In the Country of the Blind, Carnivorous Plants Are King

The Day of the Triffids (1951) by John Wyndham is an entertaining but awkward marriage of scifi silliness and social parable. When almost the entire population goes suddenly blind after watching a weirdly green meteor shower, the human race struggles to survive and behave decently amid chaos and despair. Survival is made harder by the rise of the triffids: towering mobile carnivorous plants genetically engineered to prey on humans. The opening scene of our hero wandering from a hospital into deserted London inspired 28 Days Later, while the brave new world of blindness surely contributed to Jose Saramago’s Blindness.

Pratchett and Gaiman’s Madcap Collaboration

Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman (1990)

Two of the weirdest and most imaginative fantasy novelists of our time once collaborated to write this outrageously zany, unnecessarily long story about the Apocalypse. In their hands, the impending doom of humanity is flat-out hilarious. The Four Horsemen ride motorcycles down the M25, the Hound of the Apocalypse wags his tail, inept Satanists misplace the infant Antichrist, and the prophecies of Agnes Nutter prove frightfully . . . prophetic. Meanwhile, a fussy angel (who, to people’s surprise, is not gay) buddies up with a fast-living demon (formerly Crawly, now Crowley) to postpone the end times. So ineffable.