Sci-Fi Group Book Club discussion

This is the discussion thread for the second book of the month, or group read, for February. Please remember to use the spoiler tags where necessary.

The other group read topic for this month (Watchmen) can be found here.

I started to read this book yesterday and I'm enjoying it so far. I had to laugh when I read, on the first page, '... and so back to the hotel where Janet enjoyed the bathroom with that fascination which other people's plumbing always arouses in her'. I'm guessing he just means that she luxuriated in the hotel room's bathtub....

On p. 10, when the couple are prevented from driving into Midwich, Janet figures that she could walk into the village instead, carrying her shopping bag. I'm realising that it was the norm for women to walk carrying their shopping in bags or parcels during the 1950s and early 1960s - mainly because relatively few women owned their own car or drove their husband's - as some of the stories in Philip K. Dick's Electric Dreams: Volume 1 and in Shirley Jackson's short story 'Nightmare', in The Missing Girl, demonstrate.

I liked this book. I had seen Village of the Damned (1960) and the follow up Children of the Damned (1964) before so I knew what I was getting into. I thought the book was a real page turner despite knowing what was going to happen, and surprisingly scary.

I found the whole emphasis on gender quite interesting. Not because it is deep but rather because it is so telling about the time when this book was written. The alien children are connected through sex (boys are connected to boys and girls are connected to girls) and again and again the book talks about the natural feelings and reactions of men and women. It is almost like men and women are two different species. Noted sometimes these differences are more positive for women (according to the book) but still, it feels very dated and silly.

I do have one issue with the book. I wish it had been written from the perspective of one of the mothers. It would have been so much more interesting to read about the feelings of a mother who gives birth to a child, breast feeds it and brings it up. Get to know her love and doubts and what ever was going through her mind. Even a perspective of one of the fathers would have been more interesting than that of men who stand on the outside.

Thorkell wrote: "I do have one issue with the book. I wish it had been written from the perspective of one of the mothers. It would have been so much more interesting to read about the feelings of a mother who gives birth to a child, breast feeds it and brings it up. Get to know her love and doubts and what ever was going through her mind. Even a perspective of one of the fathers would have been more interesting than that of men who stand on the outside."

This is a very good point, although (and I'm still at a rather early stage in the book), you do get (view spoiler)[the sense of unease and difficulty that Ferrelyn goes through when she realises that she's pregnant, yet shouldn't have been, and finds it hard to tell anybody about it. (hide spoiler)]

Yes and it is those places that are the best part of the book.