Having said that -- it has no literary pretensions, most characters are fairly one dimensional, and the triffids themselves (walking, thinking, carnivorous plants) I have always thought of as a rather annoying distraction. What gripped me, and grips me still, is the central premise -- that one day, the vast majority of humanity goes blind (Jose Saramago, the Nobel prize winner, has the same premise in "Blindness," but for my money Wyndham makes a better job of it). Gould, Simon (29 December 2016). Masters, Kelly (ed.). Land Of The Triffids. Independently published. ISBN 978-1-5202-5744-0. He could even be the protagonist. The way he sways his head all the time no triffid would be able to hit him.

The Day of the Triffids touches on mankind's advances in science and technology as a possible contributor to the collapse of society that's depicted in the novel. There is a certain sense of realism within this with its feudal societies and distinct personalities that establish ideas of how man would actually behave in such an apocalypse. And I think this idea has been copied (or at least mirrored) by consequential works that clearly have drawn inspiration from this story. I see a lot of this book in survival horrors such as The Road, The Death of Grass and even in The Walking Dead. It clearly is an important piece of writing that has been crucial in helping establish a genre. When John Wyndham published "The Day of the Triffids" in 1951, GMOs were still decades in the future. His triffids were created in a lab by scientists in the Soviet Union, but he does not explain how they did it. It's not even 100% a given that they did. However, this must have seemed an astounding idea at the time.Destruction then, whether by bomb or plant, isn't the point of this book. It becomes a device to get to the Robinson Crusoe question of how do you choose to rebuild society I know I said that Lord of Light was also a Robinson Crusoe novel, while I've heard that the Russian Formalists claimed that there were only seven (or so) stories and so it is reasonable to expect the same structures and forms to pop up repeatedly, it's also fair to say that once an idea has entered into my head I'll freely work it to death given the opportunity.

I wish I had known about this book years ago. Way before I ever watched The Walking Dead. Instead of thinking about the tv show while reading this book, I would be thinking about the triffids when I’m looking at zombies. Triffids' remake brings in 6.1 million". TV News. Digital Spy. 3 January 2010. Archived from the original on 17 October 2012 . Retrieved 12 August 2012.

Retailers:

Green, Michael Douglas (2000). Social critique in the major novels of John Wyndham: civilization's secrets and nature's truths (masters thesis). Concordia University. Set squarely in postwar England, Wyndham's apocalyptic vision of nature's triumph over civilisation is partly stylised, with the trappings of Cold War paranoia (the triffids are the result of Soviet biological experimentation), but though considered a conservative exponent of the genre, he avoids easy allegories and instead questions the relative values of the civilisation that has been lost, the literally blind terror of humanity in the face of dominant nature, and the possibility of regeneration without offering easy answers. Here's what Bill does right after Josella proposes finding him a harem of blind breeder women: "I ruminated a little on the ways of purposeful, subversive-minded women like Florence Nightingale and [19th-century prison reformer] Elizabeth Fry. They so often turn out to have been right after all."

This 1951 novel was written when nuclear war and the potential end of civilisation as it was known was a more immediate concern than it mostly is today. Early in the book there is an oblique reference to Lysenko and the Soviet Union - which helps to date it to that post war period. Truly Wyndham's concern is not with the potential end of civilisation itself, but really with what comes next. Stamps to feature original artworks celebrating classic science fiction novels". Yorkpress.co.uk. 9 April 2021 . Retrieved 20 September 2022. Link, Miles (2015). " 'A Very Primitive Matter': John Wyndham on Catastrophe and Survival". The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies: 63–80, 161. ProQuest 1728716664– via ProQuest. Critics have highlighted the parallels between the triffids and the decolonization that took place in Europe after 1945. In an essay entitled "The Politics of Post-Apocalypse: Ideologies on Trial in John Wyndham's The Day of the Triffids", [8] literary critic Jerry Määttä writes:Some books can be quite ill-served by their title. 'Not enough triffids!' would complain those lured to this book by the promise of a fun sci-fi romp centered around carnivorous sentient plants - just to find something entirely different.