Science Fiction with a conscience...
Sign up for Andrew Sweet's Newsletter for more insights... and get access to the exclusive Dandelion serial.
The The Day of the Triffids was my father's gift as a life-long aficionado of science fiction of all sorts. Imagine a young boy, laying in front of a small black-and-white television, watching the man slowly removing his own blindfold after an operation, with no doctor in sight. The entire hospital is deserted, and he eventually stumbles onto flesh-eating plants which descended during an asteroid storm! Enthralling!
It wasn't until many years later that I realized that within that fluffy exterior of man-eating seedlings lurked a nut of truth about society. In this case, The Day of the Triffids contains quite a few observations about society in the time it was written, and can in ways be viewed as an indictment and entrenchment of what was happening in the east. All of this, while slowly becoming a science fiction juggernaut that influenced the movie 28 Days Later, while itself being heavily influenced by The War of the Worlds.
You have to have a little history to get this. So The Day of the Triffids was published in 1951, six years after World War 2 ended, and just as the cold war was getting started. This guy, Trofim Lysenko, had risen to power to head the USSR Academy of Science in 1940, where he pushed exploration into what was known as soft-inheritance, a bogus but fun scientific theory to play around with that ultimately killed millions of people during the Great Leap Forward - but that's another story. This story is about how fear of genetic manipulation, not too different from the anti-GMO stuff we see today, got rolling. John Wyndam worked this in as his origin of The Day of the Triffids and where they came from. He even implied that the meteor shower was an artifact of cold war experiments. This story is thick with historical depth.
The story is an indictment of such experimentation, as well as an indictment on collectivist society. Multiple times throughout the story, the protagonist's visionaries (literally - people with sight remaining) become limited by being physically chained to pull along the blind. For more context regarding public sentiment, consider that Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand emerged on the scene in 1957 to wide claim. This wasn't an accident and shows where public sentiment had moved to. Wyndam wasn't shy at all about pointing out the shortcomings he saw in the emerging new world order.
My point to all of the above is that even The Day of the Triffids, with its outlandish plot of man-eating plants and meteor-induced blindness that was nearly 100% effective, never shied away from the difficult conversations. Science fiction gives us a safe way to talk about society and to ask ourselves - are we really doing the right thing? All while flying across the universe or struggling to survive yet another apocalypse.
Sign up for Andrew Sweet's Newsletter for more insights... and get access to the exclusive Dandelion serial.
The The Day of the Triffids was my father's gift as a life-long aficionado of science fiction of all sorts. Imagine a young boy, laying in front of a small black-and-white television, watching the man slowly removing his own blindfold after an operation, with no doctor in sight. The entire hospital is deserted, and he eventually stumbles onto flesh-eating plants which descended during an asteroid storm! Enthralling!
It wasn't until many years later that I realized that within that fluffy exterior of man-eating seedlings lurked a nut of truth about society. In this case, The Day of the Triffids contains quite a few observations about society in the time it was written, and can in ways be viewed as an indictment and entrenchment of what was happening in the east. All of this, while slowly becoming a science fiction juggernaut that influenced the movie 28 Days Later, while itself being heavily influenced by The War of the Worlds.
You have to have a little history to get this. So The Day of the Triffids was published in 1951, six years after World War 2 ended, and just as the cold war was getting started. This guy, Trofim Lysenko, had risen to power to head the USSR Academy of Science in 1940, where he pushed exploration into what was known as soft-inheritance, a bogus but fun scientific theory to play around with that ultimately killed millions of people during the Great Leap Forward - but that's another story. This story is about how fear of genetic manipulation, not too different from the anti-GMO stuff we see today, got rolling. John Wyndam worked this in as his origin of The Day of the Triffids and where they came from. He even implied that the meteor shower was an artifact of cold war experiments. This story is thick with historical depth.
The story is an indictment of such experimentation, as well as an indictment on collectivist society. Multiple times throughout the story, the protagonist's visionaries (literally - people with sight remaining) become limited by being physically chained to pull along the blind. For more context regarding public sentiment, consider that Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand emerged on the scene in 1957 to wide claim. This wasn't an accident and shows where public sentiment had moved to. Wyndam wasn't shy at all about pointing out the shortcomings he saw in the emerging new world order.
My point to all of the above is that even The Day of the Triffids, with its outlandish plot of man-eating plants and meteor-induced blindness that was nearly 100% effective, never shied away from the difficult conversations. Science fiction gives us a safe way to talk about society and to ask ourselves - are we really doing the right thing? All while flying across the universe or struggling to survive yet another apocalypse.
Sign up for Andrew Sweet's Newsletter for more insights... and get access to the exclusive Dandelion serial.
No comments have been added yet.
Reality Gradient
Keep up with what's happening as I progress toward the publication of my first novel Models and Citizens in the new series Reality Gradient.
...more
- Andrew Sweet's profile
- 55 followers
