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Title: The Day of the Triffids (Modern Library 20th Century Rediscovery) by John Wyndham ISBN: 0-8129-6712-7 Publisher: Modern Library Pub. Date: 01 July, 2003 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $11.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.55 (51 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Exciting and Compelling!
Comment: Nature has always been an unfolding mystery to the human race.Ê From the very beginning of time, men depicted stories of nature's beginning on cave walls and told beautiful myths and stories in an attempt to explain the unknown.Ê Even today, there is much in the world we do not understand.Ê John Wyndam's The Day of the Triffids presents a possible side of nature that has not yet been discovered.
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ÊÊÊ The novel takes place in the suburbs of England in the early twenty-first century, where Bill Masen has been checked into the hospital after surviving a brutal attack from a triffid, one of a strange species of carnivorous plants.Ê While he is in he hospital, the Earth supposedly passes through a cloud of comet debris, creating what the press call "the most remarkable celestial spectacle on record."Ê However,Ê like many things today, the beautiful meteor shower has a hidden catch - all who watch it will become blind.Ê Bill, who is unable to watch the phenomenon due to his bandaged eyes, awakes in the morning to a deathly silence and to the awful realization that everyone around him is sightless.Ê He ventures out of the hospital and teams up with a young author, Josella Playton, who can see as well.Ê The two explore the country together in hopes of finding more humans who have not become blinded by the shower and instead discover that the triffids have begun to walk and are attacking innocent and blinded humans.Ê The Day of the Triffids relates the story of Bill and Josella's fight to survive in the seemingly impossible.
John Wyndam's The Day of the Triffids is an exciting and compelling novel that will keep the reader hanging on every word, just waiting to see what will happen next.Ê The plot of the book is farfetched yet understandable and interesting, and leaves one wondering if something so horrifying could occur in the world today.Ê The terror that Bill and Josella face in their triffid-inhabited world makes the characters easy to relate to and sympathize with.Ê Practically everyone in the world has been faced with a challenge or difficult situation, and The Day of the Triffids just magnifies the fear one might go through.Ê Wyndam strings together a series of events in such a way that every part of the book is engrossing, and he leaves the reader begging for more.
For more information on The Day of the Triffids, go to:
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Rating: 4
Summary: Attack of the killer plants (and then some)
Comment: First published in 1951, this classic science-fiction novel was unique for its time (although undoubtedly inspired by "War of the Worlds"). The story follows the plight of the world's few remaining survivors after three (possibly) coincidental cataclysmic events of uncertain origins: the genetic development of mobile, carnivorous plants; the blinding of the earth's inhabitants by what may or may not have been a meteor shower; and the sudden onset of a mysterious and fatal disease. Most of the world's inhabitants are sightless and unable to defend themselves against the marauding plants, and even those with vision succumb to the plague.
End-of-the-world scenarios have of course been done to death, especially in B-movies, but "Day of the Triffids" has withstood the test of time--not because of its plot, but because it anticipated many other works and because the writing and themes are a cut above your typical pulp fiction. Nearly every episode in the book has been replicated in dozens of science fiction and horror movies and novels. Filmgoers who have seen "Resident Evil" or "28 Days Later" will recognize the opening scene, in which Wiliam Masen wakes up in a hospital room, unaware that the world as he knows it has come to a devastating end. Other scenes recall the "Night of the Living Dead" series and similar films, and the descriptions of the survivors' efforts to rebuild society clearly influenced many later works of dystopian fiction.
Wyndham adopts a minimalist "noir" style for the first sections, using a surreal first-person perspective to convey the confusion, fear, and isolation afflicting William Masen while he tries to figure out what has happened. When the focus of the book changes from the lone individual to bands of the living, the author shifts to a more expansive and analytic prose that fleshes out the book's social and political commentary.
It is the exploration of these themes that makes the book so fascinating. As various groups of survivors unite together, they adopt different modes of government: a communalism that tries to rescue as many people as possible, a fundamentalism entrenched in its devotion to outdated moral codes, a militarism that quickly degenerates to totalitarianism, and a rationalism relying on the survival of the fittest to guarantee as many new offspring as possible. Each of these myopic systems suffers from a slavishness to one goal at the expense of any other: preventing as many deaths as possible, preserving morality, maintaining law and order, and insuring the survival of the species. Following the traditions of the best dystopian fiction, Wyndham uses his story to examine the faults with our present world and its communist, theocratic, authoritarian, and Darwinian societies.
The ending of the book is just open-ended and ambiguous enough to have allowed for a sequel, by Wyndham wasn't the type to write or authorize one (although Simon Clark published "The Night of the Triffids" two years ago). This closing ambiguity seems appropriate: in the real world, there are never as many solutions as there are problems.
Rating: 3
Summary: Interesting but not as good as his short stories
Comment: I'm torn as how best to review this book. One the one hand I've seen many adaptations of the book on TV and film. Some credit the book others don't. Having just recently seen the UK series "Survivors" (1975) I must say that I'm surprised that Terry Nation didn't credit Wyndham given the heavily lifted plot and dialogue! Sure, the main characters are changed around but the incidental plot elements are nearly the same and in the same order. All that is missing is the triffids and the comet.
Which brings me to my main complaint about the book: The triffids hardly have anything to do with the plot of the book even though they are the title of it and are the most thought out piece of the book. The idea of a tech industry expirament let loose in the wild was fascinating but save for chapter 2, nothing is further is developed along those lines.
Then there's the comet (if it is one) which blinds everyone and then the unexplained plague a few days later. Now if you believe the B film Day of the Comet, the comet turns those who saw it into zombies -- triffids be damned and then the same sort of plot (minus menacing plants) goes on. In this book though, the two seem unrelated except to kill off all those annoying recently rendered blind folks.
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Title: The Night of the Triffids by Simon Clark ISBN: 0340766018 Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton Pub. Date: 01 October, 2001 List Price(USD): $8.99 |
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Title: Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham ISBN: 014118146X Publisher: Penguin Putnam~trade |
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Title: Earth Abides by George R. Stewart ISBN: 0449213013 Publisher: Fawcett Books Pub. Date: 01 May, 1989 List Price(USD): $6.99 |
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Title: The Chrysalids by John Wyndham ISBN: 0786700416 Publisher: Pub Group West Pub. Date: 01 November, 1993 List Price(USD): $3.95 |
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Title: Out of the Deeps by John Wyndham ISBN: 034527217X Publisher: Del Rey Books Pub. Date: 01 December, 1977 List Price(USD): $1.75 |
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