William's Book Blog
Mostly book reviews. Very rarely I'll allow William Campbell Powell (author) to write a blog entry on publishing activity, but he's under orders to keep that stuff over on his Facebook page and on http://williamcampbellpowell.com
Currently reading
Following in the footprints of giants
So what happened after Bill Masen escaped the clutches of the despotic Torrence and fled to the Isle of Wight? I always wondered...
Having recently revisited the Day of the Triffids on audiobook and reviewed it here, I stumbled across this sequel by Simon Clark and ordered it up from Amazon.
Hmm.
The Night of the Triffids ends up being an entirely serviceable SF adventure, but it doesn't break any new ground. The whole thing is far too pat - the villains are black-hearted, the heroes are unequivocally good, and rather naive. The triffids lack the scariness of the original, save in the opening pages. They are too easily defeated and the new variants, though novel, are ultimately no more threatening than the originals.
I got the feeling that the novel was written specifically for the American market, and with 21st century political correctness built in, as the Native Americans replay their Thanksgiving generosity of spirit, while Clark plays out the consequences of the circa 1950s apocalypse locking white American New York into a pre-NAACP white supremacist stereotype.
Somewhere in the mix there's a trace of Wyndham's conflict of moral ideologies, but they're an afterthought - given Wyndham's exploration of polygamous alternatives, it's disappointing that the protagonists' relationships are all monogamous and heterosexual.
No - this is simply an adventure story. It's "nice" that Clark has taken the trouble to tell us one vision of how the triffid universe might have unfolded. I'm not sure Wyndham would have approved.