This is a much more interesting and genuinely horrifying book than I expected.

I thought I knew the story well enough from fond memories of the 1962 Cinemascope film version, but I was wrong. Like all films, the movie version requires action and so, in the film, the triffids are much more prominent and horrifying from the start. However the book, like all books, has the space to be more thoughtful and psychological than any movie or TV series, and so it came as a surprise to discover how much less of a part the triffids play in it, and instead how full the novel is with moral and philosophical speculations. The lead character:

• spends a lot of time meditating on the nature of ‘normal society’, how fragile and contingent it is
• has numerous conversations about the morality of deciding who to save and who to abandon in a disaster scenario

In addition, there’s a surprisingly persistent discussion of the nature of ‘class’ in 1950s England, which comes to revolve around the ambiguous character of Coker.

Above all, focusing on the monsters underplays the extent to which the book is more grippingly a terrifying vision of an entire world gone blind. It’s that, the advent of universal blindness and all its implications, far more than the monsters, which absolutely terrified me. J.G. Ballard gave his novel about global warming and melting ice caps the bluntly descriptive title, The Drowned World. For the first two-thirds of the book, when the triffids are mostly peripheral to the protagonist and his adventures, the novel could have been more accurately titled The Blinded World or Planet of the Blind.

John Wyndham

Wikipedia sums Wyndham up well:

John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris (July 1903 to March 1969) was an English science fiction writer best known for his works published under the pen name John Wyndham, although he also used other combinations of his names, such as John Beynon and Lucas Parkes. Some of his works were set in post-apocalyptic landscapes. His best known works include The Day of the Triffids (1951) and The Midwich Cuckoos (1957).

After attending the unorthodox public school, Bedales, Wyndham didn’t go on to university but had a succession of jobs while he tried to launch a career as a writer. He sold science fiction stories to American magazines while also writing detective stories. He was 36 and not at all successful when the Second World War started, in which he initially served as a censor, was a fire warden in London, and then saw action as a corporal cipher operator in the Royal Corps of Signals, taking part in the Normandy landings.

After the war Wyndham continued to struggle as a writer until, at the end of the 1940s, he made a conscious decision to alter his style and treat subjects in a more realistic, less Americanised and pulp manner. The first book he wrote in this new voice was The Day of The Triffids which remains his best-known and most successful work to this day.

His reputation rests on the first four novels he wrote under the name John Wyndham during the 1950s – The Day of the Triffids, The Kraken Wakes, The Chrysalids, The Midwich Cuckoos – each of which conceives an astonishingly powerful scenario depicted with tremendous imaginative immediacy. He also wrote quite a few short stories, some novellas and later novels, but none match the haunting power of these big four fictions.

The Day of The Triffids

Chapter 1 The end begins

The first-person narrator, William ‘Bill’ Masen (p.17) is nearly 30-years-old (pp.53 and 147). He is ‘a very mediocre biochemist’ (p.243).

The narrative opens as Bill wakes up in a strangely silent hospital. He’s in because of a vicious sting he got across his eyes, whose treatment required his eyes to be swathed in bandages. That’s why he missed the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see the amazing natural firework display of the night before, as earth moved through the debris of a passing comet, creating thousands of shooting stars and green flashes across the sky. He heard all about it on the radio and the nurses who came to check on him told him how wonderful it was to see.

The following morning he wakes to a strange silence, not only in the hospital but in the usually busy streets outside. Intrigued and then worried, he eventually decides to undo the bandages over his eyes himself, first carefully feeling his way to the window to lower the blinds so his room is dark. To his relief, his eyes appear to be working fine though he gives them an hour or so to acclimatise to full daylight before venturing out into the hospital.

Here he discovers, to his growing horror, that everyone has gone blind. Doctors, nurses and patients are all stone blind. Some have fallen down stairs and hurt themselves. He helps a smartly dressed consultant to his office who, after trying the phone and finding it dead, throws himself out the fifth floor window. Going downstairs to the lobby, he finds it a sea of moaning blind people milling about trying to find the doors, crushing the weak against the wall, in helpless confusion.

Too many for him to help. He finds the service stairs, makes it down to a back alley and across the road to a pub, the Alamein Arms. It is open but empty and he discovers the landlord, very drunk, getting drunker. Landlord tells him that this morning, when his wife discovered she was blind and then that the kids were, too, she turned on the gas and lay on the bed. They’ll all be dead by now. He didn’t have the guts.

By now Masen and the reader are thoroughly harrowed. I found this opening chapter genuinely scary, a terrifying vision of the entire world struck blind. Masen downs another double brandy to stop his hands shaking, then leaves the pub to face this brave new world.

Chapter 2 The coming of the triffids

Chapter two takes us back into the past to tell us Masen’s backstory and explain the backdrop to the opening chapter. It is told from the contemporary, post-catastrophe situation and so is sprinkled with the idea that everything he is going to describe is from the old world, the world before the cataclysm, the world when people could see.

It contains passages where he laments that nobody back then, back in the Old World, really understood how interconnected all the goods and services they took for granted were. You turned on the tap and water came out; you went to the shops and they were full of food; you picked up a phone, turned on the radio or TV, and everything worked, as the result of the collaborative interaction of hundreds of thousands of people scattered across the globe. Now all that has finished, forever, and that is the basic, fundamental thrill that all post-apocalyptic novels give.

He tells us about the origin of triffids, the derivation of their name which refers to their three legs. In quite a convoluted passage he explains that they appear to have been bred in Soviet Russia in a genetic experiment associated with the name of the discredited biologist Lysenko. He goes into quite a convoluted, cloak-and-dagger story about a dodgy middleman, Umberto Christoforo Palanguez, who approaches a Western fish oil company and says he has a product which will revolutionise the market. He is referring to the oil which can be harvested from these ‘triffids’.

Umberto then commissions a Russian working in some kind of experimental lab to smuggle out some seeds of these new genetically-modified organisms, which are collected by a light airplane which is going to fly them to Umberto in the West. However, the plane is involved in a mid-air collision and millions of triffid seeds, light as air, float around the world with the trade winds.

At first they were treated as a rare novelty and in a slightly too pat coincidence it turns out that the narrator was one of the first to see them in England, as he discovers a specimen growing in his garden in the suburbs of London. That is until he is bending over it one day when its loose swinging ‘arm’ clobbers him, at which point his father uproots and destroys it.

But Masen goes on to defy his father’s wishes that he get a sensible degree and a secure profession and instead studies biology and finds himself a few years later working in an experimental triffid farm. By this point it has become well-known that the triffids produce cheap oil and other foodstuffs. The downside is we learn that the plans not only grow to a huge size but can uproot themselves and walk forward on their three stumpy ‘legs’. Worst of all, they possess a really long flexible arm, like a whip, which is covered in poison sacs. One whipping blow from a full-grown triffid and the poison lashed into a human’s flesh is fatal. And so all the workers at the triffid farm take elaborate precautions and wear outfits a little like a beekeeper’s, covering every inch of the skin in leather protection, and wearing a metal grille mask.

A colleague of Masen’s at the triffid farm, Walter Lucknor (p.46) has spent a lot of time observing the plants and developed some idiosyncratic theories. He thinks the triffids use the odd bunch of sticks down at the front of their ‘bodies’ to communicate. He thinks they can talk to each other.

In a disturbing conversation down the pub one day, after work, Lucknor dwells on the triffids’ tremendous survival effectiveness. It worries him that they know just where to sting a person, namely on the unprotected face and across the eyes – rendering their prey blind. Lucknor makes the worrying point that, if forced to choose between a blind man and a triffid, he’d bet on the triffid every time (p.48), just part of a casual conversation but which, to the narrator, later on, comes to seem grimly prophetic.

These two opening chapters create an awesomely complete setup. The narrative is so tightly bound, every part contributes to every other part. It has the fully-formed feel of a myth or legend.

And then comes the day when Masen and Lucknor are working in one of the compounds of farmed triffids and Masen is bent over one when, without warning, it lashes its sting against his mesh mask with such force that some of the poison sacs burst and spatter into his eyes. It’s only because Lucknor acts promptly to wash his eyes and then provide the antidote to the poison that his sight was saved, but still an ambulance comes, they bandage his eyes and off to hospital he goes, missing out on the great meteor shower in the sky which took place on the fateful night of Tuesday 7 May

Chapter 3 The groping city

Masen decides to head into central London. Like The War of The Worlds the thrill, the horror, comes from reading about places you’re familiar with, and the streets of the capital which most people have visited at some point, now empty of all traffic and strewn with blind people pitifully feeling their way along walls and railings, occasionally bumping into each other.

Masen records what you might call the standard thoughts about the collapse of civilisation. Slowly he sees people becoming angrier, more violent, covetous, stealing parcels off each other in case they contain food, increasingly prepared to smash windows and grope around inside in case it’s a food shop. Initially he is reluctant to behave the same way. He takes food from a delicatessen which a car has ploughed into, but leaves the correct money on the counter.

