Influences
H.G Wells is perhaps the writer who has most obviously impressed on Wyndham. He is mentioned in passing in some of his best-known novels. In the penultimate chapter of The Midwich Cuckoo Zellaby wistfully observes that The Children make:
‘....one long for H.G.’s straightforward Martians ‘
While in Triffids Bill and Josella even discuss Wells’ work:
'In the country of the blind the one-eyed man is king.'
"Oh yes-Wells said that, didn't he? Only in the story it turned out not to be true."
"The crux of the difference lies in what you mean by the word 'country'-patria in the original," I said. "Caecorum in patria luscus rex imperat omnis-a classical gentleman called Fullonius said that: it's all anyone seems to remember about him. But there's no organized patria, no state, here - only chaos, Wells imagined a people who had adapted themselves to blindness. I don't think that is going to happen here - I don't see how it can".

Although the term ‘genetic modification’ was unfamiliar to Mary Shelley, her work does deal with ‘unnaturalness’, and comparisons with Shelley are pertinent, since both writers are often dismissed by high-brow literary critics. Frankenstein is much more than a horror story, if indeed it is horror at all, just as Wyndham’s novels are incorrectly pigeon-holed.

Contemporary writers such as J.G. Ballard, Brian Aldiss, and the underrated John Christopher may well have provided Wyndham with food for thought, and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World must surely have been read by him. There are echoes of it in Consider Her Ways, and The Midwich Cuckoo, although personally I find Huxley’s writing style very dry, and a poor match for his fertile imagination.

Some have also compared Wyndham with George Orwell, both men were born in 1903, though there are as many differences between the two men’s bleak futurism, as there are similarities. Both had a storytelling style that combined grand ideas, with day-to-day minutae, and the two men also shared an equal distaste for bigoted conservatism and communism.

The Outward Urge was published just before 2001 A Space Odyssey. The lonely and maddening emptiness of space is a theme of short stories like Survival and The Dumb Martian, and there is some common ground with 2001.

The Influenced
Wyndham was one of the very first writers to effectively broach the subject of Armaegeddon, and may therefore have been a muse for novels like Doris Lessing’s Memoirs of a Survivor and Margaret Atwood’s Handmaiden’s Tale.

In the realm of popular culture many early zombie films pay homage to the likes of Triffids and Kraken Wakes. The X-Men Comics might also be considered a dumbed-down hybrid of The Midwich Cuckoo and The Chrysalids. Also the 1970’s BBC series Survivors (subject of a recent anodyne BBC remake) virtually copies passages from Day of the Triffids verbatim. I also think Wyndham has had a palpable influence on post-apocalyptic films such as Mad Max - minus the homoerotic Aussie punks of course.

Simon Clark's sequel The Night of the Triffids, released at the turn of the Millennium, may well interest Wyndham fans. It follows the triffid-battling adventures of the generation born after the worldwide breakdown. I have yet to read it but according to WyndhamWeb correspondent ‘Jackal’ (unfortunately spammers killed my comments page) it was:
‘....really disappointing, and seems to have little to do with the original. It’s probably written by a triffid fan who wanted to push ideas about what would happen to super evolving species like the triffids. I read it and felt like it devalued the original. It would’ve been ok if I hadn’t read DOTT’.

José Saramago's Blindness is another example of Day of the Triffids without the triffids. I don't know whether he was deliberately or subconsciously plagiarising, or was just unlucky in independently thinking up the idea of sudden, global blindness. Either way it was published almost half a century after DOTT. To be fair to the Portuguese author, he is a nobel-prize winner; what a pity Wyndham never got the honour.