The Kraken Wakes

Alien invaders covet our ocean deeps and start a war with humans to submerge the whole planet. Their weird incursions to the surface are terrifying and genuinely alien. The rising sea levels depicted in the story are similar to today's cli-fi, but were written decades before it became a thing.

This was Wyndham's first book after "The Day of the Triffids", and while it falls short of that masterpiece, it retains some of its vivid inventiveness. The husband and wife who operate as professional equals reflects Wyndham's own relationship, typical of Wyndham's progressive views, so contrary to a lot of the sexist tripe which pervaded the genre in those days.

Nothing wrong with this book as such, it was just a bit boring, and nowhere near as good as Day of the Triffids. For me the enjoyment was limited by the fact that we don't get to hear much about the aliens - there's no description of what they look like (the closest we get are their 'sea-tanks', and it's not clear if these are the aliens themselves or a transport mechanism or an autonomous vehicle), what their motives are, whether they want to eliminate humanity or would consider a peaceful co-existence etc.

This is an alien invasion story that pits humanity against creatures that take over the depths of the ocean and then proceed to attack. Less subtle than the Midwich Cuckoos, though stylisticly and technically exceedingly similar, this novel is told from the perspective of a journalist who accidentally gets caught up in events, but only as he looks back on them from a distance of time - making the protagonist very similar to that of The Midwich Cuckoos. Another similarity is the assertion that two intelligent species could not co-exist, but instead must come to strife. Again Wyndham's false understanding of evolution and ecology is put forward to justify this view.