The Chrysalids

by John Wyndham

‘In my experience,’ he told me, ‘if you run away from a thing just because you don’t like it, you don’t like what you find either. Now, running to a thing, that’s a different matter,

‘souls are just counters for churches to collect, all the same value, like nails. No, what makes man man is mind; it’s not a thing, it’s a quality, and minds aren’t all the same value; they’re better or worse, and the better they are, the more they mean.

Man got his physical shape – the true image, they call it – before he even knew he was man at all. It’s what happened inside, after that, that made him human.

It was odd, I felt, how many people seemed to have positive, if conflicting, information upon God’s views.

They stamp on any change: they close the way and keep the type fixed because they’ve got the arrogance to think themselves perfect. As they reckon it, they, and only they, are in the true image; very well, then it follows that if the image is true, they themselves must be God: and, being God, they reckon themselves entitled to decree, “thus far, and no farther.” That is their great sin: they try to strangle the life out of Life.’

But we do know that we can make a better world than the Old People did. They were only ingenious half-humans, little better than savages; all living shut off from one another, with only clumsy words to link them. Often they were shut off still more by different languages, and different beliefs.

‘The living form defies evolution at its peril; if it does not adapt, it will be broken. The idea of completed man is the supreme vanity: the finished image is a sacrilegious myth.