But as Masen continues his odyssey along Piccadilly, stopping for free brandy at the Regents Hotel, before walking through Soho, it begins to sink in that all the values and morality of the old world have evaporated. Only people ruthlessly focused on their own survival will survive.

Several times he comes across children or toddlers who can see in the care of blind mothers. Quickly they attract crowds of the blind who need their help and the children start crying in fear. Once Masen encounters the leader of a gang of blind men, all drunk, he’s promising to take them to the Café Royal for a piss-up and when one of them mentions women, the leader reaches out to a blonde young woman fumbling blindly by and hands her to his follower. Masen, being a decent chap, intervenes to stop this and, the next thing he knows, is waking up on the pavement having obviously been punched very hard.

My head was still full of standards and conventions which had ceased to apply. (p.59)

Now Masen begins to refer to the fact that he is writing all this from the vantage point of ‘years later’, long after the events, long after civilisation as we know it has ended. As he watches the crowds of looting leaderless, blind people he realises:

There would be no going back – ever. It was finish to all I had known. (p.60)

Chapter 4 Shadows before

In Soho watching the crowds Masen has much the same thoughts as crop up among the characters in John Christopher’s disaster novel, The Death of Grass, namely – if only a handful of people are going to survive this catastrophe, who should it be? And who should choose? Should you try to help everyone? Or is it only practical to restrict your help to a small group? In which case, who? How on earth do you decide who?

Masen comes across a brutish blind man in a side alley viciously beating a young woman cowering on the ground who’s tied with rope round the wrists and held by a leash. Masen beats the man and cuts the cord, releasing the girl, and they both nip out of the blind man’s reach.

Masen takes her to a nearby pub, where she recovers and tells her story. She’s Josella Playton (p.66) who lived at a posh house in St John’s Wood with her mummy and daddy and servants. She’d been to a big party on Monday night and had such a bad hangover she’d gone to bed early on Tuesday afternoon, having taken a sleeping draught and thus missed the comet.

They find an abandoned car in Regent Street and drive between the scattered pedestrians through Regents Park across to St John’s Wood and to Josella’s nice house. They haven’t walked far up the drive before they see the body of a man on the gravel, with a red welt across his face. In a flash Masen realises it’s a triffid sting. He sees the triffid hiding in the undergrowth. They skirt around it and into the house where they find Josella’s father dead in the living room – but not before another triffid has a go at them from the halway; they hurriedly slam the door shut. Then one comes lumbering across the garden. Masen hurries Josella into the car and they drive off as she bursts into tears.

Chapter 5 A light in the night

Masen drives them towards Clerkenwell, to a factory he knows which makes anti-triffid masks and weapons. By King’s Cross there’s a huge crowd blocking the way and they hurriedly exit the car before they’re pulled out by the mob. They make it on the foot to the factory, load up with weapons, then scout around and find a ritzy tower block, go up some stairs and break into a luxury apartment.

Once they’ve established it’s quite safe, Masen goes on a sortie for food. As he exits, a door further down the corridor opens and a young couple, obviously blind, leave their flat. The man navigates to the big window opposite, embraces his sweetheart and then steps through, plunging them to their deaths.

That’s two suicides Masen has seen, Josella being beaten up, people being crushed to death, the landlord who told him about his wife gassing herself and the children, young women getting parcelled out to rough men to abuse, children crying in the streets which are full of pitiful whimpering crowds. Brian Aldiss made the unjust criticism that Wyndham’s novels depicted ‘cosy catastrophes’, but this doesn’t feel at all cosy. It feels utterly harrowing.

Masen and Josella use an oil stove to fix up a fine meal and drink all the apartment owner’s sherry and wine. Afterwards, looking out the window, Josella notices a light pointing directly up into the sky, presumably a beacon, presumably set by someone who can see. But the thought of making their way across London’s increasingly lawless streets in the pitch black deters them.

Chapter 6 Rendezvous

Next day Masen and Josella drive towards the University of London building, see a crowd milling round the fence, park up Gower Street, make their way through back gardens to see a crowd laying siege to the gates. They watch the leader of the blind mob arguing with some kind of representative of the sighted people within. When this ‘leader’ seizes one of the insider’s arms and the mob turns ugly, those on the inside disperse it with sub-machine gun fire.

Once the mob has cleared, Masen and Josella present themselves at the locked gates and, as sighted people, are immediately let in. They discover a community of 30 or so people who have barricaded themselves into Senate House, most sighted although they have brought a few blind partners along. They are introduced to ‘the Colonel’, a plump chap trying to keep up a military bearing, and a colleague, Michael Beadley, who explains that they plan to load up with as much food and resources as they can, then leave London as soon as possible.

Masen is tasked with going to collect foodstuffs from various warehouses. When he returns, the others raise an eyebrow at him half filling a lorry with anti-triffid weapons. It turns out none of them have seen one, none of them have had anything like the experience Masen and Josella had at her parents’ house. But, having seen the movie half a dozen times, we, the readers, know better.

This chapter sees the inauguration of the theme of class in Britain. As Masen listens, he finds the man leading the mob difficult to place within England’s stratified class system because his voice veers between the educated and the common.

His voice was a curious mixture of the rough and the educated, so that it was hard to place him – as though neither style seemed quite natural to him, somehow. (p.118)

Indeed we will meet this man, Coker, later in the London episodes, and beyond and his amphibian nature, a man between two worlds, becomes a sort of symbol of the plot, or of all the characters, raised in one world, but having to face a completely different one.

Chapter 7 Conference

Having settled in with the Senate House community, Masen and Josella are called to a conference of the community in a lecture hall. A succession of speakers outline the need to leave London. It falls to a sociology professor from Kingston University, Dr. E. H. Vorless, D.Sc., to give a long speech saying times change and values with them. Everyone is going to have to work in the new world, and he predictably upsets the women present by pointing out the simple truth that they are going to have to breed, a lot, no more 2.4 children per breeding pair. If their children are to stand any hope of recreating anything like civilisation there are going to have to be a lot of them.

A number of women forcibly object – feminists because they don’t want to be treated like chattels; from the other end of the spectrum, a spirited Christian woman makes a speech from the floor saying she and others will not bow to this godless immorality, and gives the Christian interpretation that this entire catastrophe is God’s punishment for modern immoral society, a claim which can be made about more or less any society at any point in history.

Masen and Josella listen, smiling at the controversy. After the meeting they go out into the square behind Senate House and sit on a low wall. Masen is surprised when Josella suddenly says she’ll be happy to pair off with him. And then stunned when she says that he will also have to take responsibility for two blind women as well. It’s only fair. They will breed while he hunts, guards and so on. The new tribalism.

Chapter 8 Frustration

In the middle of the night, Masen is woken by shouting and the smell of smoke. People are yelling ‘Fire! Fire!’ He gets dressed in a flash and runs downstairs only to trip and fall and be knocked out. When he awakes he is in a small room, bare of everything but a bed and his hands are tied. A rough cockney geezer unlocks the door and gives him some food, but doesn’t untie his wrists.

Coker comes in. He is the ringleader of the mob who were baying at the gates of Senate House. He explains they broke into the building, started some small scale fires and set up tripwires at the bottom of stairs. It’s one of those that Masen tripped over. Then Coker’s gang rounded up the sighted people, tied them up or carried their unconscious bodies to the new location.

He gets out a map. He has a plan. He has divided London into sectors. Each sector will be assigned one sighted person and a group of the blind. Masen is assigned Hampstead. First he is tied to very tough blokes, no way he can jump them. So he’s given a group of blind people and he drives a lorry full of them to Hampstead. He scouts around for them and finds an empty hotel where he quarters them. Then he has to take them on foraging missions. This is it. He’s not intended to go back to Coker’s HQ. This will be his life, his future.

He describes how wearing it is trying to supervise blind people looting shops and loading stuff up. Not only that but some of them have started to report sick, stomach pains. On one expedition a few days in, they walk round the corner and one of the goons he’s tied to is shot down. Masen and the other hurriedly retreat back round the corner and Masen forces the other one to free him. He tells his group to walk away, stick together, stay in the middle of the road. He himself grabs a stick and pretends to be blind tottering along.

Round the corner comes the man who shot at them, the confident red-headed leader of the another gang which was looting one of the shops Masen was taking his posse towards. Red head walks behind Masen’s cohort, with Masen blindly tapping along the pavement behind him. Then one of the sickest of Masen’s gang falls to the floor, clutching his stomach. Red hair walks up to him, looks with distaste, then calmly shoots him in the head, turns and walks back to his gang.

