Cat's Cradle
Hugo-shortlisted and permanently canonical: the Cold War's sharpest fable of careless science, and the source of 'karass', 'granfalloon' and ice-nine as cultural shorthand.
Book Entry · Science Fiction
What is The Day of the Triffids about?
Bill Masen wakes in hospital with bandaged eyes to a silent London: a spectacular meteor display has blinded everyone who watched, which was nearly everyone. Unfortunately civilisation had also been farming triffids — seven-foot ambulatory plants with a lethal sting, tolerated for their oil — and they are no longer waiting politely. Wyndham follows the survivors through the moral arithmetic of collapse: who do you save, what do you owe the blind, which new society deserves joining? The triffids get the title, but the humans supply the horror.
Why it matters
The definitive British catastrophe novel, never out of print, twice filmed and serially broadcast; its hospital-awakening opening was borrowed wholesale by 28 Days Later and The Walking Dead.
Read next
Dawn
The opening of Xenogenesis, Butler's masterwork of unsentimental first contact — a fixture of university courses on posthumanism and the standing rebuke to comfortable alien-saviour stories.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Source of Blade Runner (1982), which transformed SF cinema while keeping perhaps a third of the book.