The Day of the Triffids
John Wyndham
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YouKneeK's Personal Library
LibraryThing member eleanor_eader

No matter how many times I come across this story, or in what incarnation, I always find the beginning unutterably creepy – to wake up blind, in a world that has fallen silent, to feel around the edges and discover that it’s not just a local condition, but one that spreads out in every

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direction, gives me, frankly, the heebs.

I’ve just reread this post-apocalyptic jewel sixteen years (ish) since the first time I picked it up. You can’t really forget the general plotline of The Day of the Triffids, (cosmic light show, blindness, sighted ‘survivors’, giant man-eating plants wandering about like psychopathic ents which lie in wait in hedgerows and gardens while the hero tries to figure out which of the myriad plans for the ‘future’ he encounters are viable) but I had entirely forgotten being delighted by Wyndham’s writing style, and by the sociological and philosophical course of the narrator’s thoughts and dialogue. And, really, just how well he conjures the air of menace brought about by ambulatory, stinging stalks. I mean, they sound preposterous, but if you saw one you’d run. Something about the fact that they are unreservedly lethal, and possess something that seems to lie between instinct and intelligence. I repeat, heebs.

Entirely worth reading. Entirely worth rereading. Just don’t expect me to do any gardening for a week or so.

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LibraryThing member edgeworth

I first read The Day of the Triffids in early high school, and I’m fairly sure that it’s the first apocalyptic/post-apocalyptic novel I ever read – and therefore the catalyst for my long-running interest in the genre, as both a reader and a writer. It’s highly regarded as a classic of

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science fiction, and easily his most well-known book. (I recall preferring The Kraken Wakes, but we’ll see when I re-read that one.)

The novel opens with the protagonist, Bill Masen, in a hospital in London after having surgery on his eyes. He wakes up one morning, head still swathed in bandages, to the sound of complete and utter silence. Nobody has come to give him breakfast or remove his bandages, and when he calls for help he receives only terrified screams and moans in return. Driven by fear and panic, Bill carefully removes his bandages himself, and soon discovers that a spectacular meteor shower the previous night – which he felt sulky about missing out on – has blinded all those who witnessed it. He staggers out of the hospital into a motionless London, spared the death that will now come to millions. (This was, incidentally, the inspiration for the wonderfully eerie opening scenes of the film “28 Days Later,” in which the protagonist awakes in an empty hospital and ventures out into a deserted London.)

The concept of most of the population being rendered blind – and the collapse of civilisation that follows – is excellent in and of itself, but much of the book also deals with the titular “triffids.” Bioengineered in the Soviet Union and subsequently spread across the world, triffids are alien-like mobile plants with poisonous whipping stings. Cultivated for their valuable oils, triffids are kept in nurseries and plantations all over Britain, and with nobody to tend their stakes and fences they soon break free and multiply, presenting a second challenge to the survivors of the disaster. Reading this book the second time, I was struck by how incongruous the two concepts are. They do relate to each other in the thematic sense of man being burned by his own creations (as it’s implied that the “meteor shower” was actually a malfunctioning weapons satellite) but for the most part it still feels quite odd, like two science fiction concepts crammed together in one book.

The other thing I noticed which I missed as a 14-year old was Wyndham’s sexism. There are a few moments where he appears to be giving lip service to the concept of feminism and modernity, such as when Bill rescues a captive sighted woman from her blind tormentor:

“I’m damned ashamed of myself. I’m not a bit like that, really – like you found me, I mean. In fact, I’m reasonably self-reliant, though you might not think it. But somehow the whole thing had got too big for me. What has happened is bad enough, but the awful prospect suddenly seemed too much to bear, and I panicked. I began to think that perhaps I was the only person left in the whole world who could see. It got me down, and all at once I was frightened and silly, I cracked, and I howled like a girl in a Victorian melodrama. I’d never, ever have believed it of me.”

And yet she did break down, and had to be rescued by a man. And then there’s the prim old-fashioned woman who insists that a community of survivors sticks to their Christian decency. Or the ditzy girl fascinated with Hollywood who believes that they only need to hang in a few weeks until the Americans come save them. Or the girl who sits sewing in the dark rather than figuring out how to start a “dirty old” generator, and finds herself on the receiving end of a spiel from one of the male characters. It’s not completely clear-cut, but in general, woman in The Day of the Triffids tend towards being hysterical or hopeless or ignorant, while men tend towards being resourceful or brave or forward-thinking. Even the male antagonist introduced towards the end is perfectly efficient and intelligent, just ruthless as well.

I don’t want to blame Wyndham too much for this, though – he doesn’t entirely reduce women to caricatures, and after all, the book was written in 1951 and the author himself was a product of the conservative stiff-upper lip British Empire. Which brings me to the second point, which is the fundamentally quaint Englishness of the novel. Another author accused Wyndham of writing “cosy catastrophes,” which I can sort of understand – despite featuring many suicides, reflections on the horror of losing a whole civilisation, outright murders and tragic deaths, he does tend to skim over the grisly nature of a post-apocalyptic world. In particular, after Bill leaves London and is driving through the countryside, he often mentions witnessing “many unpleasant sights,” yet never details what they are. It doesn’t do to dwell on it, you see? Let’s pull together, have some scones and this will all be over by Christmas. Okay, it’s not that bad – it’s not bad at all, in fact. The characters display resilience in the face of armageddon, but they don’t kid themselves about the long-term consequences of their situation. When I first read the book I chalked it up to that comfortingly nostalgic British attitude that any Australian schoolboy picks up from the ABC, but now that I think of the book as a product of its era, it’s probably a lingering effect of World War II stoicism. Speaking of which, the horror of blindness in the face of danger is reminiscent of the enforced blackouts of the Blitz, which probably also influenced scenes of a ruined and devastated London. Or perhaps – with one character quoting “Ozymandias,” and Bill comparing the ruins to Ancient Egypt and Greece – it simply speaks to that great British anxiety of the 1940s and 50s: imperial decline.

