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Wyndham, John, pseud. [John Wyndham Parks Benyon Harris]. Plan for Chaos: The Prequel to The Day of the Triffids. Ed. David Ketterer and Andy Sawyer. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2009. 263 pp. Cloth. 978-1-84631-179-6. $85.00. Rev. ed. London: Penguin/Viking, 2010. Paper. ISBN 978-0-14104877-2. $24.95 AUS [$22.06 USD].
This is the first publication of Plan for Chaos, which is a prequel to John Wyndham's The Day of the Triffids. Its manuscript is in the University of Liverpool's Sydney Jones Library and is part of the John Wyndham Archive that was acquired in May of 1998 (2). Plan for Chaos includes David Ketterer's introduction, which is followed by Andy Sawyer's "Note on the Text" and his helpful citations for the chapter epigrams. There are revisions of the introduction and the chapter epigrams available on the Internet1 and may be in the Penguin paperback.
Ketterer's introduction, "A Ground -Breaking Cloned Nazis Thriller," is divided into four sections: "Four Rejected Manuscript Novels including Fury of Creation/Plan for Chaos"; "The Composition and Submission of Fury of Creation/Plan for Chaos"; "Incest, Cloning, the Feared Female and The Day of the Triads"; and "Dorothy Joan Park: The Biographical Key." "Four Rejected Manuscript Novels [...]" investigates the Archive with particular stress on Wyndham's use of the detective mode and the manuscript of Plan for Chaos. There are also discussions of repetitive elements throughout Wyndham's canon, most notably Nazi cells and love stories, as well as of Wyndham's title variations (he preferred Fury of Creation over Plan for Chaos) and the stylistic demands of modifying the novel for the American audience.
"The Composition and Submission [...]" uses Wyndham's correspondence much with Frederick Pohl), his wife Grace Isobel Wilson's diary, and comments by his brother Vivian to determine the date of composition. This meticulous and demanding search through various letters and minutia is a particularly fine job of...