“Hundreds of thousands of them.” Kingsley Amis in his ‘New Maps Of Hell’ praises John Wyndham’s ‘coherence and concision’ and ‘Web’ is a good example of such qualities; Wyndham does here for Spider Island what he did for walking killer plants. Rejected by his publishers and only surfacing posthumously, this slight tale of idealism gone awry is occasionally lecture-tastic and stays primly on the side of verisimilitude rather than wallowing in schlock but there remains something very readable about taking perfectly sensible people behaving perfectly sensibly and confronting them with a lurid pulp sci-fi idea. Moneybags Lord Foxfield and radical thinker Walter Tirrie assemble a group of what looks suspiciously like your average British holidaymakers and decamp to the island of Tanakuatua which has been put under a tabu by departing natives and swept by the fallout of ‘Test Zero’ but is otherwise a five star site for a new kind of social living experiment. It’s only when our redshirts arrive they spot the off-white canopy hanging over half the island and a suspicious lack of birds and insects. Don’t read this if you’re likely to spot things moving out of the corner of your eye; Branson’s Necker Island it ain’t. What follows is not a creature feature but a weirdly plausible what-if scenario which makes it all the more unnerving. ‘Web’ is short, there’s not a lot of plot and there’s zero sex or even affection between Arnold and Camilla – Wyndham was definitely more Swap Shop than Tiswas – but it still delivers the odd shudder and for those of us for whom John Wyndham was the gateway drug into grown-up science fiction affection for the man and his work goes a long way.