In spite of its flaws, I would never dream of giving The Day of the Triffids less than a glowing review and a 10/10 score. Perhaps this is because it is so firmly lodged in my childhood memory as one of the greatest books I ever read, or perhaps it’s because it really is a taut, convincing post-apocalyptic story that presents a number of fascinating themes and concepts tied into a highly readable and concise narrative. The Day of the Triffids is one of the finest science fiction novels ever written, and I can easily forgive Wyndham the occasional old-fashioned bump in the road.

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LibraryThing member pamelad

Bill Masen wakes up in a deserted hospital to find that the rest of the population has been blinded by the bright green radiation that lit up the sky the night before. Opportunistic flesh eating plants escape their plantations and roam the streets, killing people for food. Small groups of human

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survivors form colonies with the aim of perpetuating the species. First published in 1951, this is a cold-war nightmare, with genetic warfare taking the place of the nuclear holocaust. The stoical, matter-of-fact tone and the fifties British class-consciousness, however, lend a lightness that makes Triffids an easy read, reminiscent of John Buchan.

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LibraryThing member baswood

[The Day of the Triffids] - John Wyndham

Locked down in my house today and for the foreseeable future because of coronavirus I gazed out my window on a bright sunny day, no cars on the road no people walking; thinking about my next dash to the shops for food; the only thing missing was the Triffids.

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Reading a post apocalyptic novel especially one as good as this during the start of a world wide pandemic is in some ways a surreal or should that be a real experience. OK I have to admit that the vast majority of the worlds population has not gone blind and there are no killer carnivorous plants lurking in the hedgerows, but there is a killer disease out there, which is spreading rapidly and cannot be controlled.

The Day of the Triffids was published in 1951 and has suffered some criticism because of books like it being labelled 'cosy catastrophes'. This was because they were seen as a sub-genre where after an apocalyptic event a handful of survivors were able to lead relatively comfortable lives. This is certainly not the case with John Wyndham's book, it may lack the graphic violence of some more recent literature, but horrific scenes are never far away from the story line, which is a fight for survival tinged with a love story. The story opens with Bill Masen a biologist in hospital with wounds to his eyes caused by the Triffid plants in which he specialises and which are being grown for their rich oily products. His eyes are bandaged and so he does not see the spectacular celestial lights and explosions in the sky that nearly everyone else sees. When he peels off his bandages he discovers a world where everyone has been blinded. His explorations around London reveal that there are a very few people who have kept their sight and they soon coalesce into small groups, who have different ideas about how to survive. The big question is should they try and care for the blind population or should they abandon them and strike out on their own. The cities rapidly become uninhabitable piled high with corpses of the blind population who cannot survive alone. To add to the problems the Triffid plants are roaming the countryside killing indiscriminately and many groups who choose to hold-up in buildings for defence become ravaged by disease. Bill Masen falls in love with one of the sighted survivors; a woman more worldly than himself, but they become separated and Bill risks everything searching for her.

A good story that offers many opportunities for action and adventure as well as mystery and suspense, in what we might now label a road movie, however in my opinion it offers much more than that. Bill and the characters around him have to come to terms with a situation that is suddenly totally different. The golden years of prosperity and peacetime have been snatched away and although Bill is an intelligent man he does not have the capacity to lead and plan for the future and must listen to other peoples opinions as to a way forward. Adapt to survive becomes a framework for the future, but how to avoid the mistakes of the past. Arguments are bandied around in lively conversations and confrontations, that Wyndham dovetails into his story line. The book bristles with themes and moral dilemmas, not least Bills search for the woman he loves. The setting of the story is 1950's England, but it is not parochial in a way that H G Wells science fiction novels often seem. Wyndham's concerns are still very much with us today. The apocalypse in the story seems to have been man made, as characters refer to the star-wars like satellites of destruction that are rumoured to be circulating earth and the triffids have been harvested almost in secret despite their ability to maim and to kill. Questions are mooted as to how far civilised man must go backwards before he can start to make progress again, can he avoid a descent into savagery. How quickly can people adapt to a world that is fast becoming unrecognisable, how to deal with the vast majority of the population who cannot function or survive by themselves, how to offset the loneliness felt by such a sudden change and how to raise the spirits of a group faced with an impossible task.

There are no fancy literary devices on show here; Wyndham is content to focus the point of view on Bill Mansell, with some backstories filled in by other character. Bill tells his own story as a sort of personal record in chapter 2 and the book progresses lineally from then on. The story is always engaging even if the character of Bill is a little wooden. Men emerge as natural leaders with one group led by a woman failing spectacularly in its failure to adapt, there are however some strong female characters, with Wyndham's 1950's sexism not becoming offensive (in my opinion). What is now a little outdated is the belief by many of the protagonists that civilisation would be saved by the Americans, a view continually expressed was that people would only have to survive long enough before the American's would arrive to put things right, even though the evidence pointed to it being a world wide phenomenon. I am not so sure so many people would feel like that today, but it must have been more prevalent in the early1950s still less than a decade after the second world war.

