Greatly entertaining. One of the the first post nuke books a ever read when I was a teen. I started the trend. ( )

Written in the early days of science fiction, Day of the Triffids suffers from lack of editing. Wyndham's final conclusion, that helping people should be weighed against self-interest, especially if those people are blind, is something I ultimately disagree with. Still, Triffids is a unique book and worth reading. ( )

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. ( )

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 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. ( )

Before I read this classic novel by John Wyndham, all I knew about it was that it involved killer plants. In actuality, the plants, which are known as triffids, are merely a complication; the sudden onset of blindness among most of the world population is the more serious problem. There are some suggestions that the triffids are somehow behind the blindness, but these suggestions are not explored in much detail. Survival of the human race is the paramount issue for the people of this book; why they are in this situation is beside the point.

Because survival of the human race is at stake, the people in the novel find that they must rethink all of their assumptions about right and wrong and how society should be structured. If, for example, women vastly outnumber men, and humanity is dying out, does monogamy continue to make sense? If an entire segment of society needs such extensive care that others have no time to pursue any activities other than caring for those in need, does it make sense to continue to provide that care? And in such a situation, who really has—or should have—the power to make decisions for the good of all?

Wyndham’s novel has all the strengths of the best science fiction. It raises difficult questions without giving obvious answers. It provides moments of terror and glimmers of hope. It forces readers to question their most basic assumptions about what it means to be human and what it means to be good. It deserves a place among the sci-fi classics.

Triffids is not, however, a perfect book; it has many of the flaws typical of science fiction. The central characters are likable enough, but they rarely rise above being types. Throughout the book, William Masen, the main character, moves from place to place, witnessing many different groups who have established their own ways of coping with the crisis. In most cases, he leaves quickly, sometimes just as things are getting interesting. I sometimes found this frustrating, but I think it’s a limitation inherent in the use of first-person narrative. Either Masen sees lots of different groups of people for a short time each or he only encounters a few, leaving certain interesting ideas out of the narrative completely.

Overall, I liked this book quite a lot and would recommend it to anyone who enjoys science fiction or dystopian fiction.

See my complete review at my blog. ( )

William Masen wakes up in the hospital to discover that everyone in the world has gone blind after observing a strange, green glow in the sky. He was spared because of temporary blindness caused the sting of a triffid, a large, mobile, carnivorous plant which is cultivated for its oil. William manages to find some other people who escaped the blindness, but their efforts to survive are complicated by the triffids which seem to be consciously trying to hunt down humans.

I read Triffids for the first time about 20 years ago, and rereading it now it still holds up quite well. I can see how this book has probably formed the basis for a lot of later end-of-the world stories. Wyndham manages to pack a lot of story into under two hundred pages. The moral choices that the characters has to make were interesting, and not just a simple black or white, especially in the way that Coker could come to admit that his attempt to do what he saw was right was in fact a mistake. The only thing that seems a little off is that the story seems like it would be taking place in the 1970's or 1980's, but society has not changed at all, and the characters seem more like they are still in the 1950's, but I guess that trying to extrapolate and explain social changes in society on top of everything else would have been too much for the book.

I do wonder what the purpose of the triffids really is in the story. The blinding itself is enough to bring down civilization, and to provide the cautionary message. The triffids don't really play a major role until late in the story. They do seem to provide a means to unify most of the remnants of humanity in the fight against a common enemy, and provide a reason to quickly rebuild civilization. ( )

I really liked this book. It was a really good yarn. The auther really thought through the consequenses of the hyperthetical situation. It is really compact writing but very powerful. Makes you think how you would react. Highly recommended. No wonder it's so well known. ( )

It is not zombies that plague the English in and around London in The Day of the Triffids, the early-1950s sci-fi novel. It's 7-foot-tall, man-eating plants with deadly stingers. And a terrible comet whose trail seems to somehow blind almost everyone in the world who saw the light show from its greenish particles. And a plague that's killing people. The terrible things just compound on each other, sure to excite and impress horror and sci-fi fans.

With our modern sensibilities and exposure to hundreds of tales of end-of-the-world scenarios, we might wonder at some of the slightly quaint or composed reactions from the narrator and main character, but it's not long before even this Englishman is being driven to a very modern brand of isolated despair and moral pain.

