The Midwich Cuckoos

The Midwich Cuckoos is a science fiction novel by the English writer John Wyndham, published in 1957. It has been adapted for film, radio and television.

The book begins with ambulances arriving at two traffic accidents which are blocking the only roads into Midwich, a village in Winshire. One of the ambulance men becomes unconscious when he tries to approach, and because gas poisoning is suspected the army is called in. What they find is a hemisphere two miles in diameter that nobody can enter and remain conscious, with a caged canary serving as the test, and aerial photographs showing an unidentifiable silvery object on the ground at the centre of it.

After a day the effect vanishes and the object has disappeared, and the villagers wake with no apparent ill effects. Some months afterwards they work out that every woman of child-bearing age is pregnant, and that all of the pregnancies date from the period when everyone was unconscious.

The novel is about what the village does with that, and about the children who are born from it, and it has been praised by critics as a searching novel of moral ambiguities.