Controlling the Clock

I actually read John Wyndham's The Trouble with Lichen over a year ago, on the heels of finishing The Kraken Wakes. Those were part of a binge set off by M. John Harrison's The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again, which I appropriately read by poolside. TTWL was Wyndham's 10th novel, if you count those published under another arrangement of his names, John Benyon.

I'd set it aside as I carried on reading some of the other books reviewed here, but came back to it after a Bluesky post by science writer and Barcelona neighbor Frank Swain, which reminded me of what a surprising storyline it held for 1960.

[Spoilers ahead]

Protagonist Diana Brackley is a young biochemist whose family expects her research career to be a brief detour before she marries. She takes up work for the R&D lab of a private company run by a youngish Cambridge chemist, Francis Saxover, who nearly doesn't hire her because he's afraid her looks and intelligence might disrupt the workforce. Soon after arriving at the company, Darr House, she discovers a rare lichen sample in the lab appears to slow aging—drastically, maybe to centuries. Saxover has quietly discovered the same thing independently. Both of them sit on their discoveries.

But where Saxover keeps his findings close, turning it into a compound which he uses to dose his family, Diana does something much more radical with her experiment. She leaves Darr House, lichenin treatment in hand, establishes her own lab, and opens Nefertiti, an upmarket beauty clinic in London's swank Mayfair. There, she sets about administering the drug to wealthy clients—all women—under the guise of a high-end beauty treatment, without telling them what it is, or what it does.

Where Saxover sees the risk in introducing radical longevity into society, Diana sees it as a chance to change the lot of women in that society—one she's frequently reminded of by family who tut at her professional choice, and friends who lament the biological clock women feel pressured to race. In a conversation with Saxover's daughter, she points out how this clock shapes institutional time, arguing that the institutions that govern society are designed around the seventy-year lifespan—promotion systems, marriage, education, governance broadly. Hyper-longevity breaks the mechanics underlying the social order precisely because it changes the timeline and everything else that flows from it.

Her strategy is not to do what Saxover worried about—release it to all of society—but to deliver it, unannounced, to women who are already seeking to look younger and remain appealing to society. She intentionally seeds a constituency for this power shift without anyone knowing, and manages to secure the supply chain before word gets out, which it eventually does. Pressured to give a public statement, she goes to the BBC, but—in a move that prefigures 70s paranoia cinema—she's assassinated on the steps of the studio in maximum view of the public. Or is she? The funeral the book opens with is hers, but like much else in Diana's story, it's a necessary ruse to allow her to continue controlling the clock, developing the antigerone treatment away from the pressures of politics that have enveloped the situation.

TTWL is something of an unexpected f/acc text—a story of feminist accelerationism. For Diana, delivering the antigerone to women first isn't charity, it's strategy: break the time scarcity that the social order is built on, and the order built on it breaks too. She's not fighting fertility per se, but the hold the biological clock has on women's choices. What she actually wants is to free them from the rush—the one-shot framing that forecloses women's choice. Time, not fertility, is the thing she's redistributing.

The contemporary parallels run deeper than the gender politics. Where the antigerone was the frontier model of TTWL, we see similar dynamics now around access to AI, around supply chains (Diana's lichen source was in Manchuria, and she made considerable efforts to obscure it from both the Chinese and the Russians), and around who controls the tempo of release. Saxover worries about alignment; Diana seeks to control who benefits first by managing differential access. The US government just demonstrated the tempo problem with Anthropic's Fable model, yanked under export controls three days after launch but now returned to market—the state stepping in to manage the clock, exactly the kind of institutional suppression Diana anticipated.

Diana deliberately uses wealth as her vector—her Nefertiti clients are rich by design, because she needs a constituency powerful enough to resist institutional suppression. But Wyndham doesn't let this pass unchallenged. The capacity to reshape biological time—and of course GLP-1s are already reshaping biological and possibly cognitive form—is arriving fastest for the people who already hold the most of everything else. At Diana's faked assassination, a labour rally is happening across Trafalgar Square, where a speaker calls the antigerone "the dirtiest weapon the Tories have aimed at the workers"—longevity for the comfortable means two generations on the dole, because the people above you never vacate their positions, and accumulat even more wealth and power.

TTWL is less of a cozy catastrophe or scientific horror than some of Wyndham's better-known books, and feels more directly—and unexpectedly—political. Ultimately, it asks who set the clock, who benefits from its speed, and what happens when someone smashes the clock in question rather than waiting for permission for it to be wound a little differently.

Sixty-six years on, we just have more clocks.

Listen to a 1962 radio version of TTWL on BBC Home Service.