A view expressed by one of the female characters thinking of the coming generation:

‘If I were a child now,’ she said, reflectively, ‘I think I should want a reason of some kind. Unless I was given it – that is, if I were allowed to think that I had been born into a world which had been quite pointlessly destroyed, I should find living quite pointless, too. That does make it awfully difficult because it seems to be just what has happened …’

There is much agonising as to what sort of a world the new generation would inherit, with an undeniable feeling that the previous generation has stripped it bare. In some respects I found The Day of the Triffids, particularly pertinent to todays events, it is not too difficult to imagine that the world around us in the 2020's will be quite different from what the previous couple of generations have enjoyed: thoughts and emotions that some parents must be aware of today. Perhaps there is not an apocalyptic event on the horizon, but something that might be recognisably close. I rate the book as a five star read.

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LibraryThing member RBeffa

I suspect there isn't anything new I can say in a review of Wyndham's "The Day of the Triffids" that hasn't already been said in the 120+ reviews already here on LT. I'm not about to read through them looking for some new point to be made. My reviews are primarily written for me as remembrances

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anyway. I can clearly see that the vast majority of readers have rated this as 4 to 5 stars. That is pretty impressive.

I picked up my rather tattered 30 year old paperback 3 months ago at our local library's book sale. My 1983 edition proclaims right there on the cover: "Hailed as the greatest science-fiction masterpiece of our time." Hmmmm I've been aware of Wyndham as a writer for a very long time. I read his 1968 novel "Chocky" when it was brand new and it was one of the earliest science fiction novels I remember reading as a teenager. I still have my copy. I've read a few more of his stories since then. I can't recall ever being disappointed and I usually remember who disappointed me as a reader! Triffids is a 1951 novel first serialized in Collier's magazine and was adapted into a 1963 movie and more recent BBC productions. Reading the novel I can see that some changes were made for the film. In the film, as I recall, the triffids were plants grown from alien spores that arrived on earth in a meteor shower which blinds everyone who looks at it. Alien invasion time. In the book the narrator, who is giving us his personal record, tells us that the origin of the triffids isn't precisely known, but they would seem to most likely be the result of genetic engineering carried out by the Soviets and the triffids were created and farmed to supply an oil that is superior to just about any other oil known. The end of the world begins when seeds are stolen and smuggled out of Russia and scattered on the winds across the world. Then everyone watches the sky to see a lightshow as the earth supposedly passes through the debris trail of a comet.

Civilization collapses. It collapses because nearly everyone on the planet is blinded. The eventual attack of the Triffids happens after and there is virtually no one able to stop them. But the remnants of humanity try to fight back.

Wyndham is a good writer, and the book is written in a kind of conversational style of writing that I find easy to read and that I like. The story is told by our main protagonist, a biologist who has survived the day, and the days and the years of the triffids. His is a unique story and his name is Bill Masen. The novel surprisingly has a few modern sensibilities to it. There really are only a handful of characters, and one of them is a pretty strong woman, Josella Playton.

The book has a very powerful beginning that really pulls the reader into the story and grabs your interest. One of the other strengths in the book is the examination of the fragility of modern society and the human condition and how quickly it can unravel, and the consequences of that. Most people seem to completely give up. Some don't, and there are various ideas about how humans and humanity can survive and hopefully fight back and rebuild. There's a near constant thread of optimism in here.

There were a few things that bothered me and I think even a casual reader couldn't help notice. It was entirely too coincidental that the Triffids decided that it was time to break out and attack humanity the very morning after the blinding of the population. The survivors, after years of dealing with the Triffids and still not understanding them wonder about that too. In retrospect I can see this as the man-created evil was just biding time and waiting for the chance for payback. I also found it bizarre while reading that the hot water, electricity, gas for stoves were completely gone the morning after. There is also the rather strange appearance of a devastating plague only a few days after the initial event. We are told there is no radio or television (no electricity). Other than a plot device I must wonder why. These odd things caused me to wonder if the whole business wasn't some plot gone wrong by a nefarious country or organization. We do get a bit more information by the end, some guesses, but not enough. I also found it bizarre that society collapsed and people leaped from windows within hours of being blinded. No one knew if it was permanent or why. It was pretty illogical to me and started bothering me, not immediately, but as I read and reflected on this quick and utter collapse of everything.

In sum, I wouldn't call this the greatest science-fiction masterpiece of our time. I don't think I'd even call it great, but it is certainly good. The end isn't really an end. It is a seminal early entry in apocalyptic fiction and deserves extra points for that.

One more thing. There are apparently two versions of the novel. There is the original British version and there is the Americanized version. The Americanized version changes words here and there but more importantly, chunks of the story are chopped out or abbreviated. I read the chopped version unknowingly. This is really irritating and according to one website about 12% of the original story is missing. Perhaps some of the "explaining" got the axe.

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LibraryThing member stellarexplorer

Written in 1951, The Day of the Triffids is surprisingly readable and enjoyable. The writing, the voice, is very nice-- understated and muted, but descriptive and straightforward. The subject -- a post-apocalyptic England -- is powerful and compelling, all the more so for its soldiering-on

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stiff-upper-lipism. I might make a comparison to Wilson Tucker's The Year of the Quiet Sun, or the works of J C Ballard. But I liked it more than these.

While I cannot say it is not at all dated, this is troublesome only in a small way, and much less so than any of the other SF books I've read recently from this era. For instance, much less so than the Asimov, Simak, Clement, and Vance I've read in recent years.

