I'm currently reading through Day of The Triffids by John Wyndham. If you haven't heard of it, it can basically be described as everyone but the protagonist becomes blind due to a meteor shower and a deadly type of plants(the eponymous triffids) take advantage of this and start to kill people.
The way I put it makes it sound kind of campy, but it's a great book.
Not that I'm convinced that there's many people who don't know of Triffids here, but I would summarise it as "in the land of the blind, the ambulatory carnivorous plant is king". i.e. in a sudden reversal, Man (so often the top of the food-chain, or at least comfortably side-stepping all the more common predators that might take a fancy to a bit of homo sapiens flesh, ninety-nine times out of a hundred) is no longer the dominant creature, and a strange plant that most people had believed was controllable is suddenly the fittest creature on the planet, and the non-blinded have so many things to sort out that they don't have it easy... (And none of what I've written here is what I'd consider a spoiler, I just thought I better point out.)
Depending on who you ask, it's a "folly of man" book, or an anti-slavery one, or just a rollicking good Sci-Fi read with some improbable but well-defined coincidences making for a perfect storm (and more coincidences allowing a small number of people to weather that storm, albeit not unscathed). The 1962 film had alternate titles of "Invasion of the..." and "Revolt of the...", IIRC, which technically put completely different spins on the situation. ("Day of the..." is quite neutral, in that regard.)
Different versions (i.e. the original book and many, many adaptations in film, TV or radio form) play around with the premise a bit. e.g. the meteor shower is natural/man-made; the triffids are alien in origin/a secret experiment by some government/strange but natural earth-plants; the protagonist is (almost always) an expert in Triffids/(occasionally) just has a history with them; there are chancers, lovers, opportunists, do-gooders, survivalists, and of course victims galore.
So even if you're seen a film/TV adaptation or heard an audio dramatisation, and know the plot, you'd probably be able to read the book without knowing
exactly how each twist goes. And probably your adaptation diverges quite some way in some respects... the 'ending' is quite often a divergence point, depending on what market and message they were aiming their particular production at, consciously or unconsciously...
I'm interested to know how the upcoming film, last I heard due for release in 2013, will work with the basic premise.
So, enjoy your read, SSG. It's a surprisingly modern book, compared with a lot of the tales contemporaneously written alongside it. But Wyndham does have this interesting style. From the likes of The Chrysalids through Midwitch Cuckoos and onto The Kraken Wakes. He does another plant(sorta!)-based story in The Trouble With Lichen[1], but it's quite different.
And does anyone remember Chocky? At least the mid-80s TV adaptation, if not the original book...
(Due to Wyndham being alphabetically quite late, I must admit I didn't get around to reading most of his stuff written under that particular pen-name when I was methodically going through the library's SF/Fantasy section (though unknowingly read some 'John Beynam' works), but I made up for it since.
)
[1] I know Lichen isn't a plant, before the taxonomists out there pipe up.
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Topic: What book are you reading/want to read? (Read 13572 times)