I have been slowly reading John Wyndham’s works, and I finally hit paydirt! His earlier efforts, Foul Play Suspected, and Planet Plane, were not very good. However, his fourth novel, The Day of the Triffids, is a classic dystopian tale. It’s been made into a movie and TV miniseries, and even though it was published in 1951, it hasn’t aged one bit.

It is told through the eyes of biologist Bill Masen, who has made a career out of studying some strange plants called triffids. They grow to be 8 to 10 feet tall, they produce very useful and nutritious oil, and they are able to move about on their three main roots. Unfortunately, they are also carnivorous and have lethal stingers they can whip out and lash their victim with. It’s possible to “dock” a triffid – i.e. cut off it’s stinging lash – but that reduces the quality of its oil, as well as the yield of its seeds.

No one knows for sure where they came from, but they suddenly appeared all over the world at pretty much the same time. Masen believes they are the result of Soviet genetic engineering. Their benefits outweigh their risks, and Masen works for the main developer of triffid products. One day on the job, he is glancingly stung in the face and temporarily blinded. This accident turns out to be a Godsend, because while he is the hospital bandaged up and recovering, an extraordinary, bright green meteor shower occurs one evening. Everyone on earth is awestruck by its beauty, and Masen has to listen to his nurse describe it in great detail.

However, the next day, when he is scheduled to have his eye bandages removed, no one comes by his room. He calls for breakfast, and there is no reply. He takes the bandages off himself, and he soon realizes that everyone who watched the cosmic pyrotechnics is blind. What follows is a clear-eyed account of what would happen if 99% of humanity suddenly went blind, and there is a strange species of ambulatory plants that seem to be sentient and can kill.

You can read the rest of my review here.