I would recommend it to anyone interested in the earlier days of the post-apocalyptic conversation, or just for a good, well-written read.

It was a rare book that had me return to my habit of decades-gone-by of grabbing it from my bedside table to finish it without getting out of bed in the morning. These day morning reading is rare for me without the aid of a cup of coffee.

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LibraryThing member louis.arata

Back in 1981, I stayed up late to watch The Day of the Triffids. It was a school night but I was willing to forgo sleep to watch this classic 1960s science fiction film. It was down to the last ten minutes when the TV station cut away for a commercial break. When it came back on, the station

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announcer said, “Now the exciting conclusion of The Day of the Triffids, where alien plants threaten to destroy the world, and the only way to stop them is sea water.”

Talk about your spoiler alert!

Recently, I came across the original novel by John Wyndham. No sea water this time, the novel focuses on the dissolution of society after most of the population is blinded by a curious meteor shower. The survivors – those that can see – are faced with how to rebuild the world in the face of such a calamity.

Wyndham thoughtfully examines the opposing viewpoints – what is the best way to proceed? Is it to take the moral high ground and take care of the blind, with no thought about tomorrow? Is it to set up petty fiefdoms or a military state? Is it to build self-contained compounds and drive off the outsider? Or is this the best opportunity to use education and intellect to correct the ills of society?

While there are exciting action sequences in the book, Wyndham doesn’t go for the thriller. He’s more interested in the philosophical questions. There are lengthy discussions about how society operates, which unfortunately turns some of the characters into talking heads. Only three characters – Bill Masen (the narrator), Josella, and Coker – are afforded any depth of personality.

In the novel, the triffids are not an alien life form but rather a genetically engineered plant capable of free movement. It’s equipped with a deadly stinger and uses appendages to communicate with one another through drumming on its trunk. Given the title, you would think the majority of the novel would focus on the triffids, but they are more of an opportunistic menace. Learning that the newly-blinded humans are helpless, the plants start stalking them for food. By keeping the triffids to the periphery of the main story, Wyndham makes them more sinister. It’s the concept that nature adapts and evolves to fill in a vacant niche, and now humans are lower down on the food chain.

I was reminded a lot of Jose Saramago’s novel Blindness, which also addresses the breakdown of society after a plague of blindness, and I wondered if he had read Wyndham. Also, the opening chapter of Bill Masen waking alone in a hospital apparently inspired Alex Garland’s screenplay, 28 Days Later.

Overall, a good read. Better than an alien menace. And no sea water.

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LibraryThing member clong

Reading this story if like watching a really good three hour long Twilight Zone episode. The Day of the Triffids is memorably effective storytelling: the first person narrative works well, the ebb and flow of tension is handled well, the urban scenes are very effective, the tantalizing hints of

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danger from the Triffids builds towards later large scale confrontations.

On the other hand, it is also clearly dated in important ways, with the role of the women characters, especially Josella, being exhibit A. Coker in some ways is the most interesting character in the book, and it would have been nice to follow a bit more of his story. Day of the Triffids reminded me of a very focused version of Lucifer's Hammer (i.e., in focusing primarily on how individuals, small groups, and large groups will respond post disaster). Having seen headlines about groups of thugs in New Orleans fighting, looting, and raping right before reading this book (headlines which in retrospect seem to have been exaggerated) really brought home how tenuous is (at least our confidence in) our collective ability to hold on to "civilization" in times of crisis.

One thing I really didn't find credible was that, within a couple days after the disaster, the Beadley party was focusing their attention on rewriting marriage covenants (so that the women could concentrate on their "natural function"--having babies). Even if some of them were already thinking about this, I just cannot believe that this would be the central tenant of their "This is how we're going to do things, if you're coming with us, you're signing on for this program" message.

Despite my reservations the effectiveness of the storytelling outweighs the weaknesses, and this memorable book is well worth the short investment of time.

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LibraryThing member andreablythe

One of the reasons I enjoy reading post-apoc books is the aspect of how one survives in a world that has fallen apart. Triffids provided this and more. The book follows a John, a man fortunate to miss out on a great cosmic display of lights due to an injury and thus in one of the rare few who does

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not go blind. This is the primary disaster, which is quickly followed by the threat of the triffids, over-grown genetically modified walking (yes, you read that right, walking) plants cultivated for economic reasons. John wades through the disaster and meets various groups surviving in its wake along the way.

What makes this book more than just a story about the apocalypse is the philosophical bent throughout, as the characters not only survive, but choose how to shape their own survival in a way they can live with. How much should you sacrifice to save others, if you can? Is it better to focus on saving as many people as possible, or only the few who are truly valuable? How do you cultivate hope for the future when there seems to be none? What shape should a new formed society take after a disaster of such epic proportions? What myths do we tell the children who grow up after?

Though the triffids at first glance seem ridiculous, exaggerated, Wyndham puts just enough science into their back story to make them probable in society focused on economic gain, and though the date of the book means that some of the portrayals of women are a bit antiquated, Triffids overall is a fascinating and entertaining read.

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LibraryThing member melannen

I tried reading this novel, knowing nothing other than "apocalyptic classic" and "deadly plants" and I didn't get past chapter two. When the blind people start killing their children and then themselves. Because obvs. it is better to be dead than disabled. And not only the MC, but the story-world

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and the author, very clearly agree that this is the morally correct action to take and the only practical response.

That's not just blatant and enraging ablism, that's so bad that it's failure of suspension-of-disbelief and basic writing skills. I threw the book at the wall & have not even attempted to finish it; I refuse to wade through stupid that deep even for genre research purposes.