Masen rounds up his gang, finds a lorry and takes them up Hampstead High Street. They’re looting a shop under his supervision when they’re attacked by triffids causing a mad panic. Many of the men are stung across the face, Masen leads them out the back of the shop, over a few walls into a small garage where he packs them into a Daimler and roars off past some triffids which lash out with their ten-foot stings. Things are going from bad to worse.

That night a blind girl comes to his bedroom at the hotel where they’re boarded. She has been sent by the others to offer herself to him to make him stay. Masen is overcome by the tragedy of so much beauty and freshness and innocence forced to abase itself. In the morning it is a warm day and for the first time he smells the smell of rotting flesh. The dead of London are rotting. Leaving the house he passes her room, she calls him in. She has got the mystery ailment, fever and bent double in cramps, she begs him for something to end it. Masen goes to the nearest chemist, finds something toxic, gives it to her and a glass of water, and leaves the house weeping.

God, the sense of loss, the immense human suffering, weighs heavily on the reader, well this reader, anyway.

Chapter 9 Evacuation

The book is full of meditations on what you’d have to do to survive, the steps you’d have to take, how you would have to change and adapt, drop a lot of the old ‘civilised’ values, be ready to defend yourself and yours.

Since I was sixteen my interest in weapons has decreased, but in an environment reverting to savagery it seemed that one must be prepared to behave more or less as a savage, or possibly cease to behave at all, before long.

So he drives to a gunshop in Westminster, which he thoroughly loots, and then heads to Victoria because he thinks that’s the part of London allotted to Josella. It is deserted like everywhere else. Wyndham makes a penetrating comment that the newly blind, people afflicted by this tragedy, prefer to nurse it silently indoors.

He finds an old blind lady. He gives her some cans and a can opener and she tells him she was part of a group led by a sighted woman and he prods her to give him enough of a description of the hotel where they were based for him to find it. But it is empty apart from a decent bloke who’s dying of the plague in the foyer. Masen gets him some water and the dying man confirms Josella was there but she’s left with her troupe. Doesn’t know where.

Masen drives back to the University of London. It’s now empty but inside someone has drawn an address on the wall, Tynsham Manor, near Devizes, Wiltshire. Masen finds four of the lorries are still there, including the one he loaded with the anti-triffid weapons. Well, so he’ll head off for Devizes in the morning.

He goes for a last walk in Russell Square, finds a triffid hiding in the undergrowth and blasts its top off with a shotgun. If you shoot the top of a triffid off it’s like decapitating it. It ceases moving or being a threat.

He sits against a big tree in the gardens, saying goodbye forever to London which is starting to reek of its dead. Then hears footsteps on gravel. He’s scared and, for the first time, realises what it was like for primitive man and what it’s going to be like for him – living in continual fear. Then the figure steps forward and he sees that it is… Coker, the orator, the mob leader, who kidnapped him and the others.

They decide to make a truce. Coker admits his initial strategy was wrong. Michael Beadley’s crew was right in wanting to leave London altogeher. They declare an amnesty for the past and will work together, leaving London together. They go into Senate House and so to bed.

Next morning they leave London in the two most-loaded lorries. Masen describes the difficulty of driving along roads littered with cars. They stop for gas and food. At one stop Coker quotes Shelley, which is slightly odd because Roger, a character in the 1956 apocalypse novel, The Death of Grass, is also given to quoting poetry, including Shelley. Was Shelley particularly popular in the 1950s, among middle-brow readers of science fiction?

And now we get an extended passage about the class system as Masen asks Coker straight out how come, a week ago he was rallying a London mob in broadest cockney but now is sounding quite middle class and quoting Shelley when he wants to. For someone like Masen this is confusing (p.161). Coker explains that he comes from a working class background but educated himself at night school so he could talk the language of the educated, the nobs, the people who run things (p.162). Still, Masen quietly proves his superiority by correcting Coker when he misquotes the famous lines from John Milton’s Lycidas, ‘Tomorrow to fresh woods and pastures new.’

Chapter 10 Tynsham

Masen and Coker arrive in their lorries at the manor house in the village of Tynsham in Wiltshire, as indicated by the message scrawled inside Senate House. It is populated by refugees from London but they discover that the Colonel and Michael Beadley are not there, as they expected. Instead they are shown through to the office of Miss Florence Durrant (p.172), who turns out to be the prim Christian woman who objected, during the conference at Senate House, to polygamy and breeding as being unchristian and immoral.

Our guys learn that when the London posse arrived at Tynsham there quickly developed a rift between Miss Durrant and her high-minded followers and the Colonel, Michael Beadley and most of the men. Most of the men left with the Colonel, drove off, Miss Durrant has no idea where. This left the community at Tynsham with five sighted women, a dozen blind women, some blind men and no sighted men at all. They have rounded up survivors from the nearby village and are planning to run a godly and moral community. On arrival they had discovered the mansion’s inhabitants had been killed by a few triffids loose in the grounds. Miss Durrant and the other sighted women had broken into the manor’s gun cupboard and blown the tops off 26 triffids. Over the previous few days more stragglers had arrived from London, mostly women. But not Josella. Masen is disappointed – he’d had been hoping all the way down that he’d find her here.

Masen chats to a young woman mending clothes by candlelight. Suddenly the electric lights come on and she is amazed. It was Coker, he found the generator and turned it on. He is appalled that the women hadn’t found it or realised there would be one. He takes it out in a big rant at the young darner, saying women are parasites, convincing themselves and men that they are too delicate, too spiritual and too high-minded to work. That’s why hitherto most have latched onto a man and then lived like leeches off his pay, while irresponsibly breeding children who others will have to educate.

Well, there’s a view you don’t hear very often these days, when the women of the past are uniformly portrayed as helpless victims of the patriarchy. The young woman storms out, Masen bursts out laughing.

Chapter 11 And further on…

Masen spends a sleepless night. He had hoped to find Josella at Tynsham, he is bitterly disappointed (a novel needs a  plot and so Masen’s quest for Josella is developing into the main motor of this one – as the Custance party’s odyssey across England to Westmorland is the motor of The Death of Grass). When pushed, Miss Durrant told them that the Colonel et al had headed off for a place called Beaminster in Dorset. Masen and Coker decide to go looking for them and drive off. More careful driving along car-strewn roads. Masen notices there are very few animals about, only vacant cows lowing to be milked.

In a place called Steeply Honey they see a man apparently trying to warn them away who, the moment he steps out his front door, is whiplashed by a triffid. Pushing on into the high street they park, Masen gets down, and is immediately confronted by a fair-haired man with a rifle.

Chapter 12 Dead end

But Coker has seen all this from the cab of the other truck and now enters from the side, pulling his weapon on the man. Both agree to lower them. Turns out fair hair is one of just three sighted people. They thought Masen and Coker were the advance guard of some mass gang from the city who they expect to come marauding at any moment. Masen and Coker put them straight – the cities are just massive mortuaries now. No marauding parties are coming from them.

The three locals take them to a fortified manor whither they’ve taken lots of weapons and food and turned into a base. From here, Masen and Coker persuade them to embark on a systematic sweep of the surrounding countryside looking for the Colonel’s party. They use maps to divide up the territory and set off on long lonely drives round the country, regularly beeping their horns, but find nothing.

It’s in these passages that we learn for the first time that the animals have been blinded by the comet, too. Cows and sheep are blundering around blinded. That explains his occasional references to seeing no animals except a few birds.

One of the locals manages to get a helicopter at a local airport working, and they fly low over large parts of the countryside, but they don’t find the London gang. They encounter scattered groups in farms and holdouts. When they land, these isolated groups simply refuse to believe the catastrophe is universal. Rather than joining together, they prefer to stay in the little groups and places they know. It is a very persuasive description of ‘disaster fatigue’, the refusal to accept what’s happened or to think straight. And trauma. The preference to stay within a small tight-knit community in places they know. Fear and trauma.

On one of his trips Coker unexpectedly recruits a forceful old lady, Mrs Forcett, who is a great cook. But the days are passing and nothing is changing. Coker makes a big speech saying they need to group together in as large a community as possible so that the labour of the many can enable the few to be teachers and pass on knowledge, otherwise the future is utter barbarity. For that reason he announces he is going to drive back to the Christian community at Tynsham. With its walls, extensive land and large buildings it has the potential to become an organised agrarian community.

Masen sees the force of Coker’s argument but, in the small hours, realises he is not going to go with him. He needs to find Josella, it is his quest. Back in London, on that moony evening when they sat outside Senate House and she surprised him by saying she wanted to pair off with him, she had mentioned her dream house, a lovely country house on the north-facing slope of the South Downs. Now, Masen knows he must seek her there.

