Triffids Beard 2 - The Bearded Triffid

Youthful Vices
Phoenixine Eighty-Five, October 1996
The TV recently showed the miniseries of Larry McMurtry's Dead Man's Walk (the Lonesome Dove
prequel that I mentioned in a previous essay) and I watched it and it was magnificent. It stuck very
closely to the book (largely because McMurtry wrote the screenplay himself) but it brought home to me
yet again that although I have read many McMurtry books, they have all been tales of the American West
-- I have never read any of the novels set in more contemporary times. Determined to rectify this sad
state of affairs, I purchased and devoured Cadillac Jack, a novel about a man called Jack who drives a
Cadillac.
Jack is a wheeler-dealer. He roams the States from flea market to flea market hunting for bargains that
he can buy cheaply and sell dearly. He appears to know every weirdo collector of weirdo objects and no
matter what junk he buys there is always someone around to take it off his hands. Towards the end, an
important plot point revolves around the whereabouts of a Luddite Truncheon (one of the few remaining
police truncheons used in suppressing the original Luddite riots). A millionaire truncheon collector is
desperate for it. Jack has it. Sparks fly.
My admiration for McMurtry's books revolves around the raving loonies that wander eccentrically
through their pages. You can get away with this in a western -- something about the wide open spaces
seems to encourage eccentricity, but I wasn't sure if he could manage the same thing in twentieth
century America. I needn't have worried. He did it brilliantly.
One of the last projects the late Roger Zelazny was involved in was the design of a computer game. A
novelization of this game has now been published (Chronomaster by Roger Zelazny and Jane
Lindskold). While it might make a fun game, it makes a terribly tedious novel. The hero is a designer of
pocket universes. Several such universes are now in stasis and he must enter them and explore them to
find out why (has somebody got it in for pocket universes?). Since time has been suspended in these
universes the only way he can enter and move around in them is to carry his own supply of "bottled
time" with him. He is also equipped with a "universal tool" which suggested interesting Rabelasian
possibilities to my dirty mind, but which turned out to be merely a sort of futuristic self-defining Swiss
army knife.
The novel is episodic (as games must be) and is all surface and slam-bang action. The hero is heroic and
the villains are villainous and it is all pretty black and white. I couldn't get involved.
Volume three of Harry Turtledove's irritatingly titled alien invasion novel is now available. Though the
books are hard to tell apart by looking at the cover or reading the title, they are beautifully written. They
are believable and exciting; what more could you ask for? Some heroes from earlier episodes are now
revealed to be villains and some villains turn into heroes. Nuclear weapons are tossed around and things
are looking bad for the aliens as they start to suffer reversals on the battlefield. Volume four (which
Turtledove claims will be the last) will hopefully wrap all the loose ends up. I hope it does. This is all good
stuff
Mostly I read novels, but I like short stories and therefore I fell with glee upon The Road To Nightfall,
volume four of the collected short stories of Robert Silverberg. This volume reprints stories from early in
his career. In the 1950s, in his teens and twenties, Silverberg spread like crab grass over every SF
magazine in the world. His enormous (though often trivial) output allowed him to make a living as a
professional writer and some of the best stories from this hugely productive time are collected in this
book. Despite the almost machine like way he must have hammered out the stories, they still read well.
Even that early in his career he knew how to tell a tale, how to construct a story and while of necessity
these highly commercial pieces are classically structured (no experimental fiction here) they never fail to
entertain and hold the attention.
David Brin is perhaps best known for his "uplift" novels and with Brightness Reef he returns to the
theme. Let me say straight away that this enormous novel (705 pages) is merely the first volume of