John Wyndham & Lucas Parkes The Outward Urge (1961)
If the name of Lucas Parkes sounds familiar, it's because it's one of the pseudonyms under which Wyndham occasionally wrote, and The Outward Urge was published as a collaboration with himself so as to distinguish it from Triffids and the others, it being quite different in tone. Without bothering to check the dates, I'd say it's more or less Wyndham doing an Arthur C. Clarke, or if that doesn't work, then very much foreshadowing Stephen Baxter's vaguely dynastic tales of realistic space exploration. The Outward Urge begins with the slightly annoyingly named Ticker Troon helping to build a space station in Earth orbit, then sequentially visits the moon, Mars and Venus through successive generations, finally concluding in the general vicinity of the asteroid belt with one of Troon's descendants.
Technically, it's hard science-fiction, as we used to call it back when I were a lad. Wyndham's environmental and technological predictions are based on what was understood to be possible at the time of writing, so rockets travel at rocket speed, and if the Venusian landscape upon which George Troon sets up his first dome seems implausibly habitable, it's nevertheless come a long way, conceptually speaking, since C.S. Lewis wrote Perelandra. As a novel leaning heavily on the issue of how to survive on other planets, The Outward Urge is a little dry by Wyndham's usual standards, although is thankfully free of the creaking slapstick seen in a couple of his lesser novels; but is approximately as readable and compelling as you would expect of the author of Triffids. Although it's possibly worth noting Wyndham having predicted Reagan's star wars initiative, novels of this kind often tend to reveal more about when they were written, and this is particularly true of The Outward Urge, dominated as it is, by cold war politics. So it's a mostly decent read, and particularly so in the case of the Martian episode, but probably not essential.
If the name of Lucas Parkes sounds familiar, it's because it's one of the pseudonyms under which Wyndham occasionally wrote, and The Outward Urge was published as a collaboration with himself so as to distinguish it from Triffids and the others, it being quite different in tone. Without bothering to check the dates, I'd say it's more or less Wyndham doing an Arthur C. Clarke, or if that doesn't work, then very much foreshadowing Stephen Baxter's vaguely dynastic tales of realistic space exploration. The Outward Urge begins with the slightly annoyingly named Ticker Troon helping to build a space station in Earth orbit, then sequentially visits the moon, Mars and Venus through successive generations, finally concluding in the general vicinity of the asteroid belt with one of Troon's descendants.
Technically, it's hard science-fiction, as we used to call it back when I were a lad. Wyndham's environmental and technological predictions are based on what was understood to be possible at the time of writing, so rockets travel at rocket speed, and if the Venusian landscape upon which George Troon sets up his first dome seems implausibly habitable, it's nevertheless come a long way, conceptually speaking, since C.S. Lewis wrote Perelandra. As a novel leaning heavily on the issue of how to survive on other planets, The Outward Urge is a little dry by Wyndham's usual standards, although is thankfully free of the creaking slapstick seen in a couple of his lesser novels; but is approximately as readable and compelling as you would expect of the author of Triffids. Although it's possibly worth noting Wyndham having predicted Reagan's star wars initiative, novels of this kind often tend to reveal more about when they were written, and this is particularly true of The Outward Urge, dominated as it is, by cold war politics. So it's a mostly decent read, and particularly so in the case of the Martian episode, but probably not essential.
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