272 pages
Published July 10, 1999 by Penguin Books Ltd.
When Bill Masen wakes up blindfolded in hospital there is a bitter irony in his situation. Carefully removing his bandages, he realizes that he is the only person who can see: everyone else, doctors and patients alike, have been blinded by a meteor shower. Now, with civilization in chaos, the triffids - huge, venomous, large-rooted plants able to 'walk', feeding on human flesh - can have their day.The Day of the Triffids, published in 1951, expresses many of the political concerns of its time: the Cold War, the fear of biological experimentation and the man-made apocalypse. However, with its terrifyingly believable insights into the genetic modification of plants, the book is more relevant today than ever before.
Comment by Liz Jensen on The Guardian:
> As a teenager, one of my favourite haunts was Oxford's Botanical Gardens. I'd head straight for the vast heated greenhouses, where I'd pity my …
When Bill Masen wakes up blindfolded in hospital there is a bitter irony in his situation. Carefully removing his bandages, he realizes that he is the only person who can see: everyone else, doctors and patients alike, have been blinded by a meteor shower. Now, with civilization in chaos, the triffids - huge, venomous, large-rooted plants able to 'walk', feeding on human flesh - can have their day.The Day of the Triffids, published in 1951, expresses many of the political concerns of its time: the Cold War, the fear of biological experimentation and the man-made apocalypse. However, with its terrifyingly believable insights into the genetic modification of plants, the book is more relevant today than ever before.
Comment by Liz Jensen on The Guardian:
> As a teenager, one of my favourite haunts was Oxford's Botanical Gardens. I'd head straight for the vast heated greenhouses, where I'd pity my adolescent plight, chain-smoke, and glory in the insane vegetation that burgeoned there. The more rampant, brutally spiked, poisonous, or cruel to insects a plant was, the more it appealed to me. I'd shove my butts into their root systems. They could take it. My librarian mother disapproved mightily of the fags but when under interrogation I confessed where I'd been hanging out – hardly Sodom and Gomorrah – she spotted a literary opportunity, and slid John Wyndham's The Day of the Triffids my way. I read it in one sitting, fizzing with the excitement of recognition. I knew the triffids already: I'd spent long hours in the jungle with them, exchanging gases. Wyndham loved to address the question that triggers every invented world: the great "What if . . ." What if a carnivorous, travelling, communicating, poison-spitting oil-rich plant, harvested in Britain as biofuel, broke loose after a mysterious "comet-shower" blinded most of the population? That's the scenario faced by triffid-expert Bill Masen, who finds himself a sighted man in a sightless nation. Cataclysmic change established, cue a magnificent chain reaction of experimental science, physical and political crisis, moral dilemmas, new hierarchies, and hints of a new world order. Although the repercussions of an unprecedented crisis and Masen's personal journey through the new wilderness form the backbone of the story, it's the triffids that root themselves most firmly in the reader's memory. Wyndham described them botanically, but he left enough room for the reader's imagination to take over. The result being that everyone who reads The Day of the Triffids creates, in their mind's eye, their own version of fiction's most iconic plant. Mine germinated in an Oxford greenhouse, in a cloud of cigarette smoke.
Content warning Spoiler alert.
The plot is a bit spoiled as the novel served as inspiration for the equally disturbing/terrifying movie "28 Days Later", though there are no zombies in this one. More than one heartbreaking scene in this book, so reader beware.
Where and when you find a book will determine your view of it. For me it was 1973 on my family's little farm at Canowindra. I was ten, I loved Alfred Hitchcock's Three Investigators and the Brains Benton mysteries. My Mum and older brother were digging John Wyndham so I picked up "The Day of the Triffids", aware that it was an "adult" book, a new experience for me. I think it might have blown my tiny mind. I was like Dave Bowman, a normal human when I started, and an embryonic trans-galactic starchild by the end.
Nowadays, whether it's "Station 11", "The Last of Us" or "Sweet Tooth" the apocalypse is front of mind. But back then there was "Triffids" and George Stewart's "Earth Abides", written in 1951 and 1949 respectively. After that, there'd be a long time between (fictional) world-shattering catastrophes. These two are the ones to beat …
Where and when you find a book will determine your view of it. For me it was 1973 on my family's little farm at Canowindra. I was ten, I loved Alfred Hitchcock's Three Investigators and the Brains Benton mysteries. My Mum and older brother were digging John Wyndham so I picked up "The Day of the Triffids", aware that it was an "adult" book, a new experience for me. I think it might have blown my tiny mind. I was like Dave Bowman, a normal human when I started, and an embryonic trans-galactic starchild by the end.
Nowadays, whether it's "Station 11", "The Last of Us" or "Sweet Tooth" the apocalypse is front of mind. But back then there was "Triffids" and George Stewart's "Earth Abides", written in 1951 and 1949 respectively. After that, there'd be a long time between (fictional) world-shattering catastrophes. These two are the ones to beat in the post-apocalypse sub-genre.
"The Day of the Triffids" has so much going for it... the marvelously original nature of the catastrophe; the addition of the triffids as its unlikely second wave; the role of industry and military in both these disasters; the reality of re-establishing agriculture and manufacturing when scavenging becomes impossible; the competing rebuilding strategies, be they military or science based, regressive or progressive; the relative futility of redundant moral positions, like monogamy.
The main female character, who pre-apocalypse had been a controversial author of mainstream erotica, is another great Wyndham woman. Yet again the influence of the author's partner Grace Wilson is in evidence. In a short novel, characterisation is handled economically. The relationship between Masen and Josella is beautifully complemented by the arrival of their adopted daughter Susan, giving the book a bit more heart than much SF of the time.
