The 50th anniversary of one of my favourite novels was marked by the penning of a sequel by one of the UK’s rising stars of speculative fiction. And it isn’t half bad.

The good first. Mr Clark makes a more than decent fist at giving us a novel in the style of John Wyndham. The first third or so feels pretty close in tone to the original novel and the voice of David Mason, sone of the original novel’s hero, matches that of his father in a way that feels comforting. The plot also widens the world of the original novel and lets us know what was happening in other countries (a nice touch given the attitude towards them displayed in the first novel; although it was at least allowed that they had all the best maps). It’s also a thrilling adventure with a villain that doesn’t really come as too much of a surprise. I also enjoyed the nod to Wyndham contemporary Fred Hoyle’s novel The Black Cloud throughout the book, but the acknowledgment that another of Wyndham’s novels was being referenced in the closing paragraphs was also quite good fun as well.

I also enjoyed the occasional dives into how a radically changed society could possibly function and survive and eventually flourish. As an adult, these have become my favourite parts of the original novel and I was leased to see that Clark deepened what was going on with these ideas, with Bill worrying about what is to become of a society that - deepening the idea raised in the first novel - allows for people like him to think of new ideas but doesn’t have the resources to create anything from them.

However, it isn’t all roses in this novel. Whereas Day was a reasonably straightforward chronicle of what happened to Bill and Josella after the meteor shower that blinded the population of the Earth, this descends into an action adventure roughly halfway through. It doesn’t affect its power as a novel in it sown right but it does leave a different taste in the mouth as the story proceeds, almost as though you’ve started reading a different novel entirely. I’d liken it to the difference between Alien and its first sequel, Aliens. I bloody love Aliens: it’s an almost perfect sequel (bettered, IMNSHO, only by T2) that acknowledges the first film through very similar plot developments and character actions while diverting itself into a much different film that still recognises and celebrates where it came from. Clark does something very similar here and the siege/ gunfight at the climax, while veering rapidly away from what had been done in the original, does conclude in a haunting sequence that could have failed dramatically it also further drives home just how different the new world (see what I did there?) has become from what Bill and Josella remember.

There’s also the Triffids themselves. They play roughly the same part they did in the original novel: as a symbol of how man has lost control of a world we sought to master but here we get a wildly different take on their evolution, with triffids adapting ridiculously fast to the new environments they find themselves in. I didn’t find that element of the novel as convincing, alas, but it does provide the reader with some striking images.

As a sequel, this novel’s effectiveness will rely on how sacred you hold the original text. I know that a lot of fans were disappointed by it, but I thoroughly enjoyed it as a revisiting and extension of a world that I love.