The Day of the Triffids

The Day of the Triffids has recently entered the public domain in the UK, as seventy years have passed since it was originally published and the copyright on the text has not been renewed. My first introduction to The Day of The Triffids was via the 1981 BBC Television adaptation.

Having never read the novel that inspired the TV show, (that gave me nightmares when I was an 11-year-old child), my first experience with the original text was with the Audible edition, narrated brilliantly by Kingsley Ben-Adir, it’s currently part of the Audible plus catalogue, which means you can download and listen to it free of charge, without having to spend an audible credit.

Day of the Triffids was one of the first post-apocalyptic dystopian science fiction novels to be published, and as such, can be seen as an inspirational source of a vast amount of work that has followed it. In my opinion, Wyndham does a brilliant job of telling the story of the survivors of an apocalypse that leaves most humans blind, after they watch a spectacular comet display visible across the world. The brightness of the comet display has the unfortunate consequence of burning the retinas of anyone that looks at it.

I was surprised by how few Triffids there are in The Day of the Triffids. The carnivorous plants of the title, serve only as an exciting backdrop to the main thematic concerns of the novel. What the book is about, is how the complete disintegration of society and civilization, as we know, it leads to uncomfortable ethical questions about societal convention and structures. It’s a book about the implications of successful survival in a world changed forever, where morality and what we think of as humanity has become obsolete.

Wyndham has a very accessible style of writing, and the pacing and dialogue don’t seem to have dated much, considering that this book was written more than 70 years ago. It’s suspenseful and dramatic. The Day of the Triffids is one of those books that has become a cultural reference point for so much later literature and film.  Overall, I would have no hesitation in recommending this book to anyone with an interest in dystopian, post-apocalyptic science fiction, as in many respects, this is the book that defined the genre.

We currently have one physical copy of The Day of the Triffids in the Dulwich international High Suzhou Library. However, as the book is available in the public domain, you can read a digital copy of the novel online from a variety of different sources.