Chapter 13 Journey in hope

So next morning Coker and the other three pack up and head off back north to Tynsham while Masen heads east to the South Downs. He becomes increasingly lonely driving through the silent countryside and the empty towns. In the New Forest he is startled when a small girl runs out into the road waving her arms. She is ten and named Susan, she asks him to come and see Tommy. Tommy is lying on the lawn of her house with the tell-tale red welt across his face where he’s been stung by a triffid. Masen spots it and blows its top off with his shotgun. Then confirms that Tommy is dead. Susan had been sent to bed early on the fateful night of the comet. Both her parents had been struck blind. First her father had gone to get help and never returned. Then her mother. She had a narrow escape from a triffid and warned Tommy not to go outside, but one day he had and… Masen buries the little boy, feeling desolate. Then loads up and takes Susan with him.

When it gets dark he stops for the night, scopes out a safe house, makes a meal, then outs Susan to bed. A little later he hears her sobbing and goes up to comfort her. The truth is he needs comforting, too.

Next day it rains heavily. They arrive on the north side of the South Downs around Pulborough. He has no idea where Josella’s house is or whether she’d be there. He has a brainwave. As it gets dark he finds a big detachable lamp attached to a Rolls Royce, sets it up on the front of the lorry and shines the powerful light across the long reach of the hills. There’s a bit of suspense and then, rather inevitably, Susan sees an answering light flickering in the distance. Excitedly they set off, it’s a long way, the rain obscures the view, the roads don’t go where you want them to, but eventually they identify the house on the hillside, drive up the drive, the door opens and out comes running… Josella!

I jumped down.
‘Oh, Bill. I can’t — Oh, my dear, I’ve been hoping so much…. Oh, Bill…’ said Josella.
I had forgotten all about Susan until a voice came from above. [in the cab of the lorry]
‘You are getting wet, you silly. Why don’t you kiss her in-doors?’ it asked.

Chapter 14 Shirning

The house is called Shirning Farm. Masen discovers it is owned by Dennis and Mary Brent. They’d been hosting guests, Joyce Taylor and Joan and Ted Danton on the night of the meteors. All five had been blinded. A few days later Ted had ventured out from the farm but never returned. Then Joan went to find him and never returned. Mary had been half-sting by a triffid through a part-open window, so they slammed all windows and doors shut, nursed her back to health and Dennis cobbled together an outfit covering all his skin and a mask from wire mesh, and had ventured on several terrifying trips to the nearest village in search of food.

Then Josella had arrived. Masen learns that a) she had been grabbed by Coker’s gang on the night they attacked Senate House b) she had been allotted a troupe of blind people to lead in the Victoria area c) when they began to drop like flies from the plague she’d made her way back to Senate House d) by enormous coincidence overhearing the shot of Masen decapitating the triffid in Russell Gardens on the same night when Coker had also returned and the two men had made a truce. But fearing a trap, Josella had turned back, taken a car and driven south to Shirning.

So now there are three sighted people there – Bill, Josella and young Susan – and the three blind ones. They set about fortifying the house, going on food trips. After three weeks Bill drives back to Tynsham Manor and returns with grim news. They’re all dead. Looks like the plague killed everyone. There was some kind of note pinned to the door but the piece with the text on had been torn off by someone or something, presumably a message about where the survivors were headed. Masen searched for hours but couldn’t find it anywhere.

Josella breaks down in tears. She wasn’t made for a life like this. Bill tries to reassure her that there must be thousands of groups like theirs scattered all over Europe. They just have to link up, he says, without much conviction.

Chapter 15 World narrowing

Quite a long passage describes the passing years, how Masen makes numerous trips to local towns for supplies and oil and petrol for the generator, fairly often goes up to London and watches its decay, grass colonising the rooftops, plaster facades falling into the street.

They erect a strong fence against the triffids, but on several occasions the plants break through and have to be fought off with flame throwers. Young Susan studies them closely and becomes convinced they can communicate and they have intelligence. They are watching and waiting.

One day he drives Josella to the south-facing part of the Downs and they sit looking down over the sea. They discuss the world their children will inherit, they wonder whether to tell them a myth, a legend about the old times. Masen worries that stories about the ancestors who had magic devices would crush the young, sit like a stifling shadow over them.

Then he shares with Josella (Josie) his theory that the event on that fateful night was no comet at all. What if the flashes which blinded everyone were the product of one of the numberless weapons satellites circling the globe at the start of the Cold War, which contained a weapon deliberately intended to burn out the optic nerves? What if it was an utterly man-made catastrophe after all (p.247)? God, that makes it even worse.

They have talked themselves into a mood of philosophical resignation, going so far as to say that if it all ends tomorrow, at least they will have had this time… when they hear a droning and realise a helicopter is approaching from the west. They start dancing around, waving their arms and shouting, but well before it gets close enough to see them, it abruptly changes direction and heads north inland.

The point being, its appearance destroys the mood of wistful resignation they had conjured up. Now both are on edge – maybe things aren’t sliding elegiacally towards an end. Maybe, somewhere, some people are doing a whole lot better than they are. How can they find them?

Chapter 16 Contact

Driving back from this jaunt they see smoke rising and they – and the reader – become terrified that it is the cottage at Shirning, the triffids have broken through the fence and some disaster has occurred.

Sure enough the fire is on their land, but it is the smoke stack not the house and… the helicopter they saw from the beach has landed in front of the house. Out of the house to greet them comes Ivan Simpson, the same man who had pinched a helicopter and landed it outside Senate House in London all those years ago.

He tells them that after they decided to leave Miss Durrant’s Christian commune at Tynsham, the Colonel and Michael Beadley’s group had gone north into Oxfordshire (and not south-west to Beaminster – that had been a complete fabrication on Durrant’s part) and spent two years building up a defensible property there. But after two years the proliferation of triffids all along the perimeter fences made them realise that maintaining the fences and patrolling the grounds against triffids had become impossible.

So Beadley’s group moved lock, stock and barrel to the Isle of Wight, figuring an island was the optimum defence. They had spent years eradicating the triffids with flame throwers from every inch of the island. In the spring seeds blow over from the mainland but it is reasonably easy to spot them and burn them out before they can grow.

All through this period Simpson had taken jaunts in the helicopter and landed wherever he saw survivor communities. A dead giveaway from the air was the dark band of triffid foliage surrounding any populated settlement.

There are now about 300 of them in the Isle. And then Coker had turned up. He told the story of Tynsham’s end. Some women arrived from London and they brought the plague. Coker quarantined them but it was too late, it spread, Coker and others fled but took it with them. Eventually they settled down in Cornwall, using a river as a block against the triffids, but it wasn’t secure. When Sampson discovered their community from the air, landed and explained about the security of the Isle of Wight, Coker’s group chose to go, packing into fishing boats and making the journey by sea.

Chapter 17 Strategic withdrawal

Next day Masen sets out on a day-long trip to fetch coal. When he returns he sees an odd, military style vehicle parked in the driveway. Josella exits the house to greet him and makes signs to be wary, and is followed by a tall tough looking man in combat fatigues. Josella introduces him as Mr Torrence. Torrence introduces himself as the chief executive officer of the Emergency Council for the Southeastern Region of Britain. Their base is in Brighton which is running out of food. The council have devised a plan to take over, or manage all the small communities within reach of Brighton. They’d heard about Shirning but not been able to locate it until Susan lit the fire yesterday.

Now Torrence presents a menacing offer. The council is a semi-fascist dictatorship. They have drawn up plans to sequester blind people on every habitable settlement near Brighton, twenty blind to two sighted. Slowly Masen realises that he is to treat them as serfs. He will give them food enough to work the land. When Masen protests that it’s preposterous, he’s not sure he’s got enough food to feed his six, Torrence explains he can feed the blind on mashed up triffid. On cattle fodder, in other words. As to working the land, there’s a shortage of horses, so he can get the blind to pull a plough. They will be little more than human pack animals. Masen, in turn, will ‘hold’ the property on the authority of the council in Brighton. It is pretty much a reversion to feudal authority.

As if this wasn’t bad enough, Torrence goes on to justify his council’s authority on the basis that other organisations are probably springing up across Europe, soon they will organise and become powerful. England needs to generate a social structure, and food enough to feed the new young generation while they are trained to fight. He is, in other words, like all fascist organisations, basing his entire social structure on the anticipation of war.

Throughout this recitation Masen has veered from honest indignation to realising that Torrence is deadly serious and will confiscate the farm by force if they don’t go along with the scheme. More than that, Torrence says they will take Susan with them, claiming it is for her own good, but Masen can see she’ll be held as a hostage for his good behaviour.

Masen and Josella decide the best thing is to play along, to reluctantly and grumpily acquiesce. They do so and Josella volunteers to feed them. She puts on a big spread with lots of wine, lots of conversation till late in the night, trying to allay the suspicions of Torrence and his men and the latter, eventually, are put to bed in spare rooms.

