Day of the Triffids

John Wyndham

1951

For a couple of decades now, Triffids had been part of the landscape. No one really knew where they had originated or just how they had spread, but here they were. Uniquely for plants they could move. Not just with the wind, but actually pull themselves free of the soil and go awandering. Another thing that distinguished them from their more sessile compatriots was the stinger. Attached to a fifteen-foot tendril, it contained a poison deadly enough to kill an adult human in seconds.

Then the Triffid would squat by its victim and wait for it to decay.

Triffids proved too useful to destroy though, and they're herded into ranches where they are harvested for their oils.

Then one night there's a meteor shower. No normal shower this, though! The unusually coloured streaks of light were visible over the whole of the darkened night side of the planet, but Bill Masen felt himself hard done by for he was in hospital suffering from a blow from a Triffid that would normally have left him dead. It was obvious that he had gained a measure of immunity from that childhood sting. With his eyes bandaged against the damage he missed the celestial light show and was reduced to listening to his fellow patients descriptions.

When he woke the following morning, he could hear nothing and the radio was silent.

Eventually, he gets worried enough to remove his bandages and go exploring.

The hospital appears deserted.

There's no sound of traffic on the streets, nor are there crowds of commuters surging through the streets.

What had happened to the people? When Bill met his first person on this strange day, it's to find that they had been rendered blind. It appeared that something to do with that meteor shower had caused those watching to go blind. Not in and of itself a mortal blow to civilisation: after all a substantial portion of the population had not been affected by the lights.

But there were the Triffids. As if they were aware of the tragedy the Triffids had upped sticks and were wandering the streets just waiting to pick off those who were unable to see the danger waiting for them.

And it would appear that the Triffids had another unplantlike trait - intelligence, or at least something resembling a pack mentality.

Can humanity find a way of pulling itself back from the brink of this double catastrophe?

The story of the Triffids and Mankind's fight against them is continued in The Night of the Triffids. Despite the awful cover, this is not a bad book. Honestly!

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This is part of the Masterworks Hardback series

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