The Night of the Triffids

The Night of the Triffids

Cover of first edition (hardcover)
Author	Simon Clark
Country	United Kingdom
Language	English
Genre	Science fiction novel
Publisher	Hodder & Stoughton
Publication date	2001
Media type	Print (Hardcover & Paperback)
Pages	406 pp
ISBN
OCLC	45327422
Preceded by	The Day of the Triffids

The Night of the Triffids is a science fiction novel by Simon Clark published in 2001. It is a sequel to John Wyndham's The Day of the Triffids. Clark has been commended for his success at mimicking Wyndham's style, but most reviewers have not rated his creation as highly as the original 1951 work. Clark's book is written in the first person and narrated by David Masen, the son of Wyndham's protagonist.

The story begins on the Isle of Wight, 25 years after the events from The Day of the Triffids. The community there has thrived, primarily by refining triffid oil into fuel.

One morning, a solar blackout occurs and triffids once again besiege the island. Pilot David Masen (son of Bill and Josella Masen from The Day of the Triffids) takes to the skies to investigate the cause of the blackout; however, even after taking his plane into the atmosphere as high as it can go, he finds that there is no end to the absolute darkness.

On David's descent, he loses communication with the control tower and is forced to make a crash-landing on a floating island populated by triffids. There, he meets an orphaned young girl, Christina, who has been surviving on her own in the wild since she was a young child, primarily because she is immune to triffid stings. The pair are rescued by an American ship that takes them to Manhattan Island in New York City.

Manhattan, a secure and self-contained community like the one on the Isle of Wight, appears at first glance to be a utopia seemingly untouched by the triffid catastrophe. David quickly falls in love with his tour guide, Kerris Baedekker, who is one of the hundreds of daughters of General Fielding, the primary ruler of the city. David divulges to General Fielding that the Isle of Wight has a considerable fleet of aircraft, which, using triffid oil for fuel, can fly much farther than the Manhattan fleet that runs on wood alcohol.

Just before David is set to return home to the Isle of Wight, he is kidnapped by a rebel group known as the Forresters. However, David ends up siding with them when they reveal that Fielding is actually a terrible dictator named Torrence, an old enemy of David's father, and that he keeps Manhattan prosperous by using the black and blind citizens as slaves, unbeknownst to the rest of the population. The Forresters further reveal that Torrence is planning to attack the Isle of Wight in order to steal their triffid oil refining machinery, and that he intends to create a race of soldiers immune to triffid poison by harvesting Christina's ovaries and implanting them into all the viable women in Manhattan.