At which point Masen and Josella round up the others. She had already pulled out some honey on his instructions. Now he sneaks out to the drive and pours the honey into Torrence’s military vehicles gas tank. Then Masen sneaks everyone out of the house and into the half-track. When they fire up the half-track’s engine it obviously wakes Torrence and his men but by that time Masen has driven the half-track at top speed through their carefully assembled protective gate and halfway down the battered road. They park a few hundred yards away and, looking back, can see the waiting triffids piling through the breached gate, even as lights go on in the house. Torrence and his men presumably make it to their vehicle because our team hear the sound of the ignition starting up but then sputtering and dying as the honey is sucked into the engine. Then silence. How grisly! Torrence and his four men are trapped inside a vehicle utterly surrounded by triffids, never to be able to escape. Or if they try, inevitably to be struck down… My God!

The abrupt ending

And that is the end. Quite suddenly, on the last page, Masen ceases his narration. They rendezvoused with Simpson who flew them over to the Isle of Wight and Masen declares that his own, personal account can now hand over to the broader account of the community on the Isle of White which has been written by a certain Elspeth Cary. It’s been a long and gruelling read. I felt upset and harrowed by many of the details. The text’s final words are:

So we must think of the task ahead as ours alone. We believe now that we can see our way, but there is still a lot of work and research to be done before the day when we, or our children, or their children, will cross the narrow straits on a great crusade to drive the triffids back and back with ceaseless destruction until we have wiped out the last one of them from the face of the land that they have usurped.

Hard not to feel this is an anti-climax, a very abrupt ending. Then again, it would have been difficult to continue at the same level of detail descriptions of the flight to Wight, the settling into the community and the many, many years which have followed. It would have required a second volume and, in fact, several authors have written sequels to the Wyndham original which carry the story on…

The persistence of America

Throughout the story, numerous characters express the conviction that the whole world may be blinded, but not America (pages 194, 201). They refuse to believe that America can have been affected. The isolated rural groups Masen meets around page 200 all refuse to accept that America won’t come to rescue them. The theme reaches a climax in the blind (sic) insistence of a young woman they meet in the West Country that America simply must be unaffected.

‘The Americans will be here before Christmas,’ said Stephen’s girl friend.
‘Listen,’ Coker told her patiently. ‘Just put the Americans in the jam-tomorrow-pie-in-the-sky department awhile, will you. Try to imagine a world in which there aren’t any Americans – can you do that?’
The girl stared at him. ‘But there must be,’ she said.

This directly echoes the way some characters in John Christopher’s disaster novel, The Death of Grass, cling on to the belief that America has somehow survived the catastrophe which has plunged Europe into barbarism. The British survivors pick up radio signals from America long after the BBC has gone off air…

The way the theme of this ‘Micawber fixation on American fairy godmothers’ as Coker sardonically calls it (p.202) appears in both books meshed with my recent reading of a couple of history books about the immediate post-war period (The Accidental President by A.J. Baime and Crucible: thirteen months that changed our world by Jonathan Fenby) to make me realise the deep sense people who’d lived through the Second World War must have had that there was support and succour out there in the West – that even while they were bombed night after night by the Luftwaffe, everything would be OK as long as America was still free. In both these novels the survivors of apocalyptic events in England still look to American for succour and simply refuse to believe it, too, has been devastated.

Both novels make you realise the vast impact which American aid and money and general moral support during and after the Second World War had on the psyche of the war-torn populations of Britain and Europe, and how the sense of America’s dominance lived on long afterwards in Europe’s fictions.

Credit

The Day of The Triffids by John Wyndham was published by Michael Joseph in 1951. All references are to the 1974 Penguin paperback edition.

Related link

• The Day of the Triffids online

John Wyndham reviews

• Sleepers of Mars (1973) 5 short stories from the 1930s
• The Day of the Triffids (1951)
• The Kraken Wakes (1953)
• Jizzle (1954) 15 short stories
• The Chrysalids (1955)
• The Seeds of Time (1956) 11 short stories
• The Midwich Cuckoos (1957)
• The Outward Urge (1959)
• Trouble with Lichen (1960)
• Consider Her Ways and Others (1961) 6 short stories
• Chocky (1968)
• Hidden Wyndham: Life, Love, Letters by Amy Binns (2019)

Other science fiction reviews

Late Victorian

1888 Looking Backward 2000-1887 by Edward Bellamy – Julian West wakes up in the year 2000 to discover a peaceful revolution has ushered in a society of state planning, equality and contentment
1890 News from Nowhere by William Morris – waking from a long sleep, William Guest is shown round a London transformed into villages of contented craftsmen

1895 The Time Machine by H.G. Wells – the unnamed inventor and time traveller tells his dinner party guests the story of his adventure among the Eloi and the Morlocks in the year 802,701
1896 The Island of Doctor Moreau by H.G. Wells – Edward Prendick is stranded on a remote island where he discovers the ‘owner’, Dr Gustave Moreau, is experimentally creating human-animal hybrids
1897 The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells – an embittered young scientist, Griffin, makes himself invisible, starting with comic capers in a Sussex village, and ending with demented murders
1899 When The Sleeper Wakes/The Sleeper Wakes by H.G. Wells – Graham awakes in the year 2100 to find himself at the centre of a revolution to overthrow the repressive society of the future
1899 A Story of the Days To Come by H.G. Wells – set in the same future London as The Sleeper Wakes, Denton and Elizabeth defy her wealthy family in order to marry, fall into poverty, and experience life as serfs in the Underground city run by the sinister Labour Corps

1900s

1901 The First Men in the Moon by H.G. Wells – Mr Bedford and Mr Cavor use the invention of ‘Cavorite’ to fly to the moon and discover the underground civilisation of the Selenites
1904 The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth by H.G. Wells – scientists invent a compound which makes plants, animals and humans grow to giant size, prompting giant humans to rebel against the ‘little people’
1905 With the Night Mail by Rudyard Kipling – it is 2000 and the narrator accompanies a GPO airship across the Atlantic
1906 In the Days of the Comet by H.G. Wells – a comet passes through earth’s atmosphere and brings about ‘the Great Change’, inaugurating an era of wisdom and fairness, as told by narrator Willie Leadford
1908 The War in the Air by H.G. Wells – Bert Smallways, a bicycle-repairman from Kent, gets caught up in the outbreak of the war in the air which brings Western civilisation to an end
1909 The Machine Stops by E.M. Foster – people of the future live in underground cells regulated by ‘the Machine’ until one of them rebels

1910s

1912 The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – Professor Challenger leads an expedition to a plateau in the Amazon rainforest where prehistoric animals still exist
1912 As Easy as ABC by Rudyard Kipling – set in 2065 in a world characterised by isolation and privacy, forces from the ABC are sent to suppress an outbreak of ‘crowdism’
1913 The Horror of the Heights by Arthur Conan Doyle – airman Captain Joyce-Armstrong flies higher than anyone before him and discovers the upper atmosphere is inhabited by vast jellyfish-like monsters
1914 The World Set Free by H.G. Wells – A history of the future in which the devastation of an atomic war leads to the creation of a World Government, told via a number of characters who are central to the change
1918 The Land That Time Forgot by Edgar Rice Burroughs – a trilogy of pulp novellas in which all-American heroes battle ape-men and dinosaurs on a lost island in the Antarctic

1920s

1921 We by Evgeny Zamyatin – like everyone else in the dystopian future of OneState, D-503 lives life according to the Table of Hours, until I-330 wakens him to the truth and they rebel
1925 Heart of a Dog by Mikhail Bulgakov – a Moscow scientist transplants the testicles and pituitary gland of a dead tramp into the body of a stray dog, with disastrous consequences
1927 The Maracot Deep by Arthur Conan Doyle – a scientist, an engineer and a hero are trying out a new bathysphere when the wire snaps and they hurtle to the bottom of the sea, where they discover unimaginable strangeness

1930s

1930 Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon – mind-boggling ‘history’ of the future of mankind over the next two billion years – surely the vastest vista of any science fiction book
1938 Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis – baddies Devine and Weston kidnap Oxford academic, Ransom, and take him in their spherical spaceship to Malacandra, as the natives call the planet Mars, where mysteries and adventures unfold

1940s

1943 Perelandra (Voyage to Venus) by C.S. Lewis – Ransom is sent to Perelandra aka Venus, to prevent Satan tempting the planet’s new young inhabitants to a new Fall as he did on earth
1945 That Hideous Strength by C.S. Lewis – Ransom assembles a motley crew of heroes ancient and modern to combat the rise of an evil corporation which is seeking to overthrow mankind
1949 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell – after a nuclear war, inhabitants of ruined London are divided into the sheep-like ‘proles’ and members of the Party who are kept under unremitting surveillance

