Chocky

I tend to think of classic SciFi being super hard scifi filled with impenetrable words and implausibly humanoid alien species. Chocky is, if anything, the opposite: in fact, it's at least equal part 1950's British domestic comedy. This short novella is fascinating if nothing else as a piece of history. Chocky herself – an alien that my goodreads notes say Margaret Atwood compared favorably to ET, is a very benign domestic spirit, interested in binary math, drawing, swimming and sustainable energy.

Perhaps one of the most interesting parts of Chocky is that Matthew, the child actually faced with the supernatural being, is definitely not the protagonist. Rather the story focuses on his father's reaction to and coping with Chocky's presence. I think it compares quite favorably to the Riverman, a more modern novel vaunted for the same technique.

Still, 150 mass market paperback pages don't give a lot of space to have much there. Now that scifi has been tread as a path many times in the intervening years, I don't think Chocky aged as well as it could have. It's fun, but not particularly novel or profound any more.