Just wondering what the heck this triffids doing in the Google Trends... So I googled it and found out that this is just a book. Triffids are (fictional) plants capable of animal-like behaviour: they feed on rotting meat, are able to uproot themselves and move about on their three "legs", possess a deadly whip-like poisonous sting, and appear to communicate with each other. The narrator and protagonist is Bill Masen, who has made his living working with Triffids. Being an expert on the subject, he speculates that they were deliberately bioengineered in the Soviet Union, and that Triffid seeds were spread world-wide when an attempt was made to smuggle them out of Russia; the escaping plane is presumed to have been shot down, literally scattering the seeds to the winds. Whatever their origin, when Triffids began sprouting all over the world, their extracts proved to be radically superior to existing vegetable and animal oils. The result was a world-wide slew of Triffid farms, where the penned plants' stings were left intact as docking impaired the quality of their oil. The narrative begins with Masen in hospital, his eyes bandaged after having been stung by a Triffid at one of the farms. He discovers that while he has been recovering, the light from an unusual meteor shower has rendered most people on Earth blind (Bill later muses that the shower may have been the misfiring of a space-based weapon system, though, as with the Triffids' origins, the truth is never revealed). After wandering aimlessly through London, watching civilization collapsing around him, Masen rescues a sighted woman who is being used as an unwilling pair of eyes by a blinded man. She is novelist Josella Playton, whose work has earned her a notorious and mostly undeserved reputation. She and Masen quickly fall in love.
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