Talk:The Chrysalids

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Contents

[edit] Attempted rewrite

After reading the novel again recently and taking into account your various comments I've extensively edited parts of the article. I agree that the one paperback cover is an illustration of the attack of a Fringes beast on Petra's pony and that at any case it would not belong in literary criticism. Haven't removed that yet. I agree that the nuclear nature of the Tribulation should be worked in early but haven't yet discovered a good way to include it. Does anybody agree that the ISBN number and US title can be safely relegated to the info box and removed from the initial description? I would also like to get rid of "The story" from the initial two paragraphs. -- Rydra Wong 05:38, 1 December 2006 (UTC)

The Chrysalids is the proper name, not Rebirth. Rebirth was the US title if I'm not wrong. If there are no objections in a week Ill change the title to Chrysalids. Mandel 11:58, Jul 24, 2004 (UTC)

what are the differences between the way joseph and axel use their minds ? what are some similarities / differences ? (using transitions between ideas)

Format:

topic sentence - point/specific example - proof - comment - explanation


transition - point/specific example - proof - comment/explanation - concluding statement

Do your own damn homework!

[edit] Section expansion: change

This theme is visited prominently in the end section of the book. I will draw up some stuff to put in, eventually, but anyone else's ideas would be great (keep non-1st person though!) Jdcooper 17:40, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Criticism

If we are going to have a section on "criticism", we need to link to critical sources that contain those criticisms, otherwise that section is original research/POV. Jdcooper 11:06, 5 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Plot Summary

I have just re-worked the plot summary for this quite a bit. If anyone has any objections please let me know. I tried to emphasize the overall structure of the story rather than individual names and events. I hope it makes sense.DianaW 14:46, 1 November 2006 (UTC)

Also worked a bit on the "Change" and "Criticism" section, but these are both inadequate.DianaW 14:56, 1 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Sealand vs Zealand and other edits

Re: "Sealand" vs. "Zealand" -- At least in the edition I have, the telepaths are very skeptical when Petra initially produces "Zealand" (not too many words in English start with "Z", and "Zealand" doesn't have an obvious English meaning), but after Petra's further consultations, and explanations about the buzzing of bees they accept it.

Also, the recent edits have cut-back and postponed the nuclear explanations so that the background of the novel rather will be a little obscure until people read down to the section which includes it... AnonMoos 03:06, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

Although it is sometimes referred to as Zealand and is clearly meant to be New Zealand, the narrator normally refers to it as Sealand even after Petra's explanation.
I am not in principle opposed to the explanation of why Tribulation was a nuclear holocaust being moved further up the article. What I was against was the situation we had earlier where examination of this point was scattered at various points throughout the article, and we should give an explanation of how Tribulation appeared to the Labrador people before dealing with the nuclear holocaust issues. PatGallacher 11:57, 6 November 2006 (UTC)
No, the "narrator" (David Strorm) does not normally refer to it as "Sealand" after the initial confusion. Maybe you should re-read the book, before making major edits... AnonMoos 13:31, 6 November 2006 (UTC)
Perhaps there are different editions. I've just checked mine and it appears Pat G is correct; "Sealand" is used consistently. I do agree the fact that the "postnuclear" context needs to be stated early.DianaW 14:02, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

I have reverted to my previous version, but made a few changes, in particular I have followed people's advice and moved the examination of nuclear holocaust issues to a much earlier point in the article. PatGallacher 16:35, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

I'm almost certain that Sealand is actually one of the Caribbean Islands. It would have been impossible for them to escape from Labrador to New Zealand.

A close reading of the text suggests that Wyndham did indeed intend to portray a future New Zealand. The following quote from the novel not only describes "Sealand" as "two parts" with "lots of sea all round" but places it in a different hemisphere; in sunlight during Labrador's nighttime.


'Well, the others are proper letters,' Michael admitted.' Sea-land - it must be -'
'Not "S"; it's "Z,"' repeated Petra, obstinately.
'But, darling, "Z" doesn't mean anything. Now, Sealand obviously means a land in the sea.'
'If that helps,' I said doubtfully. 'According to my Uncle Axel there's a lot more sea than anyone would think possible.'
At that point everything was blotted out by Petra conversing indignantly with the unknown. She finished to announce triumphantly: 'It is "Z". She says it's different from "S": like the noise a bee makes.'
'All right,' Michael told her, pacifically, 'but ask her if there is a lot of sea.'
Petra came back shortly with:
'Yes. There are two parts of it, with lots of sea all round. From where she is you can see the sun shining on it for miles and miles and it's all blue -'
'In the middle of the night?' said Michael. 'She's crazy.'
'But it isn't night where she is. She showed me.' Petra said. 'It's a place with lots and lots of houses, different from Waknuk houses, and much, much bigger. And there are funny carts without horses running along the roads. And things in the air, with whizzing things on top of them -'

