The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham
Two! Two! Two disasters in one! Biologist Bill Masen is hospitalized, recovering from a sting from a triffid, a carnivorous plant with a whip-like appendage. The sting got him in the face so his head is wrapped in a bandage for nearly a month. During his last night of recovery, a spectacular comet or meteor shower takes place streaking the sky with strange green contrails. The next morning, everyone who viewed the show is blind. Society as we know it is ended. The triffids, unchecked, are multiplying out of control and seem to have some sort of innate intelligence or at least instinct. They snap their stingers and kill someone, the wait for the body to decompose when they can dine at leisure. Add to that a mysterious plague, and it’s all over bar the shouting.
Wikipedia calls this a “cosy catastrophe”, meaning, “civilization (as we know it) comes to an end and everyone is killed except for a handful of survivors, who then set about rebuilding their version of civilisation” and The Day of the Triffids is one of the progenitors of the genre. And it’s quite good, although dated in some ways, particularly with its handling of women. Still, it has an interesting examination of how society might restart itself, and those that do survive (whether sighted, blind, or mixed) break up into widely scattered collectives, each with a different way to self govern.
The book differs from the movie in several important ways, the most significant of which is the timespan of the book stretches over many years, where the movie seems to last only a few days or weeks at most. Masen and Josella (a woman he meets along the way) “marry” and have a child. There is also a credible back story of how the triffids came to be. They were not dropped by the comet as the movie would have you believe.
An excellent read with a very well done The End???
September 6th, 2008 at 8:03 pm
[...] Dead movies, but I saw other things in here as well. Much of the story seemed lifted from Day of the Triffids (the book, not the movie). But I guess after the apocalypse, there’s only so much that can [...]