Name: The Day of the Triffids
Rating: 3.804347826086957 (92 reviews)
ISBN: 9780812967128

John Wyndham

The classic scifi alien invasion novel tells the suspenseful tale of the Triffid attack on Earth, which wreaks havoc across the planet as a grotesque form of plant life, harmful to humankind, terrorizes human civilization. Reader's Guide included. Reprint. 25,000 first printing.

The Day of the Triffids

When a freak cosmic event renders most of the Earth's population blind, Bill Masen is one of the lucky few to retain his sight. The London he walk is crammed with groups of men and women needing help, some ready to prey on those who can still see. But another menace stalks blind and sighted alike. With nobody to stop their spread, the Triffids - mobile plants with lethal stingers and carnivorous appetites - seem set to wipe out the survivors. The Day Of The Triffids is perhaps the most famous catastrophe novel of the twentieth century and its startling imagery of desolate streets and lurching, lethal plant life retains its power to haunt today. 'Has captivated readers for half a century' - Guardian

ikkychan

Just finished reading "The Day of the Triffids" by John Wyndham. The third book of his this year, and quite considerably one of my favorite. This speculative fiction, published in the early 1950's, carried the same theme as the two books i previously read: life as we know it has been threatened with complete destruction by a series of unfortunate (and mysterious) events, where the people left has to re-think their traditional western ways as their fundamental philosophies of life was vehemently challenged by the inconvenient existence of a disguised, subversive, dangerous entity; in this case, it took the form of highly intelligent, 9-foot tall carnivorous plant. William (Bill) Masen, our protagonist, awoke one day to find his world has come to an end: more than half of the human on Earth are blind right after casual meteor showing, except a handful of people, himself included among the lucky ones. He quickly learns how it started an outright change of societal schemes: constitutional law has proved impotent as no one is capable of giving any kind of immediate assistance and protection against the disaster, resources are being depleted in an alarmingly fast rate, there this threat of deadly typoid-like infection emerging within groups of survivors, but most disturbing of all is the whole existence of the hordes of 'triffids', a strange ambulatory plant armed with lethal stinger, which prayed among the helpless and the blinds. Brian Aldiss, his fellow science-fiction writer, famously described John Wyndham as 'the master of the cosy catastrophe', marks how Wyndham's books are widely different than others from the sci-fi and dystopian genre. It's true, his stories lacks the bombastic space battle and fantastical journey to the outer galaxy, but it doesn't make it any less of an impressive tale of survival and struggle of dominance of the humankind against an alien, imminent threat from a more powerful species. Instead of involving his characters in a grandiloquent technological adventure, he puts them in the center of contemplative observation in opposition to a rapidly changed environment, filled with different discussions about the meaning of life and the narrative tension between the striving to maintain a degree of human morality and the necessity to cast aside said morality in order to survive. His books throws all the right questions one has to envisage in a dystopian future. (Well, at the very least, Aldiss, Wyndham CAN write better, more complex female characters as opposed to your two-dimensional, boring darlings).