-- Rydra Wong 23:09, 14 December 2006 (UTC)


My version, in a compendium of "Great Science Fiction" published a few years after Re-Birth was published, uses "Zealand" throughout. I don't see why the main article text says "Sealand "; this may have been from before the above argument which points out the hemisphere difference etc. I'm changing it to Zealand for clarity, and removing the HTML comment which I think unfairly lends authority to an edit. -- 65.216.75.240 (talk) 15:41, 28 April 2008 (UTC)

May I first of all say that, when it was not too difficult to see from the article that this issue had proved contentious in the past, it was bad practice to change the article without discussing the issue beforehand. It is possible that this has appeared differently in different editions. However when we had this discussion before most people's editions said "Sealand". It is likely that British editions have been closer to Wyndham's original text, it is possible that a compendium of science fiction published in the US (where they changed the title for a start) underwent some tampering. I will check this soon. PatGallacher (talk) 16:12, 28 April 2008 (UTC)


While it's entirely possible that editions exist where the narrator's use of Sealand has been changed to Zealand by an overzealous editor, I have yet to find one. In particular, the US published paperback copy of Rebirth also has Sealand throughout. All editions that I've found to date use Sealand exclusively with the exception of a single instance where the place name is actually spoken by the Sealand woman:
"Later on, they started to discover thought-shape makers in other places, too. That was when they began to understand how fortunate they had been; they found that even in places where physical deviations don't count for much people who have think-together are usually persecuted. For a long time nothing could be done to help the same kind of people in other places - though some tried to sail to Zealand in canoes, and sometimes they got there - but later, when we had machines again, we were able to fetch some of them to safety."
Both before and after this single instance the use of Sealand remains consistent throughout, even when the Sealand woman is speaking:
"'Let him be,' came the severe, clear pattern from the Sealand woman. 'Your work is to survive. Neither his kind, nor his kind of thinking will survive long. They are the crown of creation, they are ambition fulfilled - they have nowhere more to go. But life is change, that is how it differs from the rocks, change is its very nature.'"
In addition, in my copy of the unabridged audio book version of The Chrysalids, reader Robert Powell uses Sealand throughout with the single exception noted above. I hope this clarifies the situation. -- Rydra Wong (talk) 23:30, 28 April 2008 (UTC)


There is a problem with this item - 'a wild community full of rejected Waknukians'. The Fringe was a wild community filled with all types of people. Waknuk was a farm which David and his family lived on. Maybe Labradorians.

[edit] New edits

I just reverted a couple of things; but this whole paragraph is problematic. I took out "actually" which someone added; it's almost never helpful to add "actually" as it doesn't (actually) mean anything. I believe I took it out once before. "Actually" often signals that somebody's opinion is coming up, trying to pretend it's objective. The whole paragraph is unsourced and unencyclopedic. Who is it who says the title is misleading? That needs a reference. The title isn't unclear to me, for instance, and even if it were, having a title with several possible meanings is hardly an undesirable thing, particularly in a work of fiction. There is no reason that the title can't refer to a stage of development of a butterfly, unusual or alien creatures, or the metamorphosis of David and his friends. If there are scholars or critics who have stated that the title is misleading, we could source that.

I don't really think describing the cover of one edition of the book is appropriate in the literary criticism section, either. But perhaps I'll leave that alone for now and wait to see if anyone disagrees. Not infrequently cover illustrations are commissioned and created by people who haven't even read the book, so I don't think you can read a lot into the author's intended meaning of "chrysalids" from that (especially considering he was dead before the 1970s). It's equally likely somebody at the publisher had no idea what a "chrysalid" was and told an illustrator, this is science fiction so draw some space aliens or something. The edition I have has some children's faces on the cover, eyes closed, floating disembodied against the background of a futuristic-appearing cityscape; I think it's meant to evoke the children's telepathic communications with the faraway advanced civilization in "Sealand."DianaW 14:40, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] "Alien" cover

"This title may evoke unusual creatures such as aliens (as inexplicitly depicted on the cover of one paperback release of the book in the 1970s)."

