#126 A very British disaster: The Day of the Triffids (1951) by John Wyndham

No discussion of classic British science fiction could be complete without mentioning John Wyndham, and perhaps especially his 1951 novel The Day of the Triffids. A pioneer in the noble tradition of the British disaster novel, this influential classic piles not one, or two, but three catastrophes onto the world. The protagonist, Bill Masen, must navigate not only mass blindness and a mystery disease, but the iconic triffids themselves - mobile, venomous, and possibly intelligent plants with mysterious origins and a taste for human flesh.

Despite its pulpy premise, The Day of the Triffids is written in genteel prose that reflects its postwar British origins. But Wyndham's breakthrough novel is no "cosy catastrophe", a phrase coined by Brian Aldiss. It is an unsettling depiction of societal collapse, which probes the frailty and weakness of civilisation in the face of rapid change and technology that spirals out of control. 

In this episode, walk the deserted streets of a fallen London to explore an enduring classic of British SF, one that casts a long shadow over the genre even after more than 70 years.

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Transcript

In an opening chapter ominously titled “The End Begins”, John Wyndham starts to unveil an unforgettable depiction of disaster. His protagonist, Bill Masen, wakes up in hospital, his eyes covered by bandages. He knows it to be a Wednesday, but the quiet outside makes him think of Sunday. Something has gone terribly wrong.

Carefully exposing his eyes, Masen realises that the hospital, all of London, the whole of the country and perhaps the world, have fallen into chaos. Due to a cosmic event the previous night, almost everyone has been rendered blind. Society has collapsed, and civilization is all but gone. What is worse, a new plague is spreading and a strange type of plant is adapting to become a deadly threat to the survivors. It seems the era of humankind is over, giving way to The Day of the Triffids.

A landmark in British SF

The Day of the Triffids is easily one of the most important SF novels of its time, and in the history of British SF specifically. There had been disaster novels before - notably George R. Stewart’s Earth Abides (1949) - but Wyndham’s best-known book puts catastrophe in a specifically and influentially British context. This aided the book’s commercial fortunes. Stephen E. Andrews and Nick Rennison wrote that Wyndham’s “familiar settings, genteel prose, and sheer Englishness” were all that mainstream audiences needed to enjoy SF.

The book was at the leading edge of a wave of British disaster novels. This included Wyndham’s own The Kraken Wakes (1953), John Christopher’s The Death of Grass (1956), J.G. Ballard’s sequence of varied disasters beginning with The Drowned World (1962), and Keith Roberts’ The Furies (1966). Ballard’s work in particular makes an interesting comparison with Wyndham. While Wyndham’s protagonists mourn civilization and seek to recreate it elsewhere, Ballard’s heroes actively embrace destruction, ruin, and the psychic possibilities they present.

Not surprisingly, Wyndham’s books are the ones which are more digestible to mainstream audiences, and more readily adapted to other media. His four key novels that began with Triffids in 1951 and ended with The Midwich Cuckoos (1957) cast a long shadow over British SF, and successive disaster stories often respond to them in some way. 

An understated catastrophe

Brian Aldiss famously coined the dismissive term “cosy catastrophe” to describe Wyndham’s novels, and The Day of the Triffids in particular. Later critics have pushed back against this reading, and are right to do so. There is nothing “cosy” about Wyndham’s breakthrough. One of the very first incidents in the book involves Masen witnessing a man throwing himself to his death from a fifth story window. For a novel from 1951, Triffids presents an unnerving portrait of societal collapse.

To Wyndham, British society is desperately fragile and can fall apart literally overnight. Hopes that an outside force will restore order - notably from the United States - are quickly dashed. The author’s “genteel prose” softens only slightly the unsettling impact of his scenario. Even before disaster strikes, Wyndham makes clear that in this world, the Earth is ringed by militarised satellites wielding bacteriological weapons. 

The Day of the Triffids is not “cosy”, but understated. Wyndham does not lean on graphic violence, action sequences, or pyrotechnic displays of ruination. What he does extremely well is to capture the eerie details of a deserted London, the complacency about triffids which leads to disaster, and the dawning realisation that the old world is over. There is a believable sophistication about the novel - and Wyndham’s later works - which secured it first commercial success, and then enduring appeal.

“The invisible man of science fiction”

One element which may have facilitated the success of The Day of the Triffids was that it appeared to be the work of an exciting new author. As David Pringle wrote in 1985, “to most readers ‘John Wyndham’ was a new writer in 1951”. This was because all of Wyndham’s previous work, mostly in American SF magazines, was published under various different variations of his lengthy full name: John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris. Stylistically and in terms of credit, Wyndham had pulled off a deft and profitable transformation all at the age of 48.

In a way, this achievement makes sense for Wyndham, who led an unusually withdrawn and reclusive life - to the extent that he has been called “the invisible man of science fiction”.

A nightmare we can’t wake up from

What is very clearly visible is the ongoing influence of Wyndham’s work, and of The Day of the Triffids in particular. The word “triffid” has entered the English lexicon, to describe any invasive or troublesome plant. The book has been adapted numerous times, perhaps most successfully to the 1981 UK TV series. In a time perhaps increasingly focused on the end of the world, in which cataclysms jostle for space in the unsettled popular imagination, Wyndham’s novel retains a key place in our collective fears many decades after it was published. It is in a sense a nightmare we can’t wake up from, and that is testament to its author’s imagination and his deceptively quiet approach.