Triffids Books in Order

The Triffids books centre on one of John Wyndham's most striking ideas, a world where most people lose their sight overnight and a cultivated crop of dangerous walking plants takes the chance to move up the food chain.

In The Day of the Triffids we meet Bill Masen, a biologist who has worked for years with triffids, tall carnivorous plants farmed for their valuable oil. When a spectacular green display sweeps across the sky, he happens to be in hospital with his eyes bandaged. He wakes to find London full of blind, terrified people and triffids already testing the fences.

The novel follows Bill, fellow survivor Josella and the makeshift communities they join as they leave the city, try to keep people fed and fend off both the plants and rival human groups. Wyndham spends as much time on scavenging trips, awkward meetings and arguments about how to rebuild society as he does on outright horror.

Triffids themselves are a neat piece of science fictional menace. They root like plants but can uproot and shuffle across the ground, sting at a distance and seem to learn from experience. In the book they are probably a human creation, bred for useful oil and then spread around the world, so the disaster feels uncomfortably like an accident of our own making.

That mix of everyday detail and global catastrophe helped give rise to the label cosy catastrophe, used for stories where disaster arrives but people still worry about rations, relationships and rebuilding. The Triffids world is harsher than that phrase suggests, full of sudden deaths, disease and hard compromises, but it does keep its focus on the small human circle around Bill.

Over the years the book has generated film versions, radio adaptations and television serials, each putting a slightly different spin on the plants and the cause of the blinding. Later writers have returned to its world to imagine what happens after Bill's band of survivors sail for a safer refuge.

On this page the Triffids series background ties those threads together. It gives you the set up, the major characters and the long arc of humanity versus the triffids, so you can decide where to start and how deep into this quietly apocalyptic future you want to go.