The Day of the Triffids

The opening chapter does a wonderful job of playing up fears about what mysterious thing has gone wrong with the world, but then I felt it was undercut by the general population's extreme reaction to blindness. Throwing themselves out windows? Gassing their children? What's wrong with these people? It turns out they better foresaw what was to come than I did. For one, there's the eventual proof that the effect is worldwide (though they might have waited to confirm that). For another, as the title indicates, there's the triffids. If you ever found sunflowers creepy, this novel presents the stuff of nightmares: a mobile, carnivorous, semi-sentient sunflower capable of striking you down with a well-aimed and poisonous whip vine from ten show more feet away.

But the nastiest and most horrific element of the whole story is the moral quandary, the recurring question of what obligation the few remaining sighted have towards millions upon millions of blind. Wyndham posits in this scenario that there are two overriding facts: whatever help is provided the millions it will only delay the inevitable, and that if the sighted are to have any hope of survival they must immediately concentrate upon supporting themselves to achieve it. This does not make the question go away, and it keeps cropping up in the most awful ways.

Of course, having been published in the 1950s, the novel has many dated elements but it is written with such skill that the tension is still palpable as if it were happening today. There's many parallels with today's most popular zombie stories, including the battles over views about the best way forward as the enemy closes in. There's the same theme about the human race having brought doom upon itself by means far beyond the average person's knowledge or ability to control, a mind state that nearly anyone can relate to despite its pessimism. And there is always the hope that somehow and someway the survivors can avoid repeating those mistakes if only they can learn from them. show less

The Day of the Triffids (1951) is solidly rooted in the history of its era despite the science fiction theme. It concerns the paranoia, stress and sense of menace in the every day that permeated the opening years of the Cold War. At any moment the world could come crashing down in a rain of atomic fire. Society was a blind passenger except the few sighted ones in power and at the controls who, we hope, will act civilly. What does it mean to be civil? The novel explores by looking at various modes of ordering society: aristocracy, feudalism, hunting and gathering, and communism. The successful model is described by Coker in a rousing speech:

"[First] we'll have to plow; still later we'll have to learn how to make plowshares; later than show more that we'll have to learn how to smelt the iron to make the shares. What we are on now is a road that will take us back and back and back until we can - if we can - make good all that we wear out. Not until then shall we be able to stop ourselves on the trail that's leading down to savagery. But once we can do that, then maybe we'll begin to crawl slowly up again."

Coker is describing materialism, growth and progress ie. capitalism. Wyndham was correct for 1951. Today in 2012, we face new threats that may not be so easily solved with unlimited growth. So I'll end by suggesting on the surface this is an innovative post-apocolyptic genre story but at its heart the ideas, while not irrelevant, the debate has moved on. show less

"When a day that you happen to know is Wednesday starts off by sounding like Sunday, there is something seriously wrong somewhere."

With this memorable line, John Wyndham's 1951 post-apocalyptic disaster novel The Day of the Triffids opens. The central character, Bill, wakes up in a hospital bed having seemingly missed the apocalypse all together, listening to eerily quiet streets of London outside his window. An iconic moment that has inspired so many that followed in both novel and film form, cementing its place as a 'classic' of the sub-genre. The Day of the Triffids has proven to be Wyndham's most enduring work, and fortunately for him, because this was the first of his works which he attached his real name to.

Bill discovers that show more he was one of the lucky few not blinded by a mysterious meteor shower the night before. Most Londoners now awkwardly shuffle the streets whimpering in fear, on the search for food and a place of refuge. The complicating and surprising factor for the blinded populace is the titular Triffids; a motile, enormous, and carnivorous plant with a deadly venom, which despite their mysterious origins were farmed for their superior oil. It doesn't take long for the escaped Triffids to multiply and prey upon unsuspecting humans, which they do with increasing fervor as the novel progresses.

The Day of the Triffids bares a lot of comparisons to John Christopher's The Death of Grass, published five years later. In the later, it is the extinction of a plant species that causes calamity - here, the introduction of a new one. Where as in the later, the main character John and his feamily head immediately into the countryside, the solitary Bill turns inward towards the heart of London. John has a goal in mind from the start; reaching his brother's defensible farm in the country. Bill's aims are far less defined. He rescues a woman from rape at the hands of her blind captor, and once they have a bracing shot of booze in a run-down bar, they meet a group of academics planning to start a society based on what is best described as objectivism/meritocracy... and forced polygamy.

Despite their top-billing, the Triffids themselves play but a small role in most of the book, outside of the fear they create in the characters. They are rather easily dispatched by an able-bodied, seeing person, and because most humans are hopelessly (often suicidally) incompetent without their sight, the sighted characters can easily take what spoils they want from the unmanned storefronts in London. This gives the characters ample time to speculate on what form society should take in this new paradigm, and it is here that we spend most of our time.

