The Day of the Triffids
by John Wyndham
Summary
Biologist Bill Masen wakes in a London hospital with his eyes bandaged after treatment for a sting from a triffid, one of the aggressive, stinging plants farmed commercially for their valuable oil despite killing the occasional handler. He removes his bandages the next morning to find the wards abandoned: a bright green comet shower the night before has blinded nearly everyone on Earth who watched it, and the newly sightless are already dying in the streets as the triffids, no longer penned or supervised, begin walking free and killing at will. Masen falls in with Josella Playton, a novelist who slept through the comet and kept her sight, and the two move between rival attempts to rebuild some kind of order: a scheme run by Wilfred Coker that chains sighted people to parties of the blind at gunpoint, and later a feudal regime under the sighted zealot Torrence, who wants to rule the blind as serfs. Years pass in the telling; Masen, Josella and their children eventually find their way to a triffid free colony establishing itself on the Isle of Wight, and the book ends with the group resolved to spend their lives clearing the island and, eventually, reclaiming the mainland the triffids have overrun.
Wyndham writes what the British call a cozy catastrophe, ordinary, competent people narrating a civilization's end in calm, practical prose rather than horror, and the book reads briskly for how bleak its premise is; entire chapters pass on logistics, food, fuel, who can still see, without ever losing momentum. That matter of fact tone is also what critics have argued over since: some find the English politeness amid apocalypse the novel's real achievement, and others find the ending's shrug toward founding a new order under Masen and his allies too comfortable for what came before it.
Wyndham had served as a fire watcher in London during the Blitz, and letters he wrote at the time describing the uncanny silence of the bombed city on a Sunday morning found their way almost unchanged into the novel's picture of a blinded London. He also credited H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds as a direct model.
Historical Context & Significance
Michael Joseph published The Day of the Triffids in Britain in December 1951, after a shortened version had already run in Collier's magazine in the United States. It was shortlisted for the 1952 International Fantasy Award, which went to John Collier's story collection Fancies and Goodnights, the only prize built at the time to weigh a British science fiction novel at all. Arthur C. Clarke called it an immortal story, and critics Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas praised its detailed plausibility and human immediacy, and Forrest J Ackerman judged it extraordinarily well carried out apart from a somewhat anticlimactic if perhaps inevitable conclusion.
The novel has never gone out of print and gave the language a shorthand, any implausible killer plant is still called a triffid, that has outlived most of the books that coined similar terms. Steve Sekely directed a 1962 film loosely based on it, and the BBC filmed television adaptations in 1981 and again in 2009, with an Amazon Studios series announced since. Royal Mail chose it for a 2021 postage stamp series honoring classic British science fiction, seventy years after Wyndham drew its blinded London directly from what he had watched happen to the real city during the Blitz.