Triffids Beard 2 - The Bearded Triffid

To Be Continued
Phoenixine Seventy-Eight, March 1996
One of the nice things about the new year is that all the bookshops have sales where you can mooch
around through the bargains and get very depressed at the number of books going cheap that you paid
full price for when they first came out. Sometimes, though, you do find bargains and in Dymocks annual
sale I found a hardback of Brian Aldiss' new novel Somewhere East of Life marked down from its full
price of nearly $50 to only $22.95. It was too good to resist and so I bought it which turned out to be a
massive mistake because then I went to Whitcoulls where the same book was on sale for $10. Bummer!
It isn't even a very good book. The unifying theme behind the story concerns the hero's search for his
memories. Ten years of his life have been stolen and the salacious bits used in pornographic virtual
realities. Aldiss uses this as an excuse to take his hero on a travelogue through a near future Eastern
Europe in search of his missing years. The stolen memories are really just a McGuffin -- Aldiss doesn't
use the concept for anything very interesting and concentrates instead on the social and political
aspects of the countries through which the narrative wanders. The book is constructed as a fix-up from
various novellas and the joins show. All in all I found it to be one of his least satisfactory works.
Closely related to the depression induced by examining cheap books that you bought expensively is the
extreme anger caused by buying books that you already own. Recently I narrowly avoided this hazard in
my hunt for Poppy Z. Brite. I had been reading a collection of her short stories called Wormwood,
published in America by Dell and I enjoyed them so much that I went looking for more of her work. I
found three of her books in British editions (Penguin) in a local bookshop and fell on them with glad cries
of glee. Literally seconds before the nice lady behind the counter filled in my credit card slip I discovered
that the book called Swamp Foetus that I was about to buy was a cunningly re-packaged and re-titled
Wormwood. I only found out because the nice lady behind the counter was a Poppy Z. Brite fan herself
and we were discussing the books while she rang them up on the till. What a narrow escape! So I only
bought Lost Souls and Drawing Blood and as I haven't read them yet I'll tell you about them some
other time.
But the short stories in Wormwood (or Swamp Foetus, if you prefer) are beautifully decadent,
elegant and more than a little bit sick. I loved each and every one. They display all of Poe's morbid
preoccupation with death, decay, graveyards and grue, translated through a twentieth century
viewpoint. Poppy Z. Brite is a major talent.
Another emerging major talent is Harry Turtledove who has a silly name, but since he writes good books
I am prepared to forgive him. His major forte is the alternative history (I never could get interested in his
semi-classical-historical fantasy novels) and he is currently in the middle of a massive multi-volume
project which assumes that the Earth is invaded by aliens in the middle of World War II, thus causing the
belligerent nations to forget their squabbles and align to defend Earth from the aliens. Purportedly the
story will be told in four volumes, but only three have so far been published and only the first two are
available in paperback. I read the first several months ago (Worldwar: In the Balance) and have just
finished reading volume two which is called Worldwar: Tilting the Balance. The irritating similarity in
the titles and the cover art prevented me from buying the book for quite some time -- I was convinced
that I already had it. Turtledove's publishers, unlike Poppy Z. Brite's publishers, obviously want to sell as
few copies of the book as they possibly can. Eventually, however, the penny dropped and I bought it.
One of the more impressive things about it is that despite the fact that it starts the story in the middle
by taking up exactly where the first book left off, I never felt confused by either the characters or the
storyline. It is several months since I read the first volume and I was sure that many of the plot details
had evaporated from my head. I was wrong. It all came flooding back as if there had been no time at all
between my readings of the two books; and now I am eager for more. If you like aliens-invade-the-earth
stories, you couldn't do better than this.
A book I have been consciously avoiding for many years is Stephen Levy's Hackers because I am sick
of reading reports and seeing films about nerdy kids with a Commodore 64 and a 300 baud modem