By any chance would this be the cover that is actually depicting a wildcat attacking a horse (a scene which appears in the novel)? Battle Ape 13:42, 25 November 2006 (UTC)

While I recognise that we should explain that Tribulation is a nuclear holocaust fairly early in the article, I don't think we should dive into this immediately, since this could give a misleading impression of the novel, we should explain how this appears to the Labradorians first. PatGallacher 13:18, 4 December 2006 (UTC)


Only following this rather loosely, but in general I agree with Pat G's edits. It's important to put the story in the post-nuclear holocaust context but to lead into the plot summary with this gives a different impression of the novel. It is not *primarily* a post-nuclear holocaust story.DianaW 13:23, 4 December 2006 (UTC)
Did a few very minor edits, I think it's greatly improved by others' recent edits. I think this sentence is unclear: "David, Rosalind and Petra elude their would-be captors and are rescued by the Sealand mission to discover the source of Petra's telepathic transmissions." Anyone? And I still object to the notion that the title is "misleading." It is not a bad thing or a criticism for a title to have several referents or a complex symbolism. If no one raises an objection I'm going to rewrite that part soon.DianaW 13:56, 4 December 2006 (UTC)
If nothing else it's got to be referenced who said it's "misleading," and it's unnecessary to explain that "chrysalids" is plural of "chrysalid." If there's no source for this other than just people like us free-associating as to what "chrysalids" might mean, we ought to just take this stuff out.DianaW 14:00, 4 December 2006 (UTC)
I agree with DianaW with respect to the entirely unnecessary explanation of "Chrysalids" and the unsourced concern that the title is somehow misleading. I have removed the offending paragraph. -- Rydra Wong 23:32, 22 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Time period: Several hundred vs several thousand years

The novel suggests that "A thousand years? - two thousand years? Even more perhaps?" is generally thought to be the time between Tribulation and the beginning of recorded history. Only Nicholson's Repentances was said to have "come out of the wilderness of barbarism, and that only because it had lain for, perhaps, several centuries sealed in a stone coffer before it was discovered. And only the Bible had survived from the time of the Old People them­selves." and "Except for what these two books told, the past, further back than three recorded centuries, was a long oblivion." These passages strongly suggest several thousand years passed before the three centuries of recorded history with which the Labradoreans are familiar. Hope this clarifies the edit. -- Rydra Wong 23:11, 22 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] External Link to Summary

I have re-added the link to the WikiSummaries summary of The Chrysalids (here). This link provides a useful resource to people interested a more in-depth summary. WikiSummaries is compatible with Wikipedia in that its works are under the GNU FDL. Geneffects 15:15, 25 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Was Waknuk modeled after Wabush?

Did Wyndham model Waknuk after Wabush?

A careful reading of the text suggests that this is likely.


1. The names Waknuk and Wabush are strikingly similar: the same initial letter, same vowels, same number of syllables and the potential for similar vowel pronunciation.

"Except for what these two books told, the past, further back than three recorded centuries, was a long oblivion. Out of that blankness stretched a few strands of legend, badly frayed in their passage through successive minds. It was this long line of tongues that had given us the name Labrador,"

This passage suggests the evolution of place names over time. Note also from the wiki article: Rigo for Rigolet, Lark for Lark Harbour and Newf for Newfoundland.


2. "Our district, and, consequently, our house as the first there, was called Waknuk because of a tradition that there had been a place of that name there, or thereabouts, long, long ago, in the time of the Old People. The tradition was, as usual, vague, but certainly there had been some buildings of some kind, for the remnants and foundations had remained until they were taken for new buildings. There was also the long bank, running away until it reached the hills and the huge scar that must have been made by the Old People when, in their superhuman fashion, they had cut away half a mountain in order to find something or other that interested them."

Note that the ruins of a similarly named place from the time of the Old People and reuse of preexisting building materials are mentioned and open pit mining is implied.


3. Early in the novel the narrator David describes a high bank near his house:

"I had made my way down the cart-track to the south, along the borders of several fields until I came to the high bank, and then along the top of the bank for quite a way. The bank was no puzzle to me then: it was far too big for me to think of as a thing that men could have built, nor had it ever occurred to me to connect it with the wondrous doings of the Old People whom I sometimes heard about. It was simply the bank, coming round in a wide curve, and then running straight as an arrow towards the distant hills"

This passage is highly descriptive of a raised rail bed. David would have had knowledge of roads of the type made by horse drawn vehicles - note his mention of a cart-track. The bank's arrow straightness, height above terrain and the lack of similarly built roadways in Labrador strongly suggest a rail right of way rather than a vehicular road. Note that Wabush has the Quebec North Shore and Labrador Railway and the short connector Wabush Lake Railway in its immediate vicinity. Also note that no rail of any sort exists in eastern or northern Labrador.


4. "Their existence had become a danger­ous nuisance and their depredations the cause of many repre­sentations to the Government in Rigo."

The Labradorean government is established as being in Rigo; a community on the East coast of Labrador.


5. "What the Government did do, from its comfortable situation far, far to the east, was to express sympathy in encouraging phrases, and suggest the formation of a local militia "

Waknuk is therefor situated far to the West of Rigo. Note that Wabush and nearby Labrador City are about 350 miles West of Rigolet. [1] Both Wabush and Labrador City are mining towns; see Iron Ore Company of Canada.


