The first time Penguin actively marketed its John Wyndham titles as a set was in 1970, when Chocky was published and eight other titles reprinted with covers by « Harry Willock ». All nine books were then reprinted with cover illustrations by « Peter Lord » and a posthumous novel Web in 1980 made it ten. Eight of these were reprinted with « Mark Salwowski » covers in the mid to late '80s, and nine a decade later with covers by Spencer Wilson in the larger B-format.

And that was it until 2010, when Penguin published Wyndham's "newly discovered" novel Plan for Chaos with a cover by Brian Cronin, whose tight-lipped thinkers had first appeared on Wyndham reprints two years earlier. Cronin has since provided covers for The Seeds of Time and Consider Her Ways and Others, so Penguin collectors and Wyndham fans will be waiting to see if The Outward Urge and Web make this the first set of all eleven Penguin titles.

Penguin promoted Plan for Chaos as "the newly discovered companion novel to The Day of the Triffids" and in one sense this is true, as Wyndham is thought to have written it during an eighteen month break from writing Triffids, but other than that the novels could hardly be more different. The English sf author M John Harrison called Plan for Chaos "an almost unreadable book" and it is telling that much of the introduction by Christopher Priest discusses The Day of the Triffids. Wyndham admitted to Frederik Pohl in 1951 that "I've messed about with the thing so much that I've lost all perspective" and when the book was rejected by publishers on both sides of the Atlantic he subsequently abandoned it.

The manuscript resurfaced after the John Wyndham Archive was acquired by Liverpool University in the UK and was published on the fortieth anniversary of the author's death. Its interest to academics goes without saying, though fans of Penguin's other Wyndham titles are in for a surprise.

The novel is set some thirty years or so after the end of the Second World War and begins as a hard-boiled detective thriller in what is presumably New York, but once the chase is on the story segues into sf, and shifts to a hi-tech hideout deep in the jungle, where Nazis are cloning an Aryan master race. While the clones zip round in flying saucers, the Nazi high command prepares for world domination by tricking the USA and Russia into starting a nuclear war.

As of 2016 there is still no sign of Cronin covers for The Outward Urge or Web but his artwork does appear on the first Penguin publications of Wyndham's early sf novels The Secret People and Stowaway to Mars.