The events of the plot take Bill and his disaster bride-to-be Josella on what more-or-less amounts to a tour of the different cultural nuclei among the survivors. Along with the aforementioned objectivism that is assumed to be the most 'correct', we get glimpses of religious fundamentalism, a kind of neo-feudalism, and outright slavery of the sighted at the hands of the blind. As for the blind, most of the sighted choose to detach from them instead of showing the slightest of sympathy:

"Should we spend our time prolonging misery when we believe that there is no chance of saving the people (or ourselves) in the end?"

We are left to wonder how many of the morals and ideals common today are necessary, even prudent, for our potential as a species to be maximized. We are also left wondering how Wyndham can believe that the loss of sight will render someone completely dependent on others, and that, faced with that reality, many would rather kill themselves.

Wyndham is, on the surface, also commenting on the thin veneer that separates our modern culture from barbarism, wishing that we wouldn't conflate familiarity with stability. Both the Triffids themselves, and the plague that sweeps the populace that follows them, are creations of our own hubris in times of excess. Punishment for our sins perhaps? Though, the book is notably secular, clear on the fact that nobody (not even God, or the Americans) will eventually rescue the beleaguered bands of survivors. There's a palpable sense of post-WWII angst, and a real fear of the mounting pressure of the Cold War.

The central male characters lament western culture which they believe has fostered women into becoming dependent parasites. This is pared with Wyndham's insentient sexual objectification, and postulating that women should/will become broodmares for repopulation purposes. Despite Josella's basic competency and reflective personality, I'm not entirely impressed on this front, even given its publication date.

The Day of the Triffids was sadly a disappointment for me. Ignoring the questionable cultural hypotheses and rampant misogyny, Wyndham writes about these events with the cold emotional vacancy of an amateur reporter. The characterization could charitably be described as thin, the narrative meanders frequently, and the Triffids are underutilized in my opinion. Yes, there are moments of forlorn, and melancholic prose that reminded me of why I enjoyed The Chrysalids, and perhaps my disappointment may lay partially at the feet of its positive reputation, but the fact is that I know he can/did do better than this. show less

When I was a kid, I picked this book up from my corner drugstore's paperback rack. I think it was the cover art that attracted me. Marauding man-eating plants! What wouldn't be more appealing to a kid? However, I got bored with the book after a couple dozen pages, and put it aside. It turned out this wasn't a book about marauding monsters at all. The triffids, in fact, don't become a dominant presence in the story until the last 30 pages. What the book is REALLY all about is humanity's way of coping with the end-of-the-world-as-they-know-it. It's more psychology than hysterics. The greater crisis the characters have to face (at least through 3/4 of the story) is not that the triffids are at the door, but that due to a mysterious show more celestial event, most of the world has gone blind. The "blindness," it is clear, is meant to serve as much as a metaphor for humanity's folly as it is as an on-the-ground reality (something that requires some suspension of disbelief), but it's intriguing to follow the story and see where it goes. Will humanity meet its new challenges? That's a question to engage an adult, not a kid. show less

Day of the Triffids has languished on the permanent to-read pile for decades now, with the only excuse to pick it up being its selection as an 'eco-horror' classic for the local horror book club.

There's a part of me that's happy to have read it despite my low rating, and despite the fact that I think its day is long past. There're too many books in the world, and we shouldn't all waste our time with supposed classics simply because they did something first. Triffids would not -- could not -- be published today. It's a clunky mess of a book, full of holes and characterisation that defies logic, of no real strong narrative, of an ecological understanding that's dated itself in the extreme.

The voice of the novel, Bill, is classically show more uninteresting as a narrator. He does almost nothing but react and observe the world around him. He experiences no real struggles, but simply observes others struggling around him. The only personality that ever seems to squeak through is when he puts on his professorial glasses (as all the 'good' men in the book do, with Coker being the worst of them) and explains how things work to the ignorant masses and the women around him. Obnoxious, particularly as their explanations for how the world works are so silly and rooted in the past.

Published in 1951, of course ignorant treatment of disability and women is promoted on every page until someone forward-thinking stops and explains that no, being blind or being a woman does not make you worthless (except, in the latter case, of making babies). Only the book then reverts to promoting that that is the case. In the vein of Robert Heinlein, it even promotes that a strong woman is just a (young and gorgeous) woman who wants to experience free love (preferably with the author's stand-in). It's frustrating and embarrassing, particularly as an unbelievable love story is central to the plot.