6. " - of which Waknuk was only a small district - was called Labrador. This was thought to be the Old People's name for it, though that was not very certain. Round most of Labrador there was a great deal of water called the sea, which was im­portant on account of fish. Nobody that I knew, except Uncle Axel, had actually seen this sea because it was a long way off, but if you were to go three hundred miles or so east, north, or north-west you would come to it sooner or later. But south-west or south, you wouldn't; you'd get to the Fringes and then the Badlands, which would kill you."

This passage further establishes Waknuk in the same general location as Wabush; in extreme western Labrador, approximately 300 miles west of the the coast and Rigo and of similar distance to the Labrador's northern and north western coasts.


7. "It was said, too, though nobody was sure, that in the time of the Old People Labrador had been a cold land, so cold that no one could live there for long, so they had used it then only for growing trees and doing their mysterious mining in."

The preceding passage explicitly mentions mining in the Waknuk area during the time of the Old People.


8. "Like all the houses of the district, it was constructed on a frame of solid, roughly-dressed timbers, but, since it was the oldest house there, most of the spaces in the outer walls had been filled in with bricks and stones from the ruins of some of the Old People's buildings,"

Waknuk was built on or near the ruins of an "Old People" Labradorean community.


9. During a tirade Old Jacob states:

"Government regulations made by a lot of snivelling, weak-hearted, weak-witted babblers in the East. That's what the trouble is. A lot of namby-pamby politicians, and churchmen who ought to know better, too; men who've never lived in unstable country,"

"How do they think the south-west was made safe and civil­ized for God's people? How do they think the mutants were kept under, and the Purity standards set up? It wasn't by fiddling little fines that a man could pay once a week and not notice. It was by honouring the law, and punishing anybody who transgressed it so that they knew they were punished."

This passage further places Waknuk as not only in western but southwestern Labrador. This is again very similar to the placement of Wabush in Labrador.


Based on the preceding I am reinstating the link to Wabush.

-- Rydra Wong 00:40, 29 March 2007 (UTC)


You've convinced me :-) Tirailleur 13:35, 26 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Some thoughts following a recent re-read

I reread the book last night (took a couple of hours; I'm a fast reader) and a few points came up.

There seemed to me to be a distinctly pessimistic theme runing through the book. Or perhaps that's not the right word; a resigned acceptance of human awfulness, perhaps. Leaving aside the underlying premise of a nuclear holocust, there's the fact that the pitiless harshness of the anti-mutant mentality does actually work. It is conceded by Uncle Axel that the religious nutters are onto something, in practical terms, and that the intolerance for deviation is what has enabled the progressive rehabilitation of the world, from Badlands to Wild country to Fringes to, eventually, stabilised territory.

It also struck me that there are quite marked similarities in the mindset of the religious zealots of Waknuk and that of the Zealanders. The latter are quite prepared to slaughter the former and they come to collect the child with the other telepaths an entirely secondary concern; in fact two are quite clearly abandoned and the Zealand woman simply wished them well in finding another way there from Labrador, which we know cannot happen. The Zealanders haven't rejected the Old People / Tribulation othodoxy either. They've embellished it but they still think god did it, so one wonders how much further on they are morally as opposed to technologically.

This would be OR in the article itself so I shall forbear from editing.

I have added one thing though. It is noted in the text - it is actually said by David's father - that the government cynically relaxes the rules on deviations where the deviations in question are patently useful. This is in the context of the neighbour's acquisition of a pair of "great-horses". These are said to be 26 hands high at the shoulders. I didn't know how big that was so I looked it up and apparently this would make them just under 9 feet tall at the shoulder. For comparison, that is about the size of an Asian elephant. Tirailleur 13:51, 26 July 2007 (UTC)

Pessimism is close to it, or at least, I think at least Wyndham had a pessimistic streak. I think it's one of the strengths of the book (though I hated it at first, when I was 13) that the Sealand People are as morally ambiguous as the Labridorians. It wouldn't be a realistic ending if the Sealanders were saints. One of the things I love about this book it that all three groups (including religious nutters) includes both good and bad. One thing I thought was interesting in comparing the two groups, which I think the great horses illustrate, it that the Sealanders are pro-advancement, while the Labridorians are against it--or at least leery of it and traditionally against it. The neighbor with the great horses claimed that he had produced them normally by just breeding for size. If we're to believe wiki, the tallest horse on record was a Shire that was 21 hands, so selectively breeding up a horse of 26 hands isn't all that unlikely, given time, and this book is thousand+ years in the future. I think Wyndham is basically making a pessimistic comment on both traditionalists and people who think that technology will make at all better: both groups are equally unlikable.

[edit] Fair use rationale for Image:The-chrysalids.jpg

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BetacommandBot (talk) 19:21, 26 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Major characters

Most longer or better articles on novels probably do have a section on major characters. There could be some duplication with the plot summary, but this is grounds for further editing not deletion. PatGallacher (talk) 15:19, 16 May 2008 (UTC)