If a book that dehumanizes the disabled this badly is "surprisingly modern" and "contemporary" than I weep for the modern world.

I keep coming back to : why? why did he write it that way? The story where 90% of the Earth's population is killed by visible radiation from space, and only the people who couldn't see the light survived - many of whom would have been already disabled and quite capable of being awesome anyway - could have been an amazing SF story. The story where 90% of the Earth's population is blinded and they have to adapt to disability while fighting alien plants, could have been an amazing SF story.

And yet he wrote a story about the burden of the disabled upon poor, poor able-bodied people instead, and wasted every single particle of the potential that was there in the idea.

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LibraryThing member RandyStafford

My reactions to reading this novel in 2006.

Brian Aldiss referred to the work of John Wyndham as "cosy catastrophe". I don't think, in retrospect, he meant that the disaster's of Wyndham's works are improbably nice and clean. I think he was referring to the narrative strategy Wyndham used in this

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and The Kraken Awakes: first person narratives centering around one or two individuals who have limited knowledge and explanation of the disaster they face and limited means of dealing with it. (For instance, the narrator here has no definite proof that the blindness which strikes most of humanity is the result of satellite weapons -- an interesting idea for the beginning of the satellite age -- or that the lethal plague which breaks out after the blindness is an engineered disease)

This stands in direct contrast to the best-seller idiom of later American works like Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's Lucifer's Hammer. (I don't know enough about styles of the time to know if something similar to Niven and Pournelle existed in disaster fiction prior to this book.) John Christopher, another English writer from the time, fits into this style, and a prior American work, George R. R. Stewart's Earth Abides, does too. In fact, as the story progressed and we heard about how the houses and roads and bridges of England were being eroded away by nature, I was very much reminded of Stewart's novel.

Tonally and thematically, though, there is nothing cosy or comfortable about this novel. There is something very visceral about the blinding of most of humanity, an unclean disaster that requires, for disaster fiction, an unusual amount of lifeboat ethics in that the narrator and some of his fellow survivors realize they are not doing the blind any good by temporarily saving them from death.

Wyndham's genius, of course, is combining the blindness with the "invasion" of genetically engineered, ambulatory, poisonous triffids. As with Wyndham's Re-Birth and The Midwich Cuckoos, we are constantly reminded of the Darwinian struggle for life, of competing species and supplanters in our midst. As the narrator memorably remarks in a book of many memorable, philosophical line, custom and tradition have been long mistaken for natural law.

An Wyndham strips things to basics. In what may be a cliche, the breeding and reproductive capabilities of the surviving women are of paramount importance, the possibility of polygamy discussed. It's clichéd, but it's cliched because that would be a very realistic and natural concern. Wyndham, to the annoyance of some feminist readers of the novel, says women want to have children. It is a paramount concern of Josella in the hazardous world she finds herself. Again, I think that's realistic. Wyndham embraces a practical kind of feminism when he says that women will have to learn to pull their own weight, learn, as they did during World War II, how to do many things they are used to depending on men for.

There are a surprisingly large number of on stage suicides in this novel, again I think realistically. There is the fighting of triffids -- not successfully. The novel ends in the stalemate of the English survivors retreating to the Isle of Wight and hoping, by organizing their society to provide enough leisure for scientific research, for the hero (a triffid expert) and others to figure out how to defeat the triffids. The Darwinian struggle never really ends. Alternative methods of political organization are tried by survivors in London and elsewhere. (London must be one of the most trashed cities in sf since it had a good head start in that direction with H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds.) The sinister Torrance suggests a form of feudalism. There is an implication, given his military stores and his quick and calm shooting of early plague victims, that Torrance may have some connection to the pre-disaster military.

A justly classic work.

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LibraryThing member AGangi

What I love about this book is that it takes a totally crack idea (everyone goes blind and is chased by man-eating trees!) and slowly reveals a situation that makes everything very plausible in this fictional near-future.

LibraryThing member lmichet

I'm on a Post-Apocalyptic Fiction kick right now, and I got through this one in a single day-- stayed glued to it until I finished it at two in the morning. So yeah, it's pretty excellent. Most excellent, I think, is that it's so readable. This is the book that started the whole

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sci-fi-horror-apocalypse genre-- the genre where mankind dies at its own hands, not at the end of a space-laser muzzle-- and I can understand why. This is the kind of book which seems like it could spawn a load of imitators. It's clear, compelling, and deeper than it seems.

Why deeper? Let's examine. First of all there the whole bio-warfare hubris-of-the-humans angle. Secondly, there's an ecological angle-- what are we doing to this world, and what would the world be like without us? The book is particularly chilling in this regard-- London five years after we leave, for example, frightens the characters so badly that it grips us, too. Then there is, surprisingly enough, a fairly intense class angle here. Wyndham shows us three escape teams in London: the upper- or upper-middle-class escape team, operating out of a university and dragging along a professor of sociology, plotting scientifically for the replenishing of the race; the lower-class escape team, which insists that the government will be along to save them and which suffers the consequences of extreme ignorance; and, finally, bare gimpses of a military technique which is highly absurd and intensely cruel. His judgements on which class and way of life is best suited to save the world in an hour of apocalypse-- and the way in which he chooses to express those ideas-- are interesting indeed, and could do with some examination and criticism, probably. Also interesting are his observations on gender. The only angle, I think, relevant to our modern society that he actually leaves out is race. The England that suffers the triffids is a very homogenous one. If anyone is to write a modern post-apocalypse story, I'm sure that it would have to cover racial conflict and cultural desperation in order to be relevant. But none of that is here. At any rate, it was written in fifties.

