Triffids Beard 2 - The Bearded Triffid

LaptopLand
Phoenixine Eighty-One, June 1996
I haven't read a lot this month. The reason is not hard to find -- I have bought myself a new toy and I
have spent most of the month playing with it. Indeed I am playing with it now, even as we speak. It is a
laptop computer and I am sitting comfortably in my lounge with my laptop on my lap (where else) writing
this essay.
The machine is walking Windows 95, an operating system with which I am less than familiar and so part
of the month has been spent exploring its possibilities. To this end I purchased two books -- The Byte
Guide to Optimising Windows 95 which appears to have no author other than the corporate one
mentioned in the title, and Windows 95 Secrets by Brian Livingstone and David Straub.
The first is excellent and it taught me a lot about the way the operating system does things. The second
is enormously fat and less than brilliant, but nonetheless contains the occasional nugget of gold. It is
very over-written (which accounts for its size) and the CD that comes with the book contains far too
much 16 bit software -- in other words, despite what the blurb says, not all the software is specifically
for Windows 95.
However life is not all laptops (though had you been watching me this month you could have been
forgiven for thinking otherwise) and I got distracted by the new Wilbur Smith paperback The Seventh
Scroll. It is the sequel to his earlier blockbuster River God which was set in ancient Egypt and which
described the Hyksos invasion and the subsequent flight of the Egyptian royal family into what is present
day Ethiopia where the body of the Pharaoh Mamose was interred in a hidden tomb together with a vast
treasure. The new book is set in the present day and concerns the search for that hidden tomb. It is
nothing but a straight forward, thrilling adventure tale; but what's wrong with that? It grabbed hold of
me on page one and it didn't let go until the end. It is a good old slam-bang romantic page turner and I
loved it so much that as soon as I finished it I went back and re-read River God and that one thrilled me
all over again. Wilbur Smith has written some stinkers, but when he is firing on all cylinders there is
nobody else in sight.
Did I read any science fiction this month? Well of course I did. Steven Brust has published a new Vlad
Taltos novel. As with all of this series, the title is a single nonsense word (in this case Orca; I can never
remember either the titles or the order in which they should be read, which is irritating and is, I feel, a
less than inspired marketing decision). I approached it with high hopes but was a little bit disappointed.
The early books in the series were written in the first person and told from the point of view of Vlad
Taltos himself. This book and its predecessor (Athyra) are not and I find them much less interesting as
a result. Vlad is a fascinating character and without the insight given by being inside his head in a first
person narrative it becomes harder to feel involved with him. There is too much of a distancing effect.
The plot of the current book does not help either -- it is a novel mainly about financial irregularities
committed by the high and mighty. There is a certain novelty about a story whose central theme is
creative accountancy, but the essential dullness and boredom of the subject soon comes to the fore
and my eyes glazed over.
In recent years there has been an upsurge in alternate history novels, most of them by Harry
Turtledove. In collaboration with the actor Richard Dreyfuss he has done it again in a novel called The
Two Georges. The central tenet of this novel is that the American Revolution never happened and
America remained a British colony. There was general unrest in the eighteenth century colony, but the
rebellion was nipped in the bud when George Washington travelled to England and signed a peace
concord with George III. This event was commemorated by the artist Gainsborough in a very famous
picture called The Two Georges. The novel itself is set in the twentieth century. The Gainsborough
picture is on exhibition in America, a prelude to a visit by King Charles III. However it is stolen by a
revolutionary group known as The Sons of Liberty who believe that America would be much better off as
an independent country and who view the painting as being symbolic of colonial oppression.
The main action of the book concerns the desperate search for the painting led by Colonel Thomas