And there my personal story joins up with the rest. You will find it in Elspeth Cary’s excellent history of the colony.
Our hopes all center here. It seems unlikely now that anything will come of Torrence’s neo-feudal plan, though a number of his seigneuries do still exist, with their inhabitants leading, so we hear, a life of squalid wretchedness behind their stockades. But there are not so many of them as there were. Every now and then Ivan reports that another has been overrun, and that the triffids which surrounded it have dispersed to join other sieges.
So we must think of the task ahead as ours alone. We believe now that we can see our way, but there is still a lot of work and research to be done before the day when we, or our children, or their children, will cross the narrow straits on a great crusade to drive the triffids back and back with ceaseless destruction until we have wiped out the last one of them from the face of the land that they have usurped.
By John Wyndham
The Day of the Triffids
Foul Play Suspected
The Kraken Wakes
The Midwich Cuckoos
The Outward Urge
Plan for Chaos
Stowaway to Mars
Trouble with Lichen
Web
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris was born in Knowle, Warwickshire, England, on July 10, 1903. The recent discovery of his personal papers has shed light on the previously unknown life of Wyndham. Until 1911, he lived in Edgbaston, Birmingham, England, and then moved to other parts of the country. After attending several private preparatory schools, he enrolled in Bedales School in Petersfield, England, about an hour’s drive from London. He began writing short stories in 1925 after unsuccessful attempts at careers in farming, law, advertising, and commercial art, and through the 1930s made his living by selling his stories to a myriad of periodicals. When England entered World War II, Wyndham joined the English civil service and later the British Army. After leaving the army in 1946, he resumed his writing, turning to novels and publishing under many different pseudonyms. The 1950s brought him great financial and critical success with The Day of the Triffids （1951）， The Kraken Wakes （1953）， The Chrysalids （1955）， and The Midwich Cuckoos （1957）。 He died on March 11, 1969.