What is most surprising about this book-- about its language, the way it chooses to look at the situation-- is that it really does, however, seem totally modern. He was writing about a future-- a 1970s/1980s future or so, I believe, since the main character mentions that his father fought Hitler. Though the major concerns of this society-- food production-- are not our major concerns, the attitude in general still seems extremely modern and relevant. I don't know if this sense will persist throughout the coming decades, but I hope it does. This book could do a lot of people a dose of good-- a extremely interesting and well-written dose of good.

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LibraryThing member Cecilturtle

A surprisingly compelling read, this books still resonates today despite all the of the cheesy cinematographic attempts. Although the premise is rather extraordinary, it is recounted with enough sense that it is believable. Most interesting, of course, is the description of social interactions:

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everything from modes of government to social mores, natural instincts to conditioned reactions, it is a very clever survey of human kind. Definitely a classic.

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LibraryThing member elliepotten

"... if it were a choice for survival between a triffid and a blind man, I know which I'd put my money on."

This was my second John Wyndham novel (my first being The Chrysalids) and once again I found myself in the grip of an absorbing, well-plotted, complex and all-round interesting story. It

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didn't scare me stupid - not after the first chapter, at least - like it did some people, but it did make me think and I thought the triffids were fascinating. In actual fact, the plot wasn't at all what I was expecting. I thought there was some kind of alien conspiracy at work, and that the triffids were something akin to the tripod thingies in The War of the Worlds. In actual fact, they are bio-engineered carnivorous plants with long stings that lash out at their victims, delivering a deadly welt to the face or hands. They can also, bizarrely, raise themselves out of the soil and 'walk', lurching across the ground, and even seem to communicate. Probably the biggest surprise for me as I started reading was the fact that the triffids are already a huge presence on earth before the book begins. In some areas they're a menace; in others, large nurseries exploit their potential for scientific and medicinal use, and in affluent countries, properly tethered and with their stings regularly docked, they're a popular garden novelty. The events of the novel don't in themselves create a triffid rampage - they just send them to the top of the food chain...

The novel opens with protagonist Bill waking up in a London hospital the night after a brilliant green meteor shower. Not only has he not been able to watch the freak cosmic firework display that the rest of the world's been raving about, thanks to having treatment after a near miss in his job working as a triffid researcher, but the entire hospital seems to have shut down since he fell asleep. It quickly becomes apparent that something's very wrong, and when he plucks up the courage to remove his own eye bandages he realises he's the only person who can still see. All around him, other patients are waking up blind, and chaos ensues as panicking people stumble through the streets. Within hours order has broken down and Bill has already witnessed several suicides by people who have understood the futility of their situation. These early chapters are perhaps the most harrowing of them all, as despair sinks in and people realise that there's no one to help them survive and that at best they're probably going to starve to death in their homes.

Aaaand then the triffids begin to arrive, lurching in from the surrounding countryside, breaking out of their nurseries and homing in on their suddenly vulnerable sustenance of choice. For Bill and the companions he acquires, still sighted, well aware of the dangers triffids pose at the best of times, a little care is all that's required. For the blind, there is no such chance of survival. Actually, the triffids are probably less scary than I expected them to be. The stings are instantly lethal, so they're actually quite merciful as far as horror-novel monsters go. For people who are helpless and waiting to die, death by triffid - especially a death that can't be seen coming, can't be anticipated and feared - is almost a better way to go, I'd have said. There are still some horrendous attacks, some really heartbreaking and heartpounding moments, but I should have known better than to think Wyndham would resort to cheap thrills and relentless carnage...

Mostly the dystopian element of the novel comes from the blindness, the disintegration of society and the attempt at rebuilding something from the remnants of life as we know it. The triffids are a menace, but they're almost a side-plot a lot of the time, and in some ways that's probably what makes Wyndham's novels more subtle and less scary than some of his sci-fi-horror peers. As in The Chrysalids, the writing is fantastic, the plot is thoughtful, the characters (and their reactions to the crisis) are complex and varied, and the story feels surprisingly modern given that it was first published in 1951; it has that timeless era-vague quality that makes all the best books so enduring. I'm not sure which of these books I've preferred so far, but I still have The Kraken Wakes and The Midwich Cuckoos on my shelves and there are more at the library, so I'm definitely not done with Wyndham yet!

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LibraryThing member CBJames

Tell me if this sounds familiar. A man wakes up from a coma in a hospital bed. He soon realizes that the hospital is deserted. He goes outside and finds that he is the only "survivor" of a disaster that has left the streets of London empty and quiet. He is pursued by thoughtless killers who want

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nothing but to do him in and eat him. He finds a handful of other survivors and tries to escape London and find somewhere safe. The band of survivors have to avoid a militaristic group bent on forcing everyone to join their new feudal like colony. Many of them die, but they make it to a remote farmhouse where they can remain until help arrives.

To his credit, Alex Garland the screenwriter for 28 Days Later has stated that The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham inspired his script. Reading one and viewing the other is like seeing how two artist interpret the same basic story 50 years apart. If you liked one, there is a very good chance that you'll like the other.