It's also the kind of apocalypse where the survivors are like the chosen ones. Much as mass death and disease are not fun, you can't help imagining what it would be like to be one of the survivors. I don't think this makes it what Brian Aldiss called a 'cosy catastrophe'. There is a certain sentimentality in the novel, as the characters say goodbye to the old world as they see it decaying. It's a sort of warm, loving sadness, but it is not 'cosy'. I get the sense that there was a bit of generational rivalry between Aldiss, as a representative of the 60s new wave, and Wyndham, a pre-war pulp alumnus, albeit one who tried to be innovative and forward-looking like the 60s writers who came after him.
I can't think of a single quibble about this book. I don't think it's dated, unless you also think "The Time Machine" or "The War of the Worlds" are dated because of their contemporary setting.
Grand classique
Not the first time I've read this, it's been a favourite of mine since I watched the TV adaptation (when I was probably far too young for it!)
This story is seventy years old now, and it does show its age. There's a casual sexism that lingers nastily throughout the book, and I'd never really noticed before just how many times Wyndham tells us that Bill pauses to smoke a cigarette. We're very used to stories of the apocalypse now, so the way the story is told feels quite strange, lots of it is just Bill thinking through his situation and musing on what will happen to him now. I'd also forgotten just how quickly everything happens in the opening -within a couple of days of the start, everyone's planning for their brave new world and triffids are removing all non-essential characters from the story.
But despite that datedness, I …
Not the first time I've read this, it's been a favourite of mine since I watched the TV adaptation (when I was probably far too young for it!)
This story is seventy years old now, and it does show its age. There's a casual sexism that lingers nastily throughout the book, and I'd never really noticed before just how many times Wyndham tells us that Bill pauses to smoke a cigarette. We're very used to stories of the apocalypse now, so the way the story is told feels quite strange, lots of it is just Bill thinking through his situation and musing on what will happen to him now. I'd also forgotten just how quickly everything happens in the opening -within a couple of days of the start, everyone's planning for their brave new world and triffids are removing all non-essential characters from the story.
But despite that datedness, I still find it fascinating as it's laying out the forms of a new genre in a similar way to its American contemporary, Earth Abides. It's setting out an apocalypse that appears to be entirely human-created, even if it is accidental, and wrestling with the consequences of that. In the wake of WW2, this was still something new and terrifying so Wyndham is working out the ways in which that might happen be it genetic engineering, greed or satellite weapons that bring us down. Do read this to get an indication of how people approached this sort of thing in the 50s (with all the good and bad that implies) but don't expect it to be a conventional post-apocalyptic tale.
Very impressive. This actually felt more like a "28 days later" or Threads survival film, where the prime threat is humans being dicks. The actual triffid menace I'm sure was greater in the film. Not that I remember the film well. Driving round bucolic England today felt more oppressive after reading this.
Also I don't think a book now would have so many people choose suicide over being blind within a day! Hopefully the female characters in this would do a little better too than have a man tell them to stop be so feeble.
I can't believe I hadn't read this already. I love the blind man (I mean the one who was blind before), and I enjoyed the story. I will have to sit and read it again to extract more deep and meaningful commentary, I just let it flow this time for the story of it.
This is a short story collection that is, I dare say, much less famous than Wyndham's novels. It is, however, worth hunting down if you like those novels. As is often the case with short story collections, The Seeds of Time shows greater range than all of the author's novels together (although Wyndham was just one of several pseudonyms used by this author and I haven't read any of the others).
THIS REVIEW HAS BEEN CURTAILED IN PROTEST AT GOODREADS' CENSORSHIP POLICY
See the complete review here:
http://arbieroo.booklikes.com/post/921319/the-seeds-of-time-john-wyndham
I think this might have been one of the later Wyndham novels, because it has incident, which makes it easier to read than, say The Kraken Wakes, where civilisation is destroyed by some nasty creatures who live in the deepest parts of the ocean but probably arrived from space.
Wyndham was quite keen on destroying civilisation in his novels - in the Chrysalids nuclear war has wiped out most of the population. This time civilisation is destroyed by a bunch of genetically engineered plants!
This book and the Chrysalids contrast with The Kraken Wakes and The Midwich Cuckoos in that in the former pair the troubles are all down to humanity rather than alien invaders, a pessimism that is more realistic and perhaps was quite commonplace in the 1950s. There can be no doubt that this book is heavily informed by the Cold War, though it is more subtly handled …
I think this might have been one of the later Wyndham novels, because it has incident, which makes it easier to read than, say The Kraken Wakes, where civilisation is destroyed by some nasty creatures who live in the deepest parts of the ocean but probably arrived from space.
Wyndham was quite keen on destroying civilisation in his novels - in the Chrysalids nuclear war has wiped out most of the population. This time civilisation is destroyed by a bunch of genetically engineered plants!
This book and the Chrysalids contrast with The Kraken Wakes and The Midwich Cuckoos in that in the former pair the troubles are all down to humanity rather than alien invaders, a pessimism that is more realistic and perhaps was quite commonplace in the 1950s. There can be no doubt that this book is heavily informed by the Cold War, though it is more subtly handled than in the Chrysalids.
Despite Wyndham having what must have been a fairly progressive attitude to women for his time, the male protagonist of this novel shows some really outrageously sexist attitudes at times whereas, at the same time the female protagonist is portrayed as woman about ten years ahead of her time and having suffered for it.
This novel has some serious points to make whilst telling an entertaining adventure story - read the end carefully to find out what was really happening at the beginning and discover what the book is actually about.