Edwin Lang

In this classic tale, more horror than science fiction, most of the world wake up blind after having watched what had been billed as a once-in-a-lifetime spectacular light-show comet shower. The global blinding may have been caused, through satellite technology, by an act of malice. The main character, Bill Wessen, escapes this fate by having been hospitalized by a Triffid sting, a Triffid being a walking plant that kills its target with a slap with its long poisonous tongue to the face or exposed body part. Waking from recovery for his treatment and surgery Wessen enters a dystopian world of blind, confused and angry people, a world that is rapidly decaying and increasingly heading for barbarianism. Day of the Triffids has a very strong winner-takes-all flavour. It was written in 1951, not long after the USA traumatized the world by obliterating Nagasaki and Hiroshima in a calculated way to stop the war with Japan, now that Germany had been defeated. Can things get any worse than this, one might ask? John Wyndham says, yes indeedy, and proceeds to use his fiction to document the utter collapse of the world’s societies and civilizations. I grant that The Day of the Triffids is undoubtedly a classic and is thrilling high-school students around the world, but I found it ultimately boring. And these are my reasons why. Joelle Payton enters the story as someone we might like if we were to meet her then, and now. Something of a bonne vivante, she missed the Comet extravaganza by laying comatose after having gotten, ironically, blindly drunk at a party. Although she’s only in her early 20s she had already become notoriously well-known for having written a scandalous – and presumably fictional – sex book. In the early 1950s post-war sentiment had woman back in the kitchens raising families and being terrifically virtuous and, for-his-eyes-only, sexually appealing. Payton becomes Wessen’s partner, and as the story progresses, love interest because one can safely assume there are few non-blind white-knights out there to protect a girl like her amid a blinded but rapacious population. But in spite of her being perceived as slightly flawed she comes across nevertheless as an impressively independent, smart and resourceful woman. So, one could think that an author might build on this to round out this potential dynamic duo. I was disappointed then to see this attractive young woman transformed into that classic 1950s stereotype: wife, mother and support-for-the-hardworking-procreating-husband. I don’t know if this happened because John Wyndham had been catering to a 1950s male readership that preferred a conservative outlook, with men firmly in charge. The book, at least for me, didn’t reflect the signs of the times – presence of more highly educated women; the emergence of really magnificent women such as Dorothy Hodgkin who ultimately received the Nobel Prize in 1964 for Chemistry; feminism (e.g. Dora Russell); the coming exuberance of the 1960s; and, that wonderful period when woman burned their bras. Wyndham almost seemed down on humanity’s prospect, even though there were goings-on that suggested otherwise, such as the United Nations on one hand which was already going strong with all kinds of humanity-bolstering activities, and new nations – fifty-one I think – that were popping up everywhere with imperialism’s colonialism’s collapse. Even though he had one character say ‘the race is worth preserving’, Wyndham’s first decision was to abandon the cities. In the chapter titled Shirning, quite well into the book, he has another character imagining the creation of a myth explaining how their world came to its end through a combination of blinding ‘comets’ and the Triffids: the myth being, “the world that was wonderfully clever but so wicked that it had to be destroyed”. Part of the problem with my being unimpressed though is may be that I have in a way become immune to dystopian tales with having developed a ridiculous and way too complacent confidence that the people who own us (in Canada – how many own multiple homes, what percentage own the wealth) – this ‘1 percent’ or whatever, through their greed will actually keep humanity safe, because they themselves have too much to lose. It hadn’t been that way when Wyndham wrote this book and his worry was palpable. When Putin threatened using nuclear weapons in his confrontation with Ukraine in 2022, people on the street, and especially the young, seemed to have shrugged, perhaps asking, 'Seriously?' Elon Musk and all you uber-rich of the world, we thank you for keeping us safe. And finally, yet another problem I had with the book is that I like people. I think we humans are rather neat. So, for me science fiction needs a visionary aspect to it, and has to even embody a positive, encouraging spin. It is true that we may probably be living in a negative era where we seem to find dissatisfaction with almost everything (including, alas, books) and everyone (including, alas, certain authors). The author Robert Musil (in his Man Without Qualities) says we go through these periods of negativity from time to time and they can last for as long as half a century – good books therefore should be for us antidotes. I would like to have seen in this story, for example, Bill and Joelle deciding that she would become, for example, the Literature-expert-and-revivalist – a specialist and perhaps someone who even encourages blind people to memorize books as they had in ancient times Homer’s Iliad and the Odyssey – and then having this, now, dynamic and fearless couple, raid libraries, in a presumably high-risk setting where marauders are on the prowl for healthy woman of child-bearing age, Triffids who wanted to slap you dead and with buildings disintegrating all around one, meanwhile carting truckloads of never-to-be-lost books back to their moated island. All this while perhaps balancing an infant on her (or, his) hips. It would have created the framework for a future and added some needed seat-of-the-pants excitement. Edwin

Sarah Sammis

Aocalyptic decay of sentiments and landscapes. Reorientation of values. Similar to the Walking Dead in many ways. Wonder how influential it has been to other Zombie / end of the world works and how much apocalypse work had been published before this. 

Jess Cheung

Charlotte Dann

Really enjoyed. Finished and longed for more! 

James Bedford

Krystal 

Dani

Anne Keaky

Day of the Triffids

Joe Mccaffery 

Catherine Andrews 

Frank Huang

Rowan Moran

Anna Horsley

Gabe Cortez

Alma Arellano

Anita Irsevic

Stephanie O'Sullivan

carlos

The triffids are a monstrous species of stinging plant; they walk, they talk, they dominate the world. The narrator of this novel wakes up in hospital to find that, by missing the end of the world, he has survived to witness a new world. But the new world that awaits him is fantastic and horrific.

The Day of the Triffids

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