This book carries two merits, I think: 1) Descriptions of triffids waiting in the shadows for unsuspecting people to pass by are genuinely creepy, and 2) it's one of the earliest examples of the genre. Some of the first descriptions of nature overtaking the streets and buildings (however succinct they are). Despite this, I have no doubt the classic status of Triffids will continue to diminish over time. show less

This is one of those books where one element of the story has entered public consciousness and actually drowned out the actual, well, story of the book. So everyone knows about the triffids, ambulatory plants which can kill by means of a whip-like stinger. Most people who haven’t read the book probably assume the triffids are alien, but the book actually suggests they were created in a Soviet laboratory. I’ve seen a couple of adaptations of the novel, and I had still forgotten that the entire plot, and menace of the triffids, is predicated on a global outbreak of blindness, caused by lights in the night sky (conveniently forgetting that half the planet would not be in darkness), initially blamed on a comet, but later implied it show more might have a human technological cause. The protagonist is not blinded because he was in hospital with his eyes bandaged, and the story is basically his survival story, along with the other few who were not blinded, and the various factions the sighted people have separated into. And all the while avoiding the triffids. I did at first wonder why the two things – blindness and triffids – when one or the other on their own would have provided sufficient drama. But the triffids are too easy to avoid by sighted people, and blindness alone wasn’t enough to cause human civilisation to collapse in such a short time-frame. The Day of the Triffids is definitely a book of its time – not just the sexism, but the comfortable middle-classness (so much so, one character in the book can “translate” from working-class to middle-class; this is, I hasten to add, British class, not American, and the two are not the same), and the relative ease with which the survivors manage to build sustainable communities. There’s a blink-and-you-miss-it condemnation of fascism, but this novel, like many of Wyndham’s novels, is a pretty good example of a “comfortable catastrophe”. I enjoyed it, but it was a much lighter read than I’d expected, and it’s certainly a well-known historical sf novel… but one for those eager to explore the history of the genre, including those novels some would have you believe are not genre… show less

Well.
I truly cannot begin to think how to rate this book.
Let's start with our hero, Bill. I feel like the best way to describe my feelings on Bill is to quote Monty Python, so here you go:

MORTICIAN: Bring out your dead!
[clang]
Bring out your dead!
CUSTOMER: Here's one -- nine pence.
DEAD PERSON: I'm not dead!
MORTICIAN: What?
CUSTOMER: Nothing -- here's your nine pence.
DEAD PERSON: I'm not dead!
MORTICIAN: Here -- he says he's not dead!
CUSTOMER: Yes, he is.
DEAD PERSON: I'm not!
MORTICIAN: He isn't.
CUSTOMER: Well, he will be soon, he's very ill.
DEAD PERSON: I'm getting better!
CUSTOMER: No, you're not -- you'll be stone dead in a moment.
MORTICIAN: Oh, I can't take him like that -- it's against regulations.
DEAD PERSON: I don't want to go in the

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cart!
CUSTOMER: Oh, don't be such a baby.
MORTICIAN: I can't take him...
DEAD PERSON: I feel fine!
CUSTOMER: Oh, do us a favor...
MORTICIAN: I can't.
CUSTOMER: Well, can you hang around a couple of minutes? He won't be long.
MORTICIAN: Naaah, I got to go on to Robinson's--they've lost nine today.
CUSTOMER: Well, when is your next round?
MORTICIAN: Thursday.
DEAD PERSON: I think I'll go for a walk.
CUSTOMER: You're not fooling anyone y'know. Look, isn't there
something you can do?
DEAD PERSON: I feel happy... I feel happy.
[whop]
CUSTOMER: Ah, thanks very much.
MORTICIAN: Not at all. See you on Thursday.
CUSTOMER: Right.

Bill is the Customer in this sketch. The Dead Person is roughly 95% of the population of England, all of whom were unfortunate enough to be struck blind by the comets. Bill is a fan of natural selection and every man fending for himself to the point where he stands silently in the hall watching a blind man exit through a window holding his girlfriend to avoid death by starvation rather than offering to help them find some sardines, maybe. Because you see, you can help out people when they need it, but really, why bother when you know they'll just die anyway once you're not around to help? Not like a blind or disabled person had ever managed to live on their own in 1951 or anything. And Wyndham the author goes out of his way to make sure that we know that though we may disapprove of this type of thinking, Bill is ultimately right. I was seriously suspicious about that damned plague. Seemed sort of invented so that Bill could be freed of the dreadful social responsibility he was literally hogtied into by Coker. Even Coker, the guy who berates a group of sighted folks for lingering behind fences rather than help the blind and goes as far as to kidnap some of them to force them to forage for these sort of communes of blind people, eventually comes around to realizing that Bill is right.

If Wyndham was American (and he's hilariously, hilariously not--I must admit I do love the sections where people blithely and foolishly intone things about how Americans would never let such a thing happen in their country and they'll be along any day now to rescue us), he'd be one of those people who have been trying to dismantle social security and welfare programs since their very conception.

The triffids themselves are almost an afterthought, though they do menace a lot more toward the end of the book. Is it weird that I ended up kind of rooting for them? Anyway, if you're interested in exploring some classic sci-fi, I do recommend this quick read. Before we're overrun by the triffids, anyway. show less