A review by ktk8
Trouble with Lichen by John Wyndham

3.0

I'd forgotten a lot of this book since reading it first in high school. It resonates strongly today with the crisis our world is facing, part of which (population growth and feeding all the people of the world) was obviously seen by the author all the way back in the early 60's. The underlying idea of the book is that the world is stuffed because people don't live long enough to lead anything but self centred lives, not considering future generations, women rushing happily into marriage knowing that eventually they'll die and get out of it! Anti gerone slows the aging process and therefore a carefully selected group of people find that in fact, they are going to live much longer. The finder hopes that this will lead them to take on leadership roles, and in fact the wealthy, connected women are chosen to be given anti gerone without their knowledge for the ease of making that happen, and start to care for the world better. In doing so, women will be further emancipated.
I enjoyed the book and hated to have to put it down while reading it, but the (I assume) blindness of the author to ingrained sexism evident in the book annoyed me (maybe it was purposeful?). It annoyed me that in the end Diana was in love the whole time and stated to her love that she had built a lab so that he would be able to discover a synthetic source of anti gerone, rather than doing it herself or both together as a team.