Ratings114
Average rating3.8
When Bill Masen wakes up blindfolded in hospital there is a bitter irony in his situation. Carefully removing his bandages, he realizes that he is the only person who can see: everyone else, doctors and patients alike, have been blinded by a meteor shower. Now, with civilization in chaos, the triffids - huge, venomous, large-rooted plants able to 'walk', feeding on human flesh - can have their day.The Day of the Triffids, published in 1951, expresses many of the political concerns of its time: the Cold War, the fear of biological experimentation and the man-made apocalypse. However, with its terrifyingly believable insights into the genetic modification of plants, the book is more relevant today than ever before.
[Comment by Liz Jensen on The Guardian][1]:
> As a teenager, one of my favourite haunts was Oxford's Botanical Gardens. I'd head straight for the vast heated greenhouses, where I'd pity my adolescent plight, chain-smoke, and glory in the insane vegetation that burgeoned there. The more rampant, brutally spiked, poisonous, or cruel to insects a plant was, the more it appealed to me. I'd shove my butts into their root systems. They could take it. My librarian mother disapproved mightily of the fags but when under interrogation I confessed where I'd been hanging out – hardly Sodom and Gomorrah – she spotted a literary opportunity, and slid John Wyndham's The Day of the Triffids my way. I read it in one sitting, fizzing with the excitement of recognition. I knew the triffids already: I'd spent long hours in the jungle with them, exchanging gases. Wyndham loved to address the question that triggers every invented world: the great "What if . . ." What if a carnivorous, travelling, communicating, poison-spitting oil-rich plant, harvested in Britain as biofuel, broke loose after a mysterious "comet-shower" blinded most of the population? That's the scenario faced by triffid-expert Bill Masen, who finds himself a sighted man in a sightless nation. Cataclysmic change established, cue a magnificent chain reaction of experimental science, physical and political crisis, moral dilemmas, new hierarchies, and hints of a new world order. Although the repercussions of an unprecedented crisis and Masen's personal journey through the new wilderness form the backbone of the story, it's the triffids that root themselves most firmly in the reader's memory. Wyndham described them botanically, but he left enough room for the reader's imagination to take over. The result being that everyone who reads The Day of the Triffids creates, in their mind's eye, their own version of fiction's most iconic plant. Mine germinated in an Oxford greenhouse, in a cloud of cigarette smoke.
[1]: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/may/14/science-fiction-authors-choice
Featured Series
2 primary booksTriffids is a 2-book series with 2 primary works first released in 1951 with contributions by John Wyndham and Simon Clark.
Reviews with the most likes.
This was a really cool sci-fi novel from the 1950s about the collapse of society after (virtually) everyone is blinded by a comet. The blindness is just the first bit of bad news, there are also CARNIVOROUS, SLAPPING PLANTS.
It's so great.
The spiritual precursor to the zombie genre, and it happens to be better written than anything I've read in the genre.
I've had this book on a shelf for a very long time and finally got around to reading it. John Wyndham wrote “The Day of the Triffids” seventy years ago in 1951, but if he were alive and writing today, I don't think his story would be very different. Nothing about his post-apocalyptic vision of Britain seems out of place. The idea that large, chubby, venomous plants developed in secret somewhere in Russia might become the dominant species is only moderately more disturbing than some of the things that we humans are doing to ourselves. Wyndham suggests that a few humans would survive, but only be letting go of the past and changing behavior. What an optimist! I guess you had to be an optimist in post-war Britain. Nevertheless, the story is compelling, even when most of the characters are flat and little under-developed.
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2,773 booksWhen you think back on every book you've ever read, what are some of your favorites? These can be from any time of your life – books that resonated with you as a kid, ones that shaped your personal...