A brilliant story, written well. If you haven't read it yet, consider yourself lucky. ( )

What a surprise! This is the first classic apocalyptic sci-fi that I've read that I'd actually call a good book - and I've read a lot of them (The Drowned World, The Plague, Alas Babylon, On the Beach, World Abides, etc).

It was written in the 50's and yet it is as "modern" feeling as any post 1980s apocalyptic novel (well, other than the smoking part maybe). And, unlike Blindness by Saramago (which has a similar theme), this story is realistic in the depiction of human behavior. Sure, there will be violence; sure there will be death; but also there will be people who help others, and people will survive and people will be "human".

Kudos to the author for stepping out of his era and writing a novel that was mostly free of sexism and cultural/ethnocentrism. Not that these topics weren't covered - they were - but they were treated with intelligence and an acknowledgment that these would all be issues to be addressed in a "new world order". ( )

I can't believe I've never read this classic disaster novel until now. Wyndham's tale of hope at the end of the world as we know it is a well-paced spine-tingling tale of nature's ultimate revenge on man and is a cautionary tale of bioterrorism backfiring on us. Ultimately the book is a tale of human survival against all odds, and how people react in a disaster and turn into their baser selves. I read the book in a weekend and it has stayed with me. If you haven't read this I would highly recommend it. ( )

Opening Sentence: '...When a day that you happen to know is Wednesday starts of by sounding like Sunday, there is something seriously wrong somewhere...'

Bill Masen has been in hospital with his eyes covered in bandages for a week. Wednesday is the day the bandages were suppose to come off. But no one comes into his room and there are strange shuffling noises and distant screams. The evening before everyone had been watching a huge meteor display in the sky, he was a bit grumpy that he was unable to see what was happening. Bill begins to wonder if the medical staff are sleeping in because they are tired from watching the display. He takes off his bandages himself and finds that his eyes have been saved and he can see. Very quickly he finds that he is one of only a handful of people left in the world who is not blind. Everyone who watched the meteor shower is now totally blind. The world has come to a standstill. And then there are the triffids - huge, venomous, walking plants - that stalk, kill and feed off humans. It is no longer the time of the human - it is now the day of the triffids. Survivors need to survive and rebuild civilisation - only how? All the usual suspect groups are here - the humanitarians, the religious, the military and the everyday 'decent' humans. And then there are the triffids.......!

This is classic science fiction. I cannot count the number of times I have read this book over the years - I never, ever tire of it. I get something new out of it each time. This time I thought about the genetic engineering of our produce - could we possibly create our own "Triffids" by mucking around with the genes of plants. Also could the source of mankind's demise be silently circling our heads in one of the hundreds of satellites set in orbit around the planet? ( )

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 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. ( )