1950s

1950 I, Robot by Isaac Asimov – nine short stories about ‘positronic’ robots, which chart their rise from dumb playmates to controllers of humanity’s destiny
1950 The Martian Chronicles – 13 short stories with 13 linking passages loosely describing mankind’s colonisation of Mars, featuring strange, dreamlike encounters with vanished Martians
1951 Foundation by Isaac Asimov – the first five stories telling the rise of the Foundation created by psychohistorian Hari Seldon to preserve civilisation during the collapse of the Galactic Empire
1951 The Illustrated Man – eighteen short stories which use the future, Mars and Venus as settings for what are essentially earth-bound tales of fantasy and horror
1951 The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham – the whole world turns out to watch the flashing lights in the sky caused by a passing comet and next morning wakes up blind, except for a handful of survivors who have to rebuild human society while fighting off the rapidly growing population of the mobile, intelligent, poison sting-wielding monster plants of the title
1952 Foundation and Empire by Isaac Asimov – two long stories which continue the future history of the Foundation set up by psycho-historian Hari Seldon as it faces attack by an Imperial general, and then the menace of the mysterious mutant known only as ‘the Mule’
1953 Second Foundation by Isaac Asimov – concluding part of the  Foundation Trilogy, which describes the attempt to preserve civilisation after the collapse of the Galactic Empire
1953 Earthman, Come Home by James Blish – the adventures of New York City, a self-contained space city which wanders the galaxy 2,000 years hence, powered by ‘spindizzy’ technology
1953 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury – a masterpiece, a terrifying anticipation of a future when books are banned and professional firemen are paid to track down stashes of forbidden books and burn them – until one fireman, Guy Montag, rebels
1953 The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester – a fast-moving novel set in a 24th century New York populated by telepaths and describing the mental collapse of corporate mogul Ben Reich who starts by murdering his rival Craye D’Courtney and becomes progressively more psychotic as he is pursued by telepathic detective, Lincoln Powell
1953 Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke one of my favourite sci-fi novels, a thrilling narrative describing the ‘Overlords’ who arrive from space to supervise mankind’s transition to the next stage in its evolution
1953 The Kraken Wakes by John Wyndham – some form of alien life invades earth in the shape of ‘fireballs’ which fall into the deepest parts of the earth’s oceans, followed by the sinking of ships, attacks of ‘sea tanks’ on ports and shoreline settlements around the world and then, in the final phase, melting of the earth’s icecaps and global flooding
1954 The Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov – set 3,000 years in the future when humans have separated into ‘Spacers’ who have colonised 50 other planets, and the overpopulated earth whose inhabitants live in enclosed cities or ‘caves of steel’, and introducing detective Elijah Baley who is tasked with solving a murder mystery
1954 Jizzle by John Wyndham – 15 short stories, from the malevolent monkey of the title story to a bizarre yarn about a tube train which goes to hell, a paychiatrist who projects the same idyllic dream into the minds of hundreds of women around London, to a dry run for The Chrysalids
1955 The Chrysalids by John Wyndham – hundreds of years after a nuclear war devastated North America, David Strorm grows up in a rural community run by God-fearing zealots obsessed with detecting mutant plants, livestock and – worst of all – human ‘blasphemies’ – caused by lingering radiation; but as he grows up, David realises he possesses a special mutation the Guardians of Purity have never dreamed of – the power of telepathy – and he’s not the only one, and soon he and his mind-melding friends are forced to flee to the Badlands in a race to survive
1956 The Naked Sun by Isaac Asimov – 3,000 years in the future detective Elijah Baley returns, with his robot sidekick, R. Daneel Olivaw, to solve a murder mystery on the remote planet of Solaria
— Some problems with Isaac Asimov’s science fiction
1956 They Shall Have Stars by James Blish – explains the invention, in the near future, of i) the anti-death drugs and ii) the spindizzy technology which allow the human race to colonise the galaxy
1956 The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester – a fast-paced phantasmagoria set in the 25th century where humans can teleport, a terrifying new weapon has been invented, and tattooed hard-man, Gulliver Foyle, is looking for revenge
1956 The Death of Grass by John Christopher – amid the backdrop of a worldwide famine caused by the Chung-Li virus which kills all species of grass (wheat, barley, oats etc) decent civil engineer John Custance finds himself leading his wife, two children and a small gang of followers out of London and across an England collapsing into chaos and barbarism in order to reach the remote valley which his brother had told him he was going to plant with potatoes and other root vegetables and which he knows is an easily defendable enclave
1957 The Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham – one night a nondescript English village is closed off by a force field, all the inhabitants within the zone losing consciousness. A day later the field disappears and the villagers all regain consciousness but two months later, all the fertile women in the place realise they are pregnant, and nine months later give birth to identical babies with platinum blonde hair and penetrating golden eyes, which soon begin exerting telepathic control over their parents and then the other villagers. Are they aliens, implanted in human wombs, and destined to supersede Homo sapiens as top species on the planet?
1959 The Triumph of Time by James Blish – concluding novel of Blish’s ‘Okie’ tetralogy in which mayor of New York John Amalfi and his friends are present at the end of the universe
1959 The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut – Winston Niles Rumfoord builds a space ship to explore the solar system where encounters a chrono-synclastic infundibula, and this is just the start of a bizarre meandering fantasy which includes the Army of Mars attacking earth and the adventures of Boaz and Unk in the caverns of Mercury
1959 The Outward Urge by John Wyndham – a conventional space exploration novel in five parts which follow successive members of the Troon family over a 200-year period (1994 to 2194) as they help build the first British space station, command the British moon base, lead expeditions to Mars, to Venus, and ends with an eerie ‘ghost’ story

1960s

1960 Trouble With Lichen by John Wyndham – ardent feminist and biochemist Diana Brackley discovers a substance which slows down the ageing process, with potentially revolutionary implications for human civilisation, in a novel which combines serious insights into how women are shaped and controlled by society and sociological speculation with a sentimental love story and passages of broad social satire (about the beauty industry and the newspaper trade)
1961 A Fall of Moondust by Arthur C. Clarke a pleasure tourbus on the moon is sucked down into a sink of moondust, sparking a race against time to rescue the trapped crew and passengers
1961 Consider Her Ways and Others by John Wyndham – Six short stories dominated by the title track which depicts England a few centuries hence, after a plague has wiped out all men and the surviving women have been genetically engineered into four distinct types, the brainy Doctors, the brawny Amazons, the short Servitors, and the vast whale-like mothers into whose body a twentieth century woman doctor is unwittingly transported
1962 The Drowned World by J.G. Ballard – Dr Kerans is part of a UN mission to map the lost cities of Europe which have been inundated after solar flares melted the worlds ice caps and glaciers, but finds himself and his colleagues’ minds slowly infiltrated by prehistoric memories of the last time the world was like this, complete with tropical forest and giant lizards, and slowly losing their grasp on reality.
1962 The Voices of Time and Other Stories – Eight of Ballard’s most exquisite stories including the title tale about humanity slowly falling asleep even as they discover how to listen to the voices of time radiating from the mountains and distant stars, or The Cage of Sand where a handful of outcasts hide out in the vast dunes of Martian sand brought to earth as ballast which turned out to contain fatal viruses. Really weird and visionary.
1962 A Life For The Stars by James Blish – third in the Okie series about cities which can fly through space, focusing on the coming of age of kidnapped earther, young Crispin DeFord, aboard space-travelling New York
1962 The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick In an alternative future America lost the Second World War and has been partitioned between Japan and Nazi Germany. The narrative follows a motley crew of characters including a dealer in antique Americana, a German spy who warns a Japanese official about a looming surprise German attack, and a woman determined to track down the reclusive author of a hit book which describes an alternative future in which America won the Second World War
1962 Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut – the memoirs of American Howard W. Campbell Jr. who was raised in Germany and has adventures with Nazis and spies
1963 Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut – what starts out as an amiable picaresque as the narrator, John, tracks down the so-called ‘father of the atom bomb’, Felix Hoenniker for an interview turns into a really bleak, haunting nightmare where an alternative form of water, ice-nine, freezes all water in the world, including the water inside people, killing almost everyone and freezing all water forever
1964 The Drought by J.G. Ballard – It stops raining. Everywhere. Fresh water runs out. Society breaks down and people move en masse to the seaside, where fighting breaks out to get near the water and set up stills. In part two, ten years later, the last remnants of humanity scrape a living on the vast salt flats which rim the continents, until the male protagonist decides to venture back inland to see if any life survives
1964 The Terminal Beach by J.G. Ballard – Ballard’s breakthrough collection of 12 short stories which, among more traditional fare, includes mind-blowing descriptions of obsession, hallucination and mental decay set in the present day but exploring what he famously defined as ‘inner space’
1964 Dr. Strangelove, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb by Peter George – a novelisation of the famous Kubrick film, notable for the prologue written as if by aliens who arrive in the distant future to find an earth utterly destroyed by the events described in the main narrative
1966 Rocannon’s World by Ursula Le Guin – Le Guin’s first novel, a ‘planetary romance’ or ‘science fantasy’ set on Fomalhaut II where ethnographer and ‘starlord’ Gaverel Rocannon rides winged tigers and meets all manner of bizarre foes in his quest to track down the aliens who destroyed his spaceship and killed his colleagues, aided by sword-wielding Lord Mogien and a telepathic Fian
1966 Planet of Exile by Ursula Le Guin – both the ‘farborn’ colonists of planet Werel, and the surrounding tribespeople, the Tevarans, must unite to fight off the marauding Gaal who are migrating south as the planet enters its deep long winter – not a good moment for the farborn leader, Jakob Agat Alterra, to fall in love with Rolery, the beautiful, golden-eyed daughter of the Tevaran chief
1966 – The Crystal World by J.G. Ballard – Dr Sanders journeys up an African river to discover that the jungle is slowly turning into crystals, as does anyone who loiters too long, and becomes enmeshed in the personal psychodramas of a cast of lunatics and obsessives
1967 The Disaster Area by J.G. Ballard – Nine short stories including memorable ones about giant birds and the man who sees the prehistoric ocean washing over his quite suburb.
1967 City of Illusions by Ursula Le Guin – an unnamed humanoid with yellow cat’s eyes stumbles out of the great Eastern Forest which covers America thousands of years in the future when the human race has been reduced to a pitiful handful of suspicious rednecks or savages living in remote settlements. He is discovered and nursed back to health by a relatively benign commune but then decides he must make his way West in an epic trek across the continent to the fabled city of Es Toch where he will discover his true identity and mankind’s true history
1966 The Anti-Death League by Kingsley Amis –
1968 2001: A Space Odyssey a panoramic narrative which starts with aliens stimulating evolution among the first ape-men and ends with a spaceman being transformed into a galactic consciousness
1968 Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick – in 1992 androids are almost indistinguishable from humans except by trained bounty hunters like Rick Deckard who is paid to track down and ‘retire’ escaped ‘andys’ – earning enough to buy mechanical animals, since all real animals died long ago
1968 Chocky by John Wyndham – Matthew is the adopted son of an ordinary, middle-class couple who starts talking to a voice in his head who it takes the entire novel to persuade his parents is real and a telepathic explorer from a far distant planet
1969 The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton – describes in retrospect, in the style of a scientific inquiry, the crisis which unfolds after a fatal virus is brought back to earth by a space probe and starts spreading uncontrollably
1969 Ubik by Philip K. Dick – in 1992 the world is threatened by mutants with psionic powers who are combated by ‘inertials’. The novel focuses on the weird alternative world experienced by a group of inertials after they are involved in an explosion on the moon
1969 The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin – an envoy from the Ekumen or federation of advanced planets – Genly Ai – is sent to the planet Gethen to persuade its inhabitants to join the federation, but the focus of the book is a mind-expanding exploration of the hermaphroditism of Gethen’s inhabitants, as Genly is forced to undertake a gruelling trek across the planet’s frozen north with the disgraced native lord, Estraven, during which they develop a cross-species respect and, eventually, a kind of love
1969 Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut – Vonnegut’s breakthrough novel in which he manages to combine his personal memories of being an American POW of the Germans and witnessing the bombing of Dresden in the character of Billy Pilgrim, with a science fiction farrago about Tralfamadorians who kidnap Billy and transport him through time and space – and introduces the catchphrase ‘so it goes’

