The Day Of The Triffids

This was a really cool sci-fi novel from the 1950s about the collapse of society after (virtually) everyone is blinded by a comet. The blindness is just the first bit of bad news, there are also CARNIVOROUS, SLAPPING PLANTS.

It's so great.

The spiritual precursor to the zombie genre, and it happens to be better written than anything I've read in the genre.

I've had this book on a shelf for a very long time and finally got around to reading it. John Wyndham wrote “The Day of the Triffids” seventy years ago in 1951, but if he were alive and writing today, I don't think his story would be very different. Nothing about his post-apocalyptic vision of Britain seems out of place. The idea that large, chubby, venomous plants developed in secret somewhere in Russia might become the dominant species is only moderately more disturbing than some of the things that we humans are doing to ourselves. Wyndham suggests that a few humans would survive, but only be letting go of the past and changing behavior. What an optimist! I guess you had to be an optimist in post-war Britain. Nevertheless, the story is compelling, even when most of the characters are flat and little under-developed.