His idea of using the Children as an invasive force born (literally) within the boundaries of sleepy Midwich is reminiscent of widespread Western fears of Communist subversion from within or paranoia of sleeper agents being activated. Having worked within the British Government as a censor for the Ministry of Information and then as a Cipher Operator in the Army, Wyndham would be keenly aware of the escalating, armed tensions across the world in the 1950s. However cosy the novel feels in its scope, Wyndham was indeed writing in the midst of the Cold War following WWII. In a final climax, Zellaby abuses the trust of the children by sneaking a bomb into their living space in the guise of lecture material that ultimately destroys the ineffable threat to human survival and himself in the process. Into the spotlight steps Gordon Zellaby, an aging dilettante intellectual who has earned the trust of the Children over the course of their development. The power of these collective beings surpasses the ability of the British government to control and all hope is lost (even the idea of nuclear annihilation of the village is prohibited by the Children). As time passes, it becomes clear the Children (capital c) are obviously not of human lineage as they telepathically control the world around them while the individual children form one gestalt male and female minds. Eventually through the narrator, Richard Gayford, we learn that this xenogenesis comes to fruition in the birth of children (31 males and 30 females) which are human in structure, but possess silvery pale skin and pure, golden eyes. The “dayout” as the event comes to be known, is much less benign than it seems, as all woman of child-bearing age near visibly pregnancy at the same time. Residents within a two mile hemisphere of the village are inexplicably rendered unconscious for a twenty-four hour period that is only discovered by the outside world as an ambulance driver passes through the “barrier” of the zone and loses contact with headquarters.

This is indeed what happens in the sleepy, middling British village of Midwich, standing in for middle-class Britain as a whole. That is, fiction centering on the dramas and adventures of protagonists while some disaster has rendered the outside world irrelevant or completely obliterated.

John Wyndham’s The Midwich Cukcoos (1957) falls directly into the trope that Brian Aldiss termed – originally in the pejorative sense – a “cosy catastrophe”.

The midwich