Consider Her Ways

1st edition (publ. Michael Joseph)

Consider Her Ways is a 1956 science fiction novella by John Wyndham. It was published as part of a 1961 collection with some short stories called Consider Her Ways and Others (where it forms over a third of the book).

Plot

The story is mostly a first-person narrative. It begins with a woman who has no memory of her past waking up and discovering that she is a mother of some description, in a bloated body that is not her own. After some confusing experiences her memory gradually returns and she recalls that she was part of an experiment using a drug to see if it enabled people to have out-of-body experiences. It seems that the drug has worked far better than anyone could have anticipated: she has been cast into the future. She also realizes that she is in a society consisting entirely of women, organized into a strict system of castes. Her initial contacts have never even heard of men.

When it becomes clear to doctors who attend her that something strange has happened, they arrange for her to be taken to meet a historian. It seems that the narrator is in a society somewhat more than a century after her own time. The historian relates that not long after the narrator’s own time a Dr Perrigan carried out scientific experiments that unintentionally created a virus that killed all the men in the world, leaving only women. After a very difficult period of famine and breakdown the small number of educated women, found mainly in the medical profession, took control and embarked on an urgent programme of research to enable women to reproduce without males. The women also decided to follow the advice of the Bible: "Go to the ant thou sluggard, consider her ways", and created a caste-based society, in which the narrator has become a member of the Mother caste.

Distressed at the prospect of spending her life as a bloated producer of babies, expected to be unable to read, write or reason, the narrator requests that she be administered an identical dose of the same drug in the hope that she might return to her own time. It works, and she then decides to stop Dr Perrigan at all costs. The story has an ambiguous ending, which may suggest that it is the narrator's own actions that will lead to the catastrophe she hopes to prevent. This also gives a secondary meaning to the story's name in which we are left to consider her tale and actions.

Conclusions

Consider Her Ways is more than just an original science fiction story. Particularly notable is a lengthy argument between the narrator and the historian about whether the new society is better than the old one, during which the historian attacks the concept of romance.

The story is perceptibly of and about England in the 1950s, a time and place in which Wyndham's speculation on the nature of a women-only society, and his references to genetic manipulation and drug-related experiences, may have seemed more shocking and alien to many readers than they do now.

The story is vague about exact dates, but some comments suggest that the frame story is set around 1970, and the main part takes place around 120 years after the plague which killed off the men, but the time between the frame story and the plague is unclear.

Other stories in the collection

Odd is a tale of how an ordinary man profited from an extraordinary time paradox when he stops to help a man seemingly lost and confused, and then learns the reasons why.

Stitch in Time concerns an elderly lady reflecting on a lost love and, thanks to her sons' experiments with time, finally discovering the reason why her lover abandoned her so many years ago.

Oh Where, Now, is Peggy MacRafferty? is a social satire on Hollywood glamour in which a bright, individual young Irish woman becomes part of the celebrity circuit, and loses all that makes her special in the process of becoming a star.

Random Quest combines romance and parallel universes.

A Long Spoon is the story of how a demon is summoned by mistake and the lengths the couple that invoked him have to go to get rid of him without losing their souls in the bargain.

Adaptations

Consider Her Ways was adapted as an episode of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, featuring Barbara Barrie and Gladys Cooper.

References

External links

• Amazon reviews of "Consider Her Ways and Others"