This is top-notch stuff—I'm halfway through—and more than 50 years old. It's a must-read for fans of The Stand, zombie films, postapocalyptic tales, and monster movies. It is also a more satisfying read than the 1999 novel Blindness by Jose Saramago. That book dwells on its world-wrecking plague of blindness as a Lord of the Flies-esque descent into madness and cruelty of man to man. The Day of the Triffids is interested in that, too, but it succeeds because of its emphasis on survival and human imagination as well as despair and cruelty. Blindness is the existential dilemma. The Day of the Triffids is an existential crisis battled in a new jungle of danger that presents more real physical fright and less awful human crime. Blindness is awful depression and the recognition of the villainy of crimes perpetrated by humans against each other. The Day of the Triffids is like a war novel told by an unfortunate civilian caught in a terrible battle of man against coincidence, plague, and man-made terrors. ( )

One of the greatest apocalyptic novels ever. And the description on the back cover of the 1962 Fawcett edition is priceless. "What Were They? those hideous triffids roaming the rins of the earth..."

I remember reading this in 9th grade English class, swapping it back and forth chapter by chapter with my friend sitting in front of me. ( )

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 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. ( )

This fabulously readable little novel is a compelling mix of action and ideas. I had no idea where the plot was going to go next which kept things exciting. A wonderful book for a book club to read since there is so much to discuss. My favorite part of the book is in the creppy beginning where the main character (who is blind at this point) talks about how he knows it's Wednesday but the world outside his window is quiet like a Sunday... ( )

Really effective and eerie! A good read, definitely recommended.

In a way, this novel struck me as being a zombie story as much as one of vegetables run amok. Same idea - slow moving, easy to avoid if there are few and you can see them, but gradually they overcome the survivors of whatever giant disaster by virtue of sheer numbers and blind (ahem) aggression.

And, okay, so it's not really a dystopia, it's post-apocalyptic, but it's close enough and I wanted to read it.

The last book I read before this was, of course, War With the Newts, and I found there to be many similarities. Man finds resource that he does not consider overly dangerous or sentient, spreads around world, is warned but ignores it, is later punished for his hubris. Newts delved much more deeply into the worldwide events and reactions, with Triffids being more of an adventure story, but as companion pieces they work.

As I mentioned before, I'm pretty sure this is one of Stephen King's favorite books. Not that I've ever seen him mention it, I just feel like he's adapted large chunks of it and used it to flavor most of his best writing. So, I just now looked up "Stephen King" Wyndham on the ol' google, and what's the first result? 'The famous American writer Stephen King has called Wyndham "perhaps the best writer of science fiction that England has ever produced".' Yep, you can tell.

final thoughts: I've already loaned my copy out and suggested it to a few different people. Easily one of the top 5 novels I've read this year. ( )

Stands the test of time.

Blinded people at mercy

of murderous plants.

http://www.archive.org/details/John_wyndham_theDay_of_the_triffids

http://www.wowio.com/users/product.as...

Somehow, an astronomical event has caused the overwhelming majority of the population to become blind.

If that wasn't bad enough, mobile, dangerous plans called Triffids
are able to take advantage of the disdavantage. Without sight humans are extremely vulnerable to these predators.

The narrator avoided blindness, by being in a hospital with bandaged eyes.

From there, we have an examination of this disaster scenario, and what would happen.

http://freesf.blogspot.com/2008/01/day-of-triffids-john-wyndham.html ( )

This novel is remarkable for introducing several ideas, and for setting new benchmarks for other speculative novels. Wyndham doesn’t bog himself down in the technical details of the end of society, instead he focuses on the human effects. Perhaps more telling, he allows his characters to muddle about and take their time learning how to live in a decimated world., thus enabling the reader to constantly consider “What would I do?” An apocalyptic novel unlike any other. ( )

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. ( )

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 stiff-upper-lipism. I might make a comparison to Wilson Tucker's The Year of the Quiet Sun, or the works of J G 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.

In 1951 John Wyndham published his novel The Day of the Triffids to moderate acclaim. Fifty-two years later, this horrifying story is
a science fiction classic, touted by The Times (London) as having “all the reality of a vividly realized nightmare.”

Bill Masen, bandages over his wounded eyes, misses the most spectacular meteorite shower England has ever seen. Removing his bandages the next morning, he finds masses of sightless people wandering the city. He soon meets Josella, another lucky person who has retained her sight, and together they leave the city, aware that the safe, familiar world they knew a mere twenty-four hours before is gone forever.

But to survive in this post-apocalyptic world, one must survive the Triffids, strange plants that years before began appearing all over the world. The Triffids can grow to over seven feet tall, pull their roots from the ground to walk, and kill a man with one quick lash of their poisonous stingers. With society in shambles, they are now poised to prey on humankind. Wyndham chillingly anticipates bio-warfare and mass destruction, fifty years before their realization, in this prescient account of Cold War paranoia. ( )

This novel initally supposes an disaster, and then suggests various responses to it. "It could happen like this...or like this...or like this..." Just when you think you've settled down into how it's going to be for the rest of the book, Wyndham shuffles the cards and deals again. I enjoyed it.

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.