We are all, you see, toys of the life force. It made you numerically strong, but mentally undeveloped; it made us mentally strong, but physically weak: now it has set us at one another, to see what will happen. A cruel sport, perhaps, from both our points of view, but a very, very old one. Cruelty is as old as life itself.
I'm sorry to say that The Midwich Cuckoos wasn't nearly as much fun as The Day of the Triffids, although it started out with a promising premise: After a small British village was mysteriously put to sleep for a day, it is eventually discovered that all of the women of child-bearing age are pregnant; even the virginal schoolgirls, modest widows and those who couldn't previously conceive. The all-male village elders -- a respected academic, the doctor, and the vicar -- decide that it must be a case of "xenogenesis" (changelings implanted during the "Dayout" by unknown forces) and that they must follow a course of "benign censorship" and not allow the outside world or their own womenfolk to know what is actually happening to them. These unquestioning vessels give birth to slightly strange looking babies who immediately exercise mind control over their mothers while the men sit back and wax philosophical. As the children grow up and become more powerful, the men wax harder.
I understand that this slim story has twice been made into a movie called Village of the Damned, the latest in 1995, but I honestly don't know how this dated material could possibly appeal to a modern audience. What woman today would willingly carry and give birth to an unknown entity? What group of women (including those virginal schoolgirls, older widows, the unattached) could be gathered together and told, "Well, this happened so we're just going to have to support each other and see it through" and have them accept it? What community, suspecting alien implantation, would want to just sit back and watch what happens?
This book attempts to ask questions about maternal bonding and xenophobia and the treatment of minorities, but really offers no answers -- it never really answers the question of where the babies came from: what is this "life force" that arranged the "cruel sport"? There's quite a bit made of the idea that killing the children wouldn't be murder since they are, presumably, a different species, but that felt like a forced comparison to the similar argument that once allowed for the enslavement of Africans or the slaughter of the Native Americans: except in this case, the children were an invading species who were growing capable of wiping out humanity; surely we aren't meant to magnanimously accept them as the cuckoos in our nests?
A definite lack of fun and adventure in this book, and where it attempted to get deep, it grew dull and pedantic.
