The next morning, he learns that the light from the unusual display has rendered any who watched it blind (later in the book, Bill speculates that the "meteor shower" may have been orbiting satellite weapons, triggered accidentally).

Intrigued by a single light on top of the Senate House in an otherwise darkened city, Bill and Josella discover a group of sighted survivors led by a man named Beadley, who plans to establish a colony in the countryside.

However, before these plans can be put in place, a man named Wilfred Coker stages a fire at the university and kidnaps a number of sighted individuals, including Bill and Josella.

Eventually they decide to separate, Coker returning to help at Tynsham, while Bill heads for the Sussex Downs after remembering a remark Josella made about friends she had there.

Several years pass, until one day a representative of Beadley's faction lands a helicopter in their yard and reports that his group has established a colony on the Isle of Wight.

Bill recognises the leader as a ruthless young man he had encountered on a scavenging expedition in London, whom he had watched cold-bloodedly execute one of his own group who had fallen ill.

An unabridged paperback edition was published in the late 1960s, in arrangement with Doubleday, under the Crest Book imprint of Fawcett Publications World Library.

The triffids are related, in some editions of the novel, to brief mention of the theories of the Soviet agronomist Trofim Lysenko, a proponent of Lamarckism who eventually was thoroughly debunked.

He described many scenes and incidents, including the uncanny silence of London on a Sunday morning after a heavy bombardment, in letters to his long-term partner Grace Wilson.

[13] Forrest J. Ackerman wrote in Astounding Science Fiction that Triffids "is extraordinarily well carried out, with the exception of a somewhat anticlimactic if perhaps inevitable conclusion".

[14] Brian Aldiss coined the disparaging phrase cosy catastrophe to describe the subgenre of post-war apocalyptic fiction in which society is destroyed save for a handful of survivors, who are able to enjoy a relatively comfortable existence.

[16] Groff Conklin, reviewing the novel's first publication, characterised it as "a good run-of-the-mill affair" and "pleasant reading... provided you aren't out hunting science fiction masterpieces".

Horrible alien things which some of us had somehow created, and which the rest of us, in our careless greed, had cultured all over the world, One could not even blame nature for them.In a master's thesis entitled Social Critique in the Major Novels of John Wyndham: Civilization's Secrets and Nature's Truths,[21] Michael Douglas Green writes about other scientific contributions to the novel's apocalypse: The apocalypse in The Day of the Triffids is not merely a result of the creation of the triffids, however.

Elsewhere, I have also suggested that the curiously under-analysed triffids could be read as distorted metaphors for the colonised peoples of the British Empire—then in the middle of the process of decolonisation—coming back to haunt mainland Britain, much as the Martians did in H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds (1898), one of Wyndham's main influences.Robert Yeates, in his essay "Gender and Ethnicity in Post-Apocalyptic Suburbia",[22] proposes another connection to colonialism: The title The Day of the Triffids shows a colonial role reversal of this kind in which humanity is no longer the most powerful species, and Masen remarks that it is "an unnatural thought that one type of creature should dominate perpetually.

Coker's forced shackling of sighted people to the blind echoes the sentiments that some middle-class British citizens felt in the wake of the changes introduced by the Labour party after their 1945 election victory.

Colin Manlove highlights this phenomenon in his essay "Everything Slipping Away: John Wyndham's The Day of the Triffids":[23] Simultaneous with this process, people lose their identities.

Set in the Isle of Wight "Colony" in the lead-up to the Millennium, it details the rallying of survivors from across Britain for one last attempt to defeat the triffid threat.