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bugshaw at 07:19pm on 08/01/2012
bugshaw at 07:19pm on 08/01/2012The Day of the Triffids, John Wyndham (1951)
Still very good, with evocative scenes in a London I'm familiar with, not modern shock-horror but I can still almost smell the corpses which litter the streets. The triffids seem to my sci-fi-trained mind like they should be aliens, but they are a manmade problem and for all the vivid plant-with-agency images it is very much a book about human responses.
It shares a lot with some corporate team building activities: scenarios where you have insufficient resources, colleagues with reduced capacity, and a group with diverse and conflicting objectives and ambitions. There is no obvious right path, especially with incomplete information, and every decision is hard. You can't get it right; people will die. And just as you start to attain some stability, the scenario leader throws in an evolved triffid attack, or (LOL) plague.
Wyndham shows us a range of people and their arguments about how best things should work.
Still very good, with evocative scenes in a London I'm familiar with, not modern shock-horror but I can still almost smell the corpses which litter the streets. The triffids seem to my sci-fi-trained mind like they should be aliens, but they are a manmade problem and for all the vivid plant-with-agency images it is very much a book about human responses.
It shares a lot with some corporate team building activities: scenarios where you have insufficient resources, colleagues with reduced capacity, and a group with diverse and conflicting objectives and ambitions. There is no obvious right path, especially with incomplete information, and every decision is hard. You can't get it right; people will die. And just as you start to attain some stability, the scenario leader throws in an evolved triffid attack, or (LOL) plague.
Wyndham shows us a range of people and their arguments about how best things should work.
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