When a day that you happen to know is Wednesday starts off by sounding like Sunday, there is something seriously wrong somewhere.I don't think I could have stumbled onto a more timely book: Comet showers blind the majority of the Earth's population (likely somehow caused by the Cold War era Russians and their sneaky weaponisation of space) while lethal GMOs are (literally) running amok. Think The Walking Dead meets Little Shop of Horrors by way of Jurassic Park with José Saramago's Blindness thrown in. Imagine waking up sighted but the great majority of the people around you are huddled, moaning and weeping with fear, some jumping out windows to escape their horror. There are already fallen bodies in the streets, some obviously murdered, and the power and other services are off; probably forever. Disregarding for a moment how unlikely it would be that a person's first reaction to blindness would be suicide, just looking around at the hundreds or thousands of essentially helpless people you see falling apart around you, ask yourself: How likely are you to be a selfless hero, to gather everyone together and start taking care of them? Or, like our protagonist Bill Masen, would you initially step over the bodies, careful to remain out of range of the grasping hands, and make your way to the pub for a brandy?
I say timely because, not only are the Russians presently rattling their sabers, but I have been reading way too many books lately about how we're on the brink of the end of civilisation, if not the end of the world itself, and GMOs are no doubt more mistrusted right now than they were 60 years ago when The Day of the Triffids first appeared.
It must be, I thought, one of the race's most persistent and comforting hallucinations to trust that "it can't happen here" -- that one's own time and place is beyond cataclysm.It's all so fragile -- isn't it? -- and that's something we all know; a fact that's probably even truer today than it was when John Wyndham wrote this book; if anything we've drawn nearer to the brink and become even more reliant on technology. This was an interesting and exciting read, but it was also philosophical about what kind of a society can be created post-apocalypse: We've all seen Rick Grimes gathering the helpless together, and we'd probably all like to think that we'd be the to-serve-and-protect-Sheriff-type in that situation, but faced with limited resources and great needs -- and under constant threat from the killer triffids -- what would I do? And no matter what choices I make for myself, how could I influence or resist the choices that other survivors might try to impose upon me because of their visions for a new society? Good stuff, leaving me with plenty to think on.
