The Day of the Triffids

by John Wyndham

‘They used to say that man’s really serious rivals were the insects. It seems to me that the triffids have something in common with some kinds of insects. Oh, I know that biologically they’re plants. What I mean is they don’t bother about their individuals, and the individuals don’t bother about themselves. Separately they have something which looks slightly like intelligence; collectively it looks a great deal more like it. They sort of work together for a purpose the way ants or bees do – yet you could say that not one of them is aware of any purpose or scheme although he’s part of it. It’s all very queer – probably impossible for us to understand, anyway. They’re so different. It seems to me to go against all our ideas of inheritable characteristics. Is there something in a bee or a triffid which is a gene of social organization, or does an ant have a gene of architecture? And if they have these things why haven’t we in all this time developed a gene for language, or cooking? Anyway, whatever it is, the triffids do seem to have something like it. It may be that no single individual knows why it keeps hanging around our fence, but the whole lot together knows that its purpose is to get us – and that sooner or later it will.’