1970s

1970 Tau Zero by Poul Anderson – spaceship Leonora Christine leaves earth with a crew of fifty to discover if humans can colonise any of the planets orbiting the star Beta Virginis, but when its deceleration engines are damaged, the crew realise they need to exit the galaxy altogether in order to find space with low enough radiation to fix the engines – and then a series of unfortunate events mean they find themselves forced to accelerate faster and faster, effectively travelling forwards through time as well as space until they witness the end of the entire universe – one of the most thrilling sci-fi books I’ve ever read
1970 The Atrocity Exhibition by J.G. Ballard – Ballard’s best book, a collection of fifteen short experimental texts in stripped-down prose bringing together key obsessions like car crashes, mental breakdown, World War III, media images of atrocities and clinical sex
1971 Vermilion Sands by J.G. Ballard – nine short stories including Ballard’s first, from 1956, most of which follow the same pattern, describing the arrival of a mysterious, beguiling woman in the fictional desert resort of Vermilion Sands, the setting for extravagantly surreal tales of the glossy, lurid and bizarre
1971 The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula Le Guin – thirty years in the future (in 2002) America is an overpopulated environmental catastrophe zone where meek and unassuming George Orr discovers that his dreams can alter reality, changing history at will. He comes under the control of visionary neuro-scientist, Dr Haber, who sets about using George’s powers to alter the world for the better, with unanticipated and disastrous consequences
1971 Mutant 59: The Plastic Eater by Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis – a genetically engineered bacterium starts eating the world’s plastic, leading to harum scarum escapades in disaster-stricken London
1972 The Word for World Is Forest by Ursula Le Guin – novella set on the planet Athshe describing its brutal colonisation by exploitative Terrans (who call it ‘New Tahiti’) and the resistance of the metre-tall, furry, native population of Athsheans, with their culture of dreamtime and singing
1972 The Fifth Head of Cerberus by Gene Wolfe – a mind-boggling trio of novellas set on a pair of planets 20 light years away, the stories revolve around the puzzle of whether the supposedly human colonists are, in fact, the descendants of the planets’ shape-shifting aboriginal inhabitants who murdered the first earth colonists and took their places so effectively that they have forgotten the fact and think themselves genuinely human
1973 Crash by J.G. Ballard – Ballard’s most ‘controversial’ novel, a searingly intense description of its characters’ obsession with the sexuality of car crashes, wounds and disfigurement
1973 Rendezvous With Rama by Arthur C. Clarke – in 2031 a 50-kilometre-long object of alien origin enters the solar system, so the crew of the spaceship Endeavour are sent to explore it in one of the most haunting and evocative novels of this type ever written
1973 Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut – Vonnegut’s longest and most experimental novel with the barest of plots and characters allowing him to sound off about sex, race, America, environmentalism, with the appearance of his alter ego Kilgore Trout and even Vonnegut himself as a character, all enlivened by Vonnegut’s own naive illustrations and the throwaway catchphrase ‘And so on…’
1973 The Best of John Wyndham 1932 to 1949 – Six rather silly short stories dating, as the title indicates, from 1932 to 1949, with far too much interplanetary travel
1974 Concrete Island by J.G. Ballard – the short and powerful novella in which an advertising executive crashes his car onto a stretch of wasteland in the juncture of three motorways, finds he can’t get off it, and slowly adapts to life alongside its current, psychologically damaged inhabitants
1974 Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said by Philip K. Dick – America after the Second World War is a police state but the story is about popular TV host Jason Taverner who is plunged into an alternative version of this world where he is no longer a rich entertainer but down on the streets among the ‘ordinaries’ and on the run from the police. Why? And how can he get back to his storyline?
1974 The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin – in the future and 11 light years from earth, the physicist Shevek travels from the barren, communal, anarchist world of Anarres to its consumer capitalist cousin, Urras, with a message of brotherhood and a revolutionary new discovery which will change everything
1974 Inverted World by Christopher Priest – vivid description of a city on a distant planet which must move forwards on railway tracks constructed by the secretive ‘guilds’ in order not to fall behind the mysterious ‘optimum’ and avoid the fate of being obliterated by the planet’s bizarre lateral distorting, a vivid and disturbing narrative right up until the shock revelation of the last few pages
1975 High Rise by J.G. Ballard – an astonishingly intense and brutal vision of how the middle-class occupants of London’s newest and largest luxury, high-rise development spiral down from petty tiffs and jealousies into increasing alcohol-fuelled mayhem, disintegrating into full-blown civil war before regressing to starvation and cannibalism
1976 The Alteration by Kingsley Amis – a counterfactual narrative in which the Reformation never happened and so there was no Enlightenment, no Romantic revolution, no Industrial Revolution spearheaded by Protestant England, no political revolutions, no Victorian era when democracy and liberalism triumphed over Christian repression, with the result that England in 1976 is a peaceful medieval country ruled by officials of the all-powerful Roman Catholic Church
1976 Slapstick by Kurt Vonnegut – a madly disorientating story about twin freaks, a future dystopia, shrinking Chinese and communication with the afterlife
1979 The Unlimited Dream Company by J.G. Ballard – a strange combination of banality and visionary weirdness as an unhinged young man crashes his stolen plane in suburban Shepperton, and starts performing magical acts like converting the inhabitants into birds, conjuring up exotic foliage, convinced he is on a mission to liberate them
1979 Jailbird by Kurt Vonnegut – the satirical story of Walter F. Starbuck and the RAMJAC Corps run by Mary Kathleen O’Looney, a baglady from Grand Central Station, among other satirical notions, including the news that Kilgore Trout, a character who recurs in most of his novels, is one of the pseudonyms of a fellow prisoner at the gaol where Starbuck ends up serving a two year sentence, one Dr Robert Fender

