Title The Day of the Triffids
Author: John Wyndham
Type: Fiction
Page Count/Review Word Count: 272
Rating 3.75/5
The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham is a sci-fi classic for a reason. The blurb calls it a tale of an ecological apocalypse, and that’s about right. In fact, as I was reading it, I could see how it had influenced basically every zombie survival movie ever made. The only difference is that the antagonists here are not the living dead but rather man-eating triffids, huge plants with venomous stings that have reduced society to just a husk of its former self.
I particularly liked the scenes towards the end which showed how the triffids learn. They’re like ants in that individually they show no intelligence but they have a sort of group intelligence which teaches them, for example, how to avoid some of the traps that the humans were setting to keep the perimeter of their settlement clear.
Then there are the very human stories that are told here, and the fact that everyone who observed a specific comet was turned blind. Our protagonist can see because he was in hospital at the time undergoing an operation, but sighted people become a vital resource for the survivors and it’s interesting to see how this affects the story line.
After all, like all good post-apocalyptic stories, the main threat is far from the only threat. There are other people to deal with, too. My only gripe was that it was occasionally slow, but I countered that by reading a bit at a time.