The set-up for The Day of the Triffids is extensive. The reader is given the back story in a series of flashbacks so it does not hinder the narrative much, but there is a lot to know before one can fully understand what is going on. Triffids, a new type of plant that may have been the result of Soviet biological experimentation, are accidentally released on the world when a large dose of their seeds is blown up. The seeds spread with the winds to all of the continents. The triffids produce an oil that is edible and highly useful so no one is concerned at first. After ten years, the plants reach maturity and begin to walk around. The have a sort of three legged root system that lets them move about like a man on crutches and enables them to hunt. They also have a ten foot long poisoned stinger capable of killing a man in a single dose. However fearful this may sound, the triffids are plants and can simply be cut, trimmed of their poisoned stingers, and safely kept within garden walls. Until a mysterious green comet appears and blinds everyone who looks at it. This is where the story opens--the hero and narrator, Bill Masen, wakes in a hospital bed and removes the bandages from his eyes which prevented him from looking at the comet and made him one of the very few sighted people left in London and the world.

Bill Masen delivers all of this back story while he wonders around London looking for food and for other sighted people. Even with such complex flashbacks, the story never becomes boring. In fact, by the end of the book I was hoping the author would give the characters a break. Like many end of civilization novels, The Day of the Triffids becomes a way to examine possible societies. What would you want the world to be like if you could start over from scratch? Bill Masen joins a group that intends to start a new community to repopulate the world by abandoning the blind and marrying three women to each man. He is soon forced to join a different group that refuses to abandon the blind by chaining one sighted person as a guide to small groups of blind people. Next he encounters a group that insists on living like Christians in a sort of monastery, caring for the blind and farming the land. In the end, he finds temporary safety on an isolated farm with a small group of sighted and blind people. Meantime, the triffids are growing in number every day.

If some of the particulars of The Day of the Triffids strike contemporary readers as far fetched, they are all handled so well that the result is an entertaining and believable thriller. Mr. Wyndham writes science fiction but he is concerned with character. So much so that the reader can identify with the people fighting blindness and carnivorous plants and is quickly drawn into the story. I'm not sure that The Day of the Triffids is better than Mr. Wyndham's novel The Chrysalids, but it certainly is more epic. While Chrysalids dealt with one community, one possible society of the future, Triffids deals with several possible societies along with the end of the civilization. Both make for interesting reading.

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LibraryThing member majkia

Horror tale about a dystopia where nearly everyone goes blind from watching a spectacular meteorite display. Holds up well and is just as scary now as it was back in the day when I first read it. Also, the original movie is terrific.

LibraryThing member DeltaQueen50

A classic Sci-Fi story from 1951, The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham tells an interesting post-apocalyptic story that, although somewhat dated, kept me riveted to the pages. This story is easy tp pinpoint as one from the early 1950’s from both it’s style and themes. Mankind being brought

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to the brink of extinction both by their own folly and a mysterious comet shower that envelopes the earth and causes blindness in all who watched it..

I particularly liked the style in which the author chose to tell his story, sort of an unemotional monologue, with the main character coming across as somewhat detached and remote. The incredible tale that he has to tell is all the more horrific through his simple statements. That this is a sci-fi classic, I knew, but what was rather unexpected was the love story aspect, which endeared the main characters and made the reader want to root for their success.

The Day of the Triffids is much more than a sci-fi story, the philosophical ramblings of the main character, the picture the author paints of society breaking down, the idea of nature seeking revenge on mankind all helped to elevate this book. I found myself hunching my shoulders and looking around carefully as the tension in the book grew, the idea of blindness as described by the author was truly terrifying and certainly caused me to feel some of the paranoia that the book dishes out. A truly brilliant concept and one that many other authors have taken note of and used. The Day of the Triffids is an unsettling but thoroughly entertaining read.

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LibraryThing member timspalding

Worthwhile and early example of a genre—far better than, say, Earth Abides.

The main problem is the mechanism. The triffids and the meteor blinding aren't related. I suspect most reader assume they must be—a notion that would make the triffids taking over the world so much more threatening. But,

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ultimately, the triffids aren't invading aliens; they're just walking plants the soviets, or someone, engineered, and the meteors were just meteors.

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LibraryThing member mamzel

This book is 60+ years old but really could have been written yesterday. Well meaning botanist creates a new species of plants to be processed into oil for food. His plane, however, crashes and the spores are released into the atmosphere spreading all over England and presumably the rest of the

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world. These plants, called triffids, are tolerated in everyone's gardens but develop alarming properties of being ambulant and scavengers. Another freak occurrence happens. Green lit objects fall from the sky attracting everyone to view them with drastic results. Everyone (including birds and animals) become blind except for the rare exception.

Our hero is one such exception. He wakes up in the hospital bandaged up from eye surgery. He heard everyone exclaiming about the green lights and is a little jealous he can not witness them. However, this morning, no one answers his bell, he hears no one in the hall, indeed no sound from outside either. He is due to have the bandages removed any way so he unwraps himself and finds himself the only sighted person.

We follow our hero as he tries to determine the best way to find other sighted people and create a safe place to start civilization over. As one usually discovers in post-apocalyptic stories that events like this bring out the best and worst in people and we see it all.

One of the cute, alarming, interesting themes in the story is how some people are convinced that these events spared America and that help was on its way. Being that the book was written in 1951, I am sure that World War II still had an impact on the morale of the English.

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LibraryThing member Bookmarque

Even though I like Wyndam’s other book The Chrysalids and post-apocalyptic fiction in general, I hadn’t read this book because triffid and tribble are too similar and tribbles are known for their silliness and so triffids got tarred with that brush. In reality (if you can so apply that word to

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either triffids or tribbles), triffids are anything but silly. I expected more triffid action though and I got more introspection and mild pontification instead. Which doesn’t mean I didn’t enjoy the book, I did, I just had to readjust my expectations.

