The Secret People by John Wyndham

 

(pb; 1935)

From the back cover

“The ‘new sea’ was teeming with a secret life.

“It was the world’s greatest engineering feat─the flooding of part of the Sahara desert. But the new waters that covered up the land also threatened to destroy an ancient, secret civilization beneath the earth.

“When Mark Sunnet’s plane crashed into the New Sea, he and beautiful companion, Margaret Lawn, were taken prisoners by these secret people. They were taken deep beneath the earth into strange, dark caverns. Caverns that seemed to hold no hope for escape.

“But Mark and Margaret had to escape. For now, suddenly, they were faced with two terrors─the secret people who were to be their executioners and the merciless New Sea that threatened to kill them all.”

 

Review

Wyndham, who wrote under a few other names, imbues Secret’s familiar topside-adventurers-beneath-the-earth with his usual vivid, classic science fiction writing and twists. By today’s ADHD writing standards the story comes off as chatty in certain parts (particularly near the overlong finish, when a verbose Sunnet tells Margaret key information).

There’s also a possibly-disturbing-for-modern-audiences element to Secret: Wyndham’s omniscient-author, repeated, unfortunate use of the character-centric phrase of “the Negro Zickle” (though most of multinational characters of various skin colors don’t refer to the heroic, if language-challenged* man as such─they simply call him Zickle). Having said that, Wyndham’s era-distinctive (possible) racism is born of ignorance, not meanness─the author, who published this in the mid-1930s, only shows Zickle as a smart-minded and man-of-action character.

Secret, set in September 1964, is a good read if you can overlook a few instances of British speechifying and its era-centric, unintentional (possible) racism, its flaws ameliorated by solid, imaginative, and adventure-minded science fiction, Buck Rogers-esque fight scenes, and a sly villain (Miguel Salvades).   

[* = Zickle, a tribesman, was taken from his village where English was not spoken. His story, which may or may not include the events of Secret, would make for an interesting modern spin-off tale.]