ABFED #12 - Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham
Oooh - overdrive. I read this between 11:30pm yesterday and three in the morning. It's really, really good. Sci-fi classic, written in 1951, post-apocalyptic how-do-we-live now type book. A new life form, called the triffid, has colonized earth. It's a plant that grows to about 8 feet tall (in England, anyway; taller in the tropics), can walk on three of it's roots, and has a poisonous sting that has a 10 foot range and can kill a person if it hits bare skin. Lovely. But that's not where the book really takes off. Rather, it is a mysterious light show in the night that turns very nearly everyone stone blind that really kicks thing off.
It's funny, because the whole everyone's-blind-look-how-fast-chaos-breaks-out plotline has been used much more recently in (duh) Blindness by Jose Saramago, later turned into a movie with Julieanne Moore and Mark Ruffalo. They didn't have strange harbringer-of-death plants to deal with though.
In Day of the Triffids, there are musings about right and wrong, absolute versus subjective morality, why society has made it's rules the way it has, the arms race, genetic manipulation, and the role of the 'one great man' organizer in a fallen society. The triffids, which the main character has spent his life working with, are alien only to the reader; to the people in the book they are a more or less normal part of the scenery, although they do become more and more threatening as the book goes on. It's equal parts cautionary tale and straightforward history of events, with no real conclusions and no clear victor in the end (although we do have our sympathies). Very, very good.
On to Brave New World! (this is why my 'read' list is so skewed towards Sci-fi and Fantasy. They're a hell of a lot easier to read and understand than the freakin' 19th century French Lit on there, lol)
It's funny, because the whole everyone's-blind-look-how-fast-chaos-breaks-out plotline has been used much more recently in (duh) Blindness by Jose Saramago, later turned into a movie with Julieanne Moore and Mark Ruffalo. They didn't have strange harbringer-of-death plants to deal with though.
In Day of the Triffids, there are musings about right and wrong, absolute versus subjective morality, why society has made it's rules the way it has, the arms race, genetic manipulation, and the role of the 'one great man' organizer in a fallen society. The triffids, which the main character has spent his life working with, are alien only to the reader; to the people in the book they are a more or less normal part of the scenery, although they do become more and more threatening as the book goes on. It's equal parts cautionary tale and straightforward history of events, with no real conclusions and no clear victor in the end (although we do have our sympathies). Very, very good.
On to Brave New World! (this is why my 'read' list is so skewed towards Sci-fi and Fantasy. They're a hell of a lot easier to read and understand than the freakin' 19th century French Lit on there, lol)