The Kraken Wakes

The Kraken Wakes

Cover of first edition (hardcover)
Author	John Wyndham
Country	United Kingdom
Language	English
Genre(s)	Science fiction novel
Publisher	Michael Joseph
Publication date	July 1953
Media type	Print (Hardback & Paperback)
Pages	288 pp
ISBN	NA

The Kraken Wakes is an apocalyptic science fiction novel by John Wyndham, originally published by Michael Joseph in the UK in 1953 and first published in the US in the same year by Ballantine Books under the title Out of the Deeps as a mass market paperback. The current publication of the book is a paperback published by Penguin on May 28 1970.

The title is a reference to Alfred Tennyson's sonnet The Kraken, which describes a Scandinavian sea monster.

Plot summary

The novel describes escalating phases of an alien invasion. In the first phase objects from outer space land in the oceans. The distribution of their landing points - always at ocean deeps, never on land - implies intelligence. Phase two starts with ships being attacked, causing havoc to world shipping. Shortly after, the aliens start 'harvesting' the land by sending up 'sea tanks' which capture humans from seaside settlements; this is presumed to be for investigation, although the humans always drown. However, humans manage to defeat this phase. Next, the aliens start melting the ice caps, causing sea levels to rise. London and other ports are gradually flooded, causing widespread social and political collapse.

The story follows Mike and Phyllis Watson, a married couple who are both journalists, who want to cover this story of the alien attacks for the English Broadcasting Company. They try to survive and understand what is going on. At the end, humanity develops an underwater ultrasonic weapon that kills the aliens. However, the world population has been reduced to less than a fifth of its level before these events.

Throughout the book the aliens remain concealed; everything we know about them is inferred from their actions.

Literary significance & criticism

The novel tells an entertaining apocalyptic story and takes an ahead-of-its time look at planetary engineering, curiously prescient of modern day fears of sea-level rise due to global warming. The novel also satirises the media, and Cold War political mindsets.

The main criticism which has been made is that it is in places a re-hash of some ideas from Wyndham's first novel, The Day of the Triffids. The ending is considered weak as well, suggesting that the author was not sure how to conclude the novel.

In Phase Three, the novel lists news reports of many icebergs calving from the icecaps of both Greenland and Antarctic, and increased Arctic warm currents causing pack ice and icebergs to move. The character Bocker implies a link with a 2.5 inch rise in sea level and speculates the melting would effect further sea levels rises. In fact melting sea ice alone, as in the Arctic Ocean, would not cause any rise in the sea level. Rather, such an increase could only be caused by melting ice on land, as in Antarctica or Greenland, but the novel is not clear about how much of each kind of ice is being melted.

The novel contains what is, in a way, Wyndham's starkest statement of his assumption that two intelligences must necessarily fight each other to the death, although he implies this in The Chrysalids and The Midwich Cuckoos as well.

External link

• review

Bibliography

• Wyndham, John. The Kraken Wakes (London: Michael Joseph, 1953) —First edition.
• Wyndham, John. Out of the Deeps (New York: Ballantine, 1953) —First US edition.
• Wyndham, John. The Kraken Wakes (London: Penguin, 1955) —First Penguin edition.
• Wyndham, John. The Kraken Wakes (London: Penguin, 1970) ISBN 0-14-001075-0

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