Currently reading
Pale Fire: A Poem in Four Cantos by John Shade
Pale Fire
Lords of Chaos: The Bloody Rise of the Satanic Metal Underground New Edition
Under Stones
The Erotic Potential of My Wife
A Corner of White
Winter's Bone
Progress:
99 %
Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders
The Beetle
Wreck This Journal
The Day of the Triffids
When you think of Day of the Triffids, where does your mind go to? Big scary plant creatures, right? Right? Wrong. Turns out there are green comets, a blindness epidemic, post-apocalyptic world rebuilding, a plague.... and some big scary plant creatures. All my early memories of this book were wrong. The triffids are actually a relatively minor plot point.So, false expectations aside, this is really an early '50s PA novel which examines how social mores would have to change in order to adapt to a global disaster. Wyndham shows us a number of small groups of people, and their miniature new societies, exposing and challenging their assumptions about which of society's rules are the important ones to survival. Well, he tries. I actually thought that the groups of survivors weren't as disparate in their assumptions as the writer seemed to think. I also felt that Wyndham struggled to delineate the concepts of "sex" or "partnering" and "marriage" - his characters often confusing those concepts and using them interchangeably, despite their supposed beliefs about breeding up the population.Perhaps if I hadn't read so many PA novels in the last couple of years, I might have found this to be a fresher perspective, but as it was I didn't come across anything startling or any unexplored ethical territory. It was an entertaining enough read, and a quick one at that, but at the end of the day what would really have made this a more enjoyable book for me would have been...... MORE BLOODY TRIFFIDS!