1980s

1980 Russian Hide and Seek by Kingsley Amis – set in an England of 2035 after a) the oil has run out and b) a left-wing government left NATO and England was promptly invaded by the Russians in the so-called ‘the Pacification’, who have settled down to become a ruling class and treat the native English like 19th century serfs
1980 The Venus Hunters by J.G. Ballard – seven very early and often quite cheesy sci-fi short stories, along with a visionary satire on Vietnam (1969), and then two mature stories from the 1970s which show Ballard’s approach sliding into mannerism
1981 The Golden Age of Science Fiction edited by Kingsley Amis – 17 classic sci-fi stories from what Amis considers the ‘Golden Era’ of the genre, basically the 1950s
1981 Hello America by J.G. Ballard – a hundred years from now an environmental catastrophe has turned America into a vast desert, except for west of the Rockies which has become a rainforest of Amazonian opulence, and it is here that a ragtag band of explorers from old Europe discover a psychopath has crowned himself ‘President Manson’, revived an old nuclear power station to light up Las Vegas and plays roulette in Caesar’s Palace to decide which American city to nuke next
1981 The Affirmation by Christopher Priest – an extraordinarily vivid description of a schizophrenic young man living in London who, to protect against the trauma of his actual life (father died, made redundant, girlfriend committed suicide) invents a fantasy world, the Dream Archipelago, and how it takes over his ‘real’ life
1982 Myths of the Near Future by J.G. Ballard – ten short stories showing Ballard’s range of subject matter from Second World War China to the rusting gantries of Cape Kennedy
1982 2010: Odyssey Two by Arthur C. Clarke – Heywood Floyd joins a Russian spaceship on a two-year journey to Jupiter to a) reclaim the abandoned Discovery and b) investigate the monolith on Japetus
1984 Empire of the Sun by J.G. Ballard – his breakthrough book, ostensibly an autobiography focusing on this 1930s boyhood in Shanghai and then incarceration in a Japanese internment camp, observing the psychological breakdown of the adults around him: made into an Oscar-winning movie by Steven Spielberg: only later did it emerge that the book was intended as a novel and is factually misleading
1984 Neuromancer by William Gibson – Gibson’s stunning debut novel which establishes the ‘Sprawl’ universe, in which burnt-out cyberspace cowboy, Case, is lured by ex-hooker Molly into a mission led by ex-army colonel Armitage to penetrate the secretive corporation, Tessier-Ashpool, at the bidding of the vast and powerful artificial intelligence, Wintermute
1986 Burning Chrome by William Gibson – ten short stories, three or four set in Gibson’s ‘Sprawl’ universe, the others ranging across sci-fi possibilities, from a kind of horror story to one about a failing Russian space station
1986 Count Zero by William Gibson – second in the ‘Sprawl trilogy’: Turner is a tough expert at kidnapping scientists from one mega-tech corporation for another, until his abduction of Christopher Mitchell from Maas Biolabs goes badly wrong and he finds himself on the run, his storyline dovetailing with those of sexy young Marly Krushkhova, ‘disgraced former owner of a tiny Paris gallery’ who is commissioned by the richest man in the world to track down the source of a mysterious modern artwork, and Bobby Newmark, self-styled ‘Count Zero’ and computer hacker
1987 The Day of Creation by J.G. Ballard – strange and, in my view, profoundly unsuccessful novel in which WHO doctor John Mallory embarks on an obsessive quest to find the source of an African river accompanied by a teenage African girl and a half-blind documentary maker who films the chaotic sequence of events
1987 2061: Odyssey Three by Arthur C. Clarke – Spaceship Galaxy is hijacked and forced to land on Europa, moon of the former Jupiter, in a ‘thriller’ notable for Clarke’s descriptions of the bizarre landscapes of Halley’s Comet and Europa
1988 Memories of the Space Age Eight short stories spanning the 20 most productive years of Ballard’s career, presented in chronological order and linked by the Ballardian themes of space travel, astronauts and psychosis
1988 Running Wild by J.G. Ballard – the pampered children of a gated community of affluent professionals, near Reading, run wild and murder their parents and security guards
1988 Mona Lisa Overdrive by William Gibson – third of Gibson’s ‘Sprawl’ trilogy in which street-kid Mona is sold by her pimp to crooks who give her plastic surgery to make her look like global simstim star Angie Marshall, who they plan to kidnap; but Angie is herself on a quest to find her missing boyfriend, Bobby Newmark, one-time Count Zero; while the daughter of a Japanese gangster, who’s been sent to London for safekeeping, is abducted by Molly Millions, a lead character in Neuromancer

1990s

1990 War Fever by J.G. Ballard – 14 late short stories, some traditional science fiction, some interesting formal experiments like Answers To a Questionnaire from which you have to deduce the questions and the context
1990 The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling – in an alternative version of history, Victorian inventor Charles Babbage’s design for an early computer, instead of remaining a paper theory, was actually built, drastically changing British society, so that by 1855 it is led by a party of industrialists and scientists who use databases and secret police to keep the population suppressed
1991 The Kindness of Women by J.G. Ballard – a sequel of sorts to Empire of the Sun which reprises the Shanghai and Japanese internment camp scenes from that book, but goes on to describe the author’s post-war experiences as a medical student at Cambridge, as a pilot in Canada, his marriage, children, writing and involvement in the avant-garde art scene of the 1960s and 70s: though based on  his own experiences the book is overtly a novel focusing on a small number of recurring characters who symbolise different aspects of the post-war world
1993 Virtual Light by William Gibson – first of Gibson’s Bridge Trilogy, in which cop-with-a-heart-of-gold Berry Rydell foils an attempt by crooked property developers to rebuild post-earthquake San Francisco
1994 Rushing to Paradise by J.G. Ballard – a sort of rewrite of Lord of the Flies in which a number of unbalanced environmental activists set up a utopian community on a Pacific island, ostensibly to save the local rare breed of albatross from French nuclear tests, but end up going mad and murdering each other
1996 Cocaine Nights by J. G. Ballard – sensible, middle-class Charles Prentice flies out to a luxury resort for British ex-pats on the Spanish Riviera to find out why his brother, Frank, is in a Spanish prison charged with murder, and discovers the resort has become a hotbed of ‘transgressive’ behaviour – i.e. sex, drugs and organised violence – which has come to bind the community together
1996 Idoru by William Gibson – second novel in the ‘Bridge’ trilogy: Colin Laney has a gift for spotting nodal points in the oceans of data in cyberspace, and so is hired by the scary head of security for a pop music duo, Lo/Rez, to find out why his boss, the half-Irish singer Rez, has announced he is going to marry a virtual reality woman, an idoru; meanwhile schoolgirl Chia MacKenzie flies out to Tokyo and unwittingly gets caught up in smuggling new nanotechnology device which is the core of the plot
1999 All Tomorrow’s Parties by William Gibson – third of the Bridge Trilogy in which main characters from the two previous books are reunited on the ruined Golden Gate bridge, including tough ex-cop Rydell, sexy bike courier Chevette, digital babe Rei Toei, Fontaine the old black dude who keeps an antiques shop, as a smooth, rich corporate baddie seeks to unleash a terminal shift in the world’s dataflows and Rydell is hunted by a Taoist assassin

2000s

2000 Super-Cannes by J.G. Ballard – Paul Sinclair packs in his London job to accompany his wife, who’s landed a plum job as a paediatrician at Eden-Olympia, an elite business park just outside Cannes in the South of France; both are unnerved to discover that her predecessor, David Greenwood, one day went to work with an assault rifle, shot dead several senior executives before shooting himself; when Paul sets out to investigate, he discovers the business park is a hotbed of ‘transgressive’ behaviour i.e. designer drugs, BDSM sex, and organised vigilante violence against immigrants down in Cannes, and finds himself and his wife being sucked into its disturbing mind-set
2003 Pattern Recognition by William Gibson – first of the ‘Blue Ant’ trilogy, set very much in the present, around the London-based advertising agency Blue Ant, founded by advertising guru Hubertus Bigend who hires Cayce Pollard, supernaturally gifted logo approver and fashion trend detector, to hunt down the maker of mysterious ‘footage’ which has started appearing on the internet, a quest that takes them from New York and London, to Tokyo, Moscow and Paris
2007 Spook Country by William Gibson – second in the ‘Blue Ant’ trilogy
2008 Miracles of Life by J.G. Ballard – right at the end of his life, Ballard wrote a straightforward autobiography in which he makes startling revelations about his time in the Japanese internment camp (he really enjoyed it!), insightful comments about science fiction, but the real theme is his moving expressions of love for his three children