James Bradley , author of The Deep Field , has just write a fascinating essay aboutDay of the Triffids . He phone the monster - plant novel a Darwinian closing - of - the - populace scenario , and then sharpen out how it ’s very different from an American apocalypse account .
Bradley writes :
Just as much of the power of 28 Days later on number from its often eerily beautiful simulacrum of an abandoned London , many of The Day of the Triffids ’ most enduring effigy are of the empty cities and townspeople of southerly England , and , as sentence overhaul , of their gradual reclamation by the state of nature .
What ’s interesting , to my mind , is the way in which these figure of speech are identifiably part of an English – or perhaps British – custom . Since Wells at least , British speculative fiction has tend to imagine our death in similarly muted terms . . . This imagination stands in bleak contrast to American vision of world ’s conclusion , and their apocalyptic fervour . . . Perhaps not astonishingly for a country in which faith loom so enceinte , America is haunt by the apocalyptic imagination of fundamental Christianity , a cultural belief that has not been supersede by skill , but but mutated into the sort of apocalyptic fantasy which are given shape in The Road or even Battlestar Galactica ( if you ’re concerned in this question I ’ve posted an article I write for The Age back in 2007 here ) .
By contrast , novels such as [ John ] Wyndham ’s can be discover as part of a larger anxiousness about the waning of British power from the get-go of the 20th hundred on . The end of the reality , for Wyndham and his countryman is more about a larger historical unconscious process than the more fervid , religious fantasies of the Americans . Like Ozymandias ’ statue in Shelley ’s antique land , the silent streets and cities of England talk to the folly of human ambition , and to the British good sense of Imperial decline .
This is just one part of a really interesting essay about a account book that deserves to be remembered as one of the smashing , agitate science fabrication works of the 20th century . ( And it ’s prescient too : If you ’ll recall , the human - eating triffids are being engender as biofuel . )
I also reckon that Bradley has attain on something here with his whimsy of how British SF handle Revelation . It ’s something I ’ve get wind Charles Stross say too : That their account of imperialism give the Brits a long eyeshot , both of the future and of the declension of the human coinage .
viaCity of natural language
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