Though I read assorted novels and short stories by British author John Wyndham in my formative sci-fi years, I never got around to what many would consider his most famous work, DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS.
I saw the 1962 movie adaptation at an early age, in which the Triffids were alien invaders. But one of the big surprises for me was that in the original book, the walking plant-monsters are the bioengineered creations of an unidentified Earth-nation, implicitly Russia. In addition, similar causes bring about the plague of blindness that leaves all of humanity vulnerable to the Triffids, though Wyndham doesn't devote much space to the plague's origins.
The second big surprise is that the Triffids are not the stars of the novel. Since H.G. Wells' WAR OF THE WORLDS, the template for nearly all alien-invasion stories that followed, the majority of these stories emphasize some bland (sometimes nameless) viewpoint character who describes the powers and proclivities of the invaders. Some alien-invasion stories have chosen a course opposed to that of Wells by emphasizing a larger-than-life hero who seeks to defeat the invaders, but obviously such narratives put aside Wells' attempt to emphasize a common-man narrator.
Wyndham's viewpoint character, biologist Bill Masen, has much in common with the nameless protagonist of the Wells novel. However, during the apocalypse that causes British society to fall into chaos, Masen only occasionally discourses on the Triffids. Masen's concern, like that of Wyndham, and unlike that of Wells, is to provide numerous camera-eye views of how the society falls apart, and what can be done to build it back again. The ambulatory plant-creatures are more of a secondary menace, not least because the social chaos brought about by the blindness-plague would have come about had the Triffids never existed. I theorize that Wyndham chose to use the Triffids as proxies for foreign invaders, given that human agents weren't a possibility in a world where all countries had been equally devastated by the twin menaces.
TRIFFIDS is a good read, but Masen is nothing more than an authorial insert, providing bland takes on the various factions that arise in the absence of the social contract. Somewhat better in terms of characterization is the hero's girlfriend. She was a minor celebrity in the vanished social order thanks to having written a racy book (though author Wyndham never really tells readers what was racy about it). However, she's absent for a large portion of the story, so Bill Masen is the functional focal icon of TRIFFIDS. My memory is that the 1962 movie abandons the structure of the book and pursues the Wells template unabashedly. I plan to confirm that soon with a re-watch of the film that gained a measure of immortality through inspiring the following lyrics from ROCKY HORROR:
And I really got hot
When I saw Janette Scott
Fight a Triffid that spits poison and kills
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