Vivisection”

In November 1919, four months after his sixteenth birthday, John [Wyndham Parkes Lucas] Beynon Harris published the first part of a story entitled “Vivisection” in the second issue of The Bee, a short-lived journal “Produced by Members of Bedales School.” The following year, the complete eight issues of 77te Bee were published as a single volume by Morland Press, London. “Vivisection,” which is clearly inspired by H.G. Wells’s 77ie Island of Doctor Moreau, would seem to be both Harris’s and, effectively, “John Wyndham’s” first publication. It was as a science fiction writer in the Wellsian mode that John Wyndham received international acclaim and made a significant impact on the development of British and world sf. His schoolboy publication “Vivisection”—here reproduced for the first time—is important because it points directly to the successful second phase of Harris’s career, a phase arrived at (five years after World War II) following a pre- and post-war “American” phase (which can now be understood as an instructive detour) as “John Beynon [Harris],” the sole British writer during the 1930s to establish a reputation in such American sf pulp magazines as Wonder Stories. (DK)

Art · Historical and modern epidemiology studies · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · Philosophy