![]() ![]() I knew the triffids already: I'd spent long hours in the jungle with them, exchanging gases. I read it in one sitting, fizzing with the excitement of recognition. My librarian mother disapproved mightily of the fags but when under interrogation I confessed where I'd been hanging out – hardly Sodom and Gomorrah – she spotted a literary opportunity, and slid John Wyndham's The Day of the Triffids my way. I'd shove my butts into their root systems. ![]() The more rampant, brutally spiked, poisonous, or cruel to insects a plant was, the more it appealed to me. I'd head straight for the vast heated greenhouses, where I'd pity my adolescent plight, chain-smoke, and glory in the insane vegetation that burgeoned there. However, with its terrifyingly believable insights into the genetic modification of plants, the book is more relevant today than ever before.Īs a teenager, one of my favourite haunts was Oxford's Botanical Gardens. ![]() Now, with civilization in chaos, the triffids - huge, venomous, large-rooted plants able to 'walk', feeding on human flesh - can have their day.The Day of the Triffids, published in 1951, expresses many of the political concerns of its time: the Cold War, the fear of biological experimentation and the man-made apocalypse. ![]() Carefully removing his bandages, he realizes that he is the only person who can see: everyone else, doctors and patients alike, have been blinded by a meteor shower. When Bill Masen wakes up blindfolded in hospital there is a bitter irony in his situation. ![]()
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