I don’t know why I let myself forget how much I enjoy a well executed dystopian novel, but John Wyndham definitely did a good job of reminding me with this captivating and even freakishly believable story. The dystopian setting is created as a combination of two factors: comets seem to have made everyone who’s seen them blind, and a product of plant engineering gone wrong, triffids, have gone wild. Starting in London and proceeding into the English countryside, The Day of the Triffids follows Bill as he wakes up to a new world and the eventful phases that precede him finding his place in it. No more needs to be said about the plot I think, but I do want to emphasize how fascinating it was to read about what happens when our societies are suddenly broken. Wyndham doesn’t avoid some tropes of the subject matter, but as this is a classic I can forgive it a lot of them, especially when everything really does feel so authentic - like this actually represents how people would think and act. In that sense I was reminded of another favourite of mine, Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, although that one feels more literary and this slightly more straightforward and adventurous. But it gave a lot to think about too; the message of humans creating our own catastrophes rang true in the current circumstances of the climate crisis.