Shute Norway (1899–1960) was an aeronautical engineer: chief engineer on the R100 airship and co-founder of Airspeed Ltd in 1931. He moved to Australia in 1950. On the Beach is set in Melbourne as its people wait for fallout from an atomic war to reach them; it was filmed in 1959.

Shute writes catastrophe as Wyndham did, through decent, practical people who keep their manners. Suits readers who liked the calm voice of Wyndham’s narrators.

— Lisanne
03
The same decade, harder

John Christopher

British · The Death of Grass (1956), The White Mountains (1967)

John Christopher was the pen name of Sam Youd (1922–2012), born in Huyton, Lancashire. In The Death of Grass a virus that first hits rice in East Asia spreads to wheat, barley and every other grass, and an engineer, John Custance, leads two families across a collapsing England to his brother’s farm in a Westmorland valley. The White Mountains began his Tripods trilogy for young readers.

Christopher takes Wyndham’s set-up, a small group crossing a failing Britain, and asks how quickly decency goes. Suits readers who found Triffids too gentle.

— Lisanne
04
He named the ‘cosy catastrophe’

Brian Aldiss

English · Non-Stop (1958), Hothouse (1962), Billion Year Spree (1973)

Aldiss (1925–2017) was born in East Dereham, Norfolk, joined the Royal Signals in 1943 and saw action in Burma. Billion Year Spree is his history of science fiction, and his 1969 story “Supertoys Last All Summer Long” became the basis of Steven Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001).

Aldiss argued with Wyndham directly, dismissing The Day of the Triffids as a ‘cosy catastrophe’. Hothouse, set on a far-future Earth ruled by plants, is his much stranger answer to the triffids.

— Lisanne
05
The disaster welcomed

J. G. Ballard

British · The Drowned World (1962), High-Rise (1975), Empire of the Sun (1984)

Ballard (1930–2009) was born in Shanghai and interned there by the Japanese as a boy, the experience behind Empire of the Sun. In The Drowned World, solar radiation has melted the ice caps and London lies under lagoons, and the biologist Robert Kerans finds himself drawn to the new world rather than to restoring the old one.

Ballard complicates Wyndham. He kept the British disaster novel and refused its renewal: his heroes do not want the old world back. Read The Drowned World after The Kraken Wakes.

— Lisanne
06
An intelligence we cannot read

Stanisław Lem

Polish · Solaris (1961), The Cyberiad (1965), His Master’s Voice (1968)

Lem (1921–2006) was born in Lwów, then in Poland and now Lviv in Ukraine, and died in Kraków. Andrei Tarkovsky’s film of Solaris won a Special Jury Prize at Cannes in 1972. The Science Fiction Writers of America gave him honorary membership in 1973 and later rescinded it, which some members read as a rebuke for his criticism of American science fiction.

Lem shares Wyndham’s interest in a mind humans cannot understand, from the deep-sea invaders of The Kraken Wakes to the Midwich children. Suits readers who want the idea at its most philosophical.

— Lisanne
07
Who counts as human

Octavia E. Butler

American · Kindred (1979), Dawn (1987), Parable of the Sower (1993)

Butler (1947–2006) was born in Pasadena, California, and in 1995 became the first science fiction writer to receive a MacArthur Fellowship. Parable of the Sower is set in a collapsing California of the 2020s, where Lauren Olamina founds a new belief system, Earthseed; in Dawn, survivors of a nuclear war are rescued by aliens who require genetic merging with humans.

The Chrysalids follows telepathic children escaping a fundamentalist community that kills or banishes anyone with a mutation; Butler’s novels ask the same question, who is allowed to count as human, from the side of the outcast.

— Lisanne
08
The theocracy from inside

Margaret Atwood

Canadian · The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), Oryx and Crake (2003)

Atwood was born in Ottawa in 1939 and has won the Booker Prize twice, for The Blind Assassin (2000) and The Testaments (2019). The Handmaid’s Tale is narrated by a woman in Gilead, a theocracy that controls women’s fertility; Oryx and Crake follows a survivor of a bioengineered plague.

Atwood takes the religious state of The Chrysalids and the controlled births of The Midwich Cuckoos and tells them from inside a woman’s life. Suits readers who want Wyndham’s ideas with women at the centre.

— Lisanne

Every book by Margaret Atwood →

09
The Midwich children, turned round

Kazuo Ishiguro

British, born in Nagasaki · The Remains of the Day (1989), Never Let Me Go (2005), Klara and the Sun (2021)

Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki in 1954, moved to England as a small child and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017. Never Let Me Go follows pupils of Hailsham, an English boarding school, who slowly learn what they were raised for.

Wyndham asks what the village should do about its strange children; Ishiguro tells the story from inside the children, with the adults running the system. Suits readers who want Wyndham’s quiet English tone with more grief.

— Lisanne

Every book by Kazuo Ishiguro →

10
What survives

Emily St. John Mandel

Canadian · Station Eleven (2014), The Glass Hotel (2020), Sea of Tranquility (2022)

Mandel was born in Merville, British Columbia, in 1979. Station Eleven, set after a virus devastates the world, follows a travelling company of Shakespearean actors around the Great Lakes; it was a National Book Award finalist, won the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 2015 and became an HBO Max series in 2021.

Mandel continues Wyndham’s question of what survives after collapse and answers it with theatre and music. Suits readers who want a recent catastrophe with Wyndham’s hope intact.

— Lisanne

Where to start if you loved John Wyndham

If you loved The Day of the Triffids, read John Christopher.

The Death of Grass (1956): famine, anarchy and a long walk north.

If you loved The Chrysalids, read Octavia E. Butler.

Parable of the Sower (1993): a young woman and a new faith in a collapsing California.

If you loved The Midwich Cuckoos, read Kazuo Ishiguro.

Never Let Me Go (2005): children raised apart, seen from the inside.

If you want an argument with Wyndham, read J. G. Ballard.

The Drowned World (1962): a flooded London its hero does not want to save.

If you want more John Wyndham, go back to the start.

Read The Day of the Triffids (1951), then The Kraken Wakes (1953), The Chrysalids (1955), The Midwich Cuckoos (1957) and Chocky (1968).

Frequently asked questions about authors like John Wyndham

Who writes like John Wyndham?

John Christopher and Nevil Shute from his own decade; Brian Aldiss and J. G. Ballard, who argued with him; Margaret Atwood, Kazuo Ishiguro and Emily St. John Mandel among later writers.

What should I read after The Day of the Triffids?

John Christopher’s The Death of Grass (1956), then Wyndham’s own The Kraken Wakes (1953).

Which John Wyndham book should I read first?

The Day of the Triffids (1951), his first novel as John Wyndham; then The Chrysalids (1955) or The Midwich Cuckoos (1957).

What is a cosy catastrophe?

A label Brian Aldiss used to dismiss some of Wyndham’s novels, especially The Day of the Triffids. Later critics have disputed it.

Does John Wyndham have a new book?

No. He died in 1969. Logical Fantasy: The Many Worlds of John Wyndham (2024) collects 18 of his stories, five of them previously uncollected.

Has The Midwich Cuckoos been filmed?

Yes: as Village of the Damned in 1960 and 1995, and as a television series in 2022.

Sources

List last reviewed 31 October 2026.

Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021. Every comparison here is a judgement about method and subject, not an algorithmic match. See more on her personal bookshelf.

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