John Wyndham

In the sleepy English village of Midwich, a mysterious silver object appears and all the inhabitants fall unconscious. A day later the object is gone and everyone awakens unharmed—except that all the women in the village are discovered to be pregnant.

A world paralysed by genetic mutation John Wyndham takes the reader into the anguished heart of a community where the chances of breeding true are less than fifty per cent and where deviations are rooted out and destroyed as offences and abominations.

This book is fantastic and frightening, but entirely plausible. It doesn't just seem scientifically possible, but its characters are living people shaken out of the civilization they know into the horror of a world dominated by triffids. The triffids are grotesque and dangerous plants, over seven feet tall, originally cultivated for their yield of high-grade oil. So long as conditions give the mastery to their human directors, they are a valuable asset to mankind. But when a sudden universal disaster turns those conditions upside down, then the triffids, seizing their opportunity, become an active and dreadful menace. The story of what happens is told here by one of the few people lucky enough to escape the disaster.

What if aliens invaded and colonized Earth's oceans rather than its land? Britain, 1953: It begins with red dots appearing across the sky and crashing to the oceans' deeps. At first, many people believe that these aliens are interested in only what's down below. But when the polar ice-caps begin to melt, it becomes clear that these beings are not interested in sharing the Earth and that humankind might just be on the brink of extinction. . . .