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When Bill Masen wakes up blindfolded in hospital there is a bitter irony in his situation. 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. 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. However, with its terrifyingly believable insights into the genetic modification of plants, the book is more relevant today than ever before.
Comment by Liz Jensen on The Guardian:
As a teenager, one of my favourite haunts was Oxford's Botanical Gardens. 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. The more rampant, brutally spiked, poisonous, or cruel to insects a plant was, the more it appealed to me. I'd shove my butts into their root systems. They could take it. 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 read it in one sitting, fizzing with the excitement of recognition. I knew the triffids already: I'd spent long hours in the jungle with them, exchanging gases. Wyndham loved to address the question that triggers every invented world: the great "What if . . ." What if a carnivorous, travelling, communicating, poison-spitting oil-rich plant, harvested in Britain as biofuel, broke loose after a mysterious "comet-shower" blinded most of the population? That's the scenario faced by triffid-expert Bill Masen, who finds himself a sighted man in a sightless nation. Cataclysmic change established, cue a magnificent chain reaction of experimental science, physical and political crisis, moral dilemmas, new hierarchies, and hints of a new world order. Although the repercussions of an unprecedented crisis and Masen's personal journey through the new wilderness form the backbone of the story, it's the triffids that root themselves most firmly in the reader's memory. Wyndham described them botanically, but he left enough room for the reader's imagination to take over. The result being that everyone who reads The Day of the Triffids creates, in their mind's eye, their own version of fiction's most iconic plant. Mine germinated in an Oxford greenhouse, in a cloud of cigarette smoke.
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Previews available in: Russian English
Subjects
Blind, English Fantasy fiction, Translations into Russian, Science Fiction & Fantasy, Horror, Fiction in English, Fiction, Meteorites, Science fiction, Fantasy fiction, English, Classic Literature, Plant mutation, Fiction, science fiction, general, Large type books, Carnivorous plants, Plants, Blindness, Extraterrestrial beings, Human-alien encounters, 18.05 English literature, Fiction, science fiction, action & adventurePlaces
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The Day of the Triffids (Penguin Essentials)
Sep 30, 2014, Viking
mass market paperback
0241970571 9780241970577
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Day of the Triffids: Popular Penguins
Jul 18, 2011, Penguin Classics
paperback
0143566539 9780143566533
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The Day of the Triffids: TV Tie-In Edition
Mar 30, 2010, Penguin UK
paperback
0141043555 9780141043555
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Day of the Triffids
Aug 07, 2008, Penguin Books, Limited (UK), imusti
paperback
0141033002 9780141033006
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The Day of the Triffids
2008, Penguin Group UK
Electronic resource
in English
0141912111 9780141912110
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El día de los trífidos
2008, Minotauro
Paperback
in Spanish
- 1st edition in this collection
8445076906 9788445076903
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Day of the Triffids (Modern Library 20th Century Rediscovery)
January 2004, Turtleback Books Distributed by Demco Media
in English
0606297855 9780606297851
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The day of the triffids
2003, Modern Library
in English
- 2003 Modern Library pbk. ed.
0812967127 9780812967128
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Day of the Triffids (Modern Library 20th Century Rediscovery)
July 2003, Tandem Library
School & Library Binding
in English
1417619910 9781417619917
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The Day of the Triffids (Penguin Modern Classics)
February 22, 2001, Penguin Books Ltd
0141185414 9780141185415
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The Day of the Triffids
October 18, 2001, Gollancz, Orion Publishing Group, Limited
Hardcover
- New Ed edition
0575073381 9780575073388
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The Day of the Triffids (Radio Collection)
January 2000, Chivers Word for Word Audio Books
Audio cassette
in English
- Unabridged edition
0754075338 9780754075332
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20th Century Day Of The Triffids (Penguin Twentieth Century Classics)
Jun 01, 1999, Penguin Classic
0141181451 9780141181455
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Denʹ triffidov: sbornik zarubezhnoĭ fantastiki
1992, "Sudostroenie"
in Russian
5735504509 9785735504504
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The Day of the Triffids (Bull's-eye S.)
December 1989, Nelson Thornes Ltd
Paperback
- New Ed edition
0748702520 9780748702527
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The Day of the Triffids
December 31, 1989, Listen for Pleasure
Unknown Binding
1858480329 9781858480329
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Day of the Triffids
December 12, 1985, Del Rey, Ballantine Books
Mass Market Paperback
in English
0345328175 9780345328175
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The day of the triffids: The kraken wakes ; The chrysalids ; The seeds of time ; Trouble with lichen ; The Midwich cuckoos.
1981, Book Club Associates, 1981.
in English
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The day of the triffids: The kraken wakes ; The chrysalids ; The seeds of time ; Trouble with lichen ; The Midwich cuckoos.
1980, Heinemann [etc.]
in English
0905712463 9780905712468
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The Day of the Triffids (Unicorn)
September 1975, Nelson Thornes Ltd
Paperback
- New impression edition
0090551508 9780090551507
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The Day of the Triffids (Crest Science Fiction, T1322)
1970, Fawcett Publications
0449013227 9780449013229
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Day of the Triffids
April 30, 1970, Penguin Putnam~mass
Paperback
- New Impression edition
0140009930 9780140009934
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The Day Of The Triffids (S.F. Masterworks) [Hardcover] Wyndham,John and Dw Gary Viskupic
Mar 12, 1961, Doubleday
1473212677 9781473212671
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The day of the triffids
1954, Penguin Books in association with Michael Joseph
in English
0140009930 9780140009934
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Book Details
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First Sentence
"When a day that you happen to know is Wednesday starts off by sounding like Sunday, there is something seriously wrong somewhere."
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- Created March 12, 2019
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May 12, 2022 | Edited by mheiman | Merge works |
May 11, 2022 | Edited by mheiman | merge authors |
October 5, 2021 | Edited by ImportBot | import existing book |
March 12, 2019 | Created by ImportBot | Imported from amazon.com record |