Having misplaced my copy of Day of the Triffids, I found myself attempting to describe a triffid gun to a friend. All I could remember was that they fired rotating discs that cut the top (the dangerous part) off any triffid foolish enough to get within range. I explained it as “a gun that fires ‘ninja stars’ to cut triffids apart” and left it at that…
So now I come here. Is there any more information in the book that tells you how to effectively disable triffids? Or is what I can remember all we get?
I seem to remember the leding character strangling one of them (or at least crushing it with his hands) after it stung him on the neck (he didn’t die because the triffid had recently stung someone else and was low on venom, plus he had developed a slight immunity due to the incident with triffid poison in his eyes.
Oh, and flame throwers; in the book, they set up a windmill that made a knocking sound, the triffids were attracted to it and the people (in protective clothing) waded in and crisped them with flame throwers, but this method wasn’t effective a second time because the plants had learned.
I think that the book hinted that mankind would eventually search for some kind of biological control.
The triffid gun shot a razor-sharp-edged disc that severed the stalk on top of the triffid (which housed the sting). It didn’t kill the triffid, and the stalk would eventually grow back. If memory serves, the props used in the BBC adaptation of the book (the one with John Duttine) looked pretty close. Roughly the size of a sawn-off shotgun, with a horizontal slot where the disc came out; I think they were spring-loaded.
At one point, the narrator talks about how they used to de-sting triffids in the commercial farms, but the operation isn’t described. (Apparently, the oil yield from a de-stung triffid goes down in quality, and the operation itself was tricky, so it made more commercial sense just to put the triffid farm workers into protective clothing.)
I don’t remember them coming up with any “magic bullet” solution in the book - as I recall, it closes on a note of quiet resolution, with Masen promising himself that they will reclaim the world from the triffids - but he doesn’t say how. (I’ll admit, though, that it’s been a while since I last read it.)
IIRC (and I probably don’t) some one at the end of the book was planning to cut off the bottom off England (Cornwall isn’t it) with a large fence/wall and just flush out the Triffids to create a zone free of the plants, any hint of a “magic bullet” thankfully absent which made for a more interesting ending.
In general though, whatever was good for reducing shrubs and trees to pulp was good for reducing Triffids to pulp too, guns and electric fences proving fairly ineffective.