Name: The Day of the Triffids
ISBN: 9780143566533

The Day of the Triffids

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.

What Hacker News says

brudgersAug 2025

Typically the embedded story (at least in the stories I'm familiar with)

Maybe read the three classics dystopian sci-fi:

  The Earth Abides
  Day of the Triffids
  On the Beach

Or just classic scifi:

  Anything by Phillip K. Dick
  Most things by Robert Heinlein

Or authors of “modern” classics:

  William Gibson
  John Scalzi

Even Dune is a pretty grim future for all the non-player characters. Never mind Margret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale, McCarthy’s The Road, and Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz.

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criddellMay 2025

Sometimes I think high school English courses are designed to make kids hate reading.

Gatsby was one of the books we had to read and I didn't like any of the characters and couldn't care less about anything they wanted or did.

When I was around 30 I decided to read the book again to see if it landed differently and nope. Still thought it was awful.

I did enjoy a few of the assigned books. Canticle for Leibowitz, Brave New World, Lost Horizon, Frankenstein, and Day of the Triffids are a few I remember positively.

Teachers know kids will use AI to write essays and I bet more than a few teachers use them to grade, so there's probably no point in assigning a single book for everybody anymore. IMHO, the best chance to get a kid to read and write about a novel is to let them pick something of interest.

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pomianOct 2024

Same author, another mind blowing book, especially then: " Day of the Triffids". one of the first apocalypse books. Makes you always think twice when looking up at the Aurora Borealis, like a few days ago.

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iainmerrickOct 2023

This is a theme in several John Wyndham stories -- I’m thinking Day of the Triffids and especially The Kraken Wakes.

He often seems to get looked down on today for writing “cosy catastrophes” about plucky English survivors, but his books have a lot more going on than that.

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patrickscolemanSep 2023

Just read “The Day of the Triffids” by John Wyndham (1951)[1]. It’s a great, classic horror sci-fi novel where plants can hear and talk to each other. Big influence for “Annihilation” and “28 Days Later.” Gotta love it when some crazy fictional idea turns out to have some factual (?) basis.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_of_the_Triffids

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swayvilNov 2021

By the way, John Wyndham (author of The Day of the Triffids. Mentioned in the article) also wrote a novel titled, "The Kraken Wakes". Which is a hilarious, messed up and excellent piece of scifi full of early 20th century flavorful goodness.

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