Recent reads

The Day of the Triffids, by John Wyndham. This 1951 end-of-the-earth tale is widely considered a classic. I found it disappointing.

Part of the disappointment results from the fact that the author's chosen antagonists, the carnivorous plants known as triffids, are so slow-moving and predictable that the only way he could justify them being a threat to humanity was to introduce an entirely unrelated catastrophe: a mysterious green meteor-shower which inexplicably blinds everybody who views its light. The narrator is one of the few human beings who missed out on seeing the celestial event and thus retained his eyesight.

No, the evil meteor shower isn't explained. Ever.

I suppose there is a moral here about the potential dangers of bioengineered creatures, since it's speculated that the triffids are probably the work of those pesky Russians and their amoral scientists. The conflicts and struggles that our small band of survivors go through as they try to find safe places to live and defend themselves against both the triffids and other groups of survivors, are moderately interesting, somewhat like Terry Nations' unfortunately forgotten television series Survivors. But the buildup is simply so implausible that it's impossible to take the story seriously.