How do we use the tools we’re given? British sci-fi novelist John Wyndham’s work—mostly written in the 1950s and ’60s—is suffused with the technological fascinations and societal anxieties of the day. But it nonetheless reaches beyond his own times and into our own.

A review of The Chrysalids and Chocky with a view toward what his novels say about the perils and possibilities of human connectivity.