In the 1950s author John Wyndham was for a time regarded as a successor to H.G. Wells. Wyndham had considerable success with novels such as The Day of the Triffids (1951 , The Kraken Wakes (1953), The Chrysalids (1955) and The Midwich Cuckoos (1957). In effect Wyndham took the apocalyptic sf of Wells and reworked them into disaster parables for middle-class England of the 1950s.

Meteors turn plants into giant walking man-eaters (which by the way is the same basic plot as Little Shop of Horrors by Roger Corman (1960), but was nevertheless a very different movie). There is, by the way, no such thing as a "Triffid", which is the name these plants went by. However, "trifid" (with one F) means "divided into three parts", and is often used as part of the scientific name of plants which have a three-part leaf

Sailor Bill Masen is in hospital for an eye operation. With his eyes bandaged, he is unable to witness a freak meteorite shower that night. When he wakes up in the morning he finds London in chaos, the entire populace blinded by radiation from the meteorite shower. The shower has also brought with it triffids, a form of ambulatory, carnivorous plant, which now emerge to prey upon the helpless populace. Gathering a small group of seeing survivors, Masen makes his way across Europe fighting off the triffids and searching for people to reorganize civilization.