In many ways, this story reminded me of Earth Abides by George R. Stewart. It is introspective and philosophical, light on action and violence and features a hero who is sensitive and at times unsure of himself. Both heros escape their respective plagues by serendipity and wake to this new, destroyed world. Both are level-headed enough to cope pretty well and become leaders of their own little bands, while dodging all manner of dangers.

Bill gets put into harm’s way more directly than does Ish, though and I was surprised that he was taken prisoner so early. I didn’t feel that it was hopeless or in any way dire though, but it was a nice little jolt of emotion. As was the time during Bill’s search for Josella. Their reunion was a nice feel-good moment in a story that otherwise is pretty down-beat. Ditto knowing Corker’s fate.

In some ways, Bill is pragmatic, knowing that helping the blinded people is only delaying the inevitable; starvation, disease, death. His capacity for human kindness gets the better of him a few times, but he can still put himself on the moral high ground in comparison to the red-headed man who he avoids when he first sees him, but is confronted by later in the book. I like his canny escape there. I also like his and Josella’s decision-making and collaboration. Also Corker’s ideas about the different choices of governing people in the wake of this disaster and prioritizing the support of thinkers and teachers while some modern conveniences still exist. Otherwise, no one will have the leisure time available to devote to pure research (esp into triffid eradication) and technology repair. Astute. I’m sure that the uber-religious didn’t like the fact that their whole dogma about sexual morality wouldn’t be practical or particularly useful in the new world. Breeding without artificial social construction would be a big hurdle for some (are you advocating free-love??!!).

It does suffer from a few things that don’t sit right with me though. The first one, the miracle helicopter pilot is the worst. Why couldn’t he have just made the guy a former pilot instead of expecting us to believe that some random hick could find, figure out and fly a helicopter without a single mishap? Strange and totally not feasible. Another is the duality of the disasters. The blindness would have been one thing, but the addition of the already present triffids is kind of a stretch, especially that Wyndham never tied the two together definitively. Oh sure, we suspect, at least I did, that the “meteor shower” would turn out to be some alien device and the triffids their advance team, all designed to wipe out earth’s biologicals so the aliens could have a nice clean planet. To confound matters, no concrete explanation is given, which in one way works to convey the off-balance sense of being that the characters must be facing, but doesn’t work for the more fact-dependent reader. And lastly, the relegation of females to drudges, dopes and dogmatists. Even our relatively robust heroine needed to be rescued and the dopier moments all feature fatuous women and hectoring (lecturing) men. Kind of tired, but at least women weren’t immediately reduced to commodities and hoarded together to be raped (Blindness, I’m looking at you).

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LibraryThing member sturlington

Note: There are some spoilers in this review.

I've seen this apocalyptic novel referred to as a "cozy catastrophe." It's easy to see why the term cozy would be applied to it. For a large part of the book, the main characters hunker down in an English farmhouse in the lush countryside. The only thing

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that spoils their pastoral post-apocalyptic life are the hordes of Triffids -- giant, carnivorous, locomotive plants with deadly stingers whose origins are unknown but appear to have been genetically engineered -- besieging the gates. But while the Triffids are more numerous than the surviving humans, they are not more clever, and they can be kept at bay with diligence. By today's standards for apocalyptic fiction, this story does seem quaint. Violence and death are present, but kept at arm's length. Still, I think The Day of the Triffids is far too unsettling to qualify as "cozy"; it's just more subtle that what we're used to.

I remember how shocked I was when I read this for the first time many years ago, and realized that even before the Triffids lurched on the scene, everyone in the world goes blind as the result of watching a peculiar green meteor shower. This is the real catastrophe that destroys civilization and gives the Triffids the upper hand (so to speak). All of our advances and progress as a species are wiped out literally overnight by such a simple thing. This is not the only apocalyptic book to explore blindness as a catalyzing event, but it was the first one that I read. It wasn't that the idea was so terrifying, but that it was so isolating. Even the few remaining sighted are cut off because they can't reveal their ability to see for fear of being conscripted by the blind.

Bill Masen is in the hospital, eyes bandaged from a recent Triffid attack (he works with them), when the calamity occurs. The first few chapters, when he realizes the extent of what has happened and then wanders through an eerily quiet London observing small but heartbreaking scenes of the newly blind, are bleak and disquieting. The overwhelming feeling of The Day of the Triffids is not terror or coziness, but resignation and a gloomy sense of loss. Also regret, as the characters come to realize that humankind must be responsible for what has happened to them.

The Triffids are never a truly terrifying threat, as zombies might have been (although they resemble zombies in many ways). They just are able to multiply and relentlessly besiege the survivors. It doesn't seem cozy to imagine how tiring it must be, always keeping your guard up against millions of persistent plants. And the novel offers no satisfying resolution (unlike the movie), only a determination by the characters to take their world back. We don't know if they will succeed.

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LibraryThing member NKSCF

Following the introduction of a blindness epidemic brought on, supposedly, by the appearance of a meteor shower, England and the entire world are now at the mercy of the triffids, plants created through genetic engineering that have helped humankind profit off of them until mutations in the species

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caused them to become undesirable. More of a cozy catastrophe than a post-apocalyptic novel, The Day of the Triffids is amazingly written by John Wyndham, one of the greatest authors England has ever produced and this novel showcases his skills brilliantly. A wonderful find for science fiction fans and horror fans alike.

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