Triffids Beard 2 - The Bearded Triffid

goodness knows how many and it is profoundly irritating in that it simply stops in mid story when the
page count gets high enough. No conclusions are reached, no endings are explored. It just stops. As a
result it is supremely unsatisfying.
The tale takes place on the distant planet of Jijo. It is under quarantine, left to lie fallow by the galaxy's
patron races in the hope that the seeds of life left behind by the last race to live on it may mature into a
life form suitable for uplift. But representatives of six races (one of them human) have sneaked in over
the years for various reasons and an unofficial colony is growing. Then a spaceship arrives, seemingly to
report on the current status of the world. What are the colonists to do?
The tale is told episodically from the point of view of representatives of each of the races, and it soon
becomes clear that Brin is utterly hopeless at portraying aliens. Every single one of them comes across
as merely a rather oddly shaped human being He simply cannot convincingly portray a mindset that is
truly alien, though he is very good at bizarre biological adaptations (one of the alien races has wheels
instead of legs!). I think I'm giving up on Brin. He is no longer worth the effort.
Well, six months ago tension, apprehension and dissension had begun. Now they are finished. The sixth
and last book of Stephen King's serial novel has been published and now we know what Paul was doing
in the shed and what happened when Coffey finally walked that horrible green mile.
As an experiment in publishing it has been a resounding success. As a novel, I think perhaps it is less so.
Partly that is because of the preannounced limit of six books. The closer King got to book number six,
the more obvious it was that the plot needed seven, eight or nine books and the last couple were very
rushed with far too many incidents reported in retrospect that deserved the more immediate drama of
being experienced as they happened
Six instalments is about six hundred pages (give or take) which is not a bad length for a story. But I
can't help feeling that had King conceived and written it as an entity (as opposed to a serial) it would
have been longer (say about nine hundred pages). But he was caught in the strait-jacket of the
marketing decisions that pre-dated the writing. Six instalments it had to be, no matter how rushed the
later ones.
Don't get me wrong -- I enjoyed it tremendously. It is a powerful and moving story. The flaws are
perhaps inevitable, but it was a worthy gimmick, enormous fun and one hell of a story.
Youthful vices are never lost, they just gain in intensity. One of mine is an inordinate fondness for the
appallingly bad novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs (acronymically known as ERB), a writer I discovered as a
child (the best time to discover him) and who I cannot resist reading despite a certain and sure
knowledge that the words he put down on paper were unutterably rubbishy ones.
One of the more frustrating experiences of my reading life has been the knowledge that when ERB died
(round about the time I was born) he left behind 80 pages or so of a Tarzan novel. I wanted to read it,
but I never could. It remained unfinished and unpublished until this year. The fragment was completed
by Joe R. Lansdale (a comic book artist and novelist) and has been published as a limited edition
hardback called Tarzan -- The Lost Adventure (lck!) which I paid far too much money for, but which
I now proudly own.
I have to admit that it is not a very good book (though this is perhaps less than surprising). It consists
mainly of Tarzan set pieces -- attacks by various wild beasts, fights among the great apes, Tarzan
rescues the good guys and vanquishes the bad guys. A lost city is discovered. Ho hum.
It was nice to make a reacquaintance with Jad-Bal-Ja and Nkima and it was good to see them restored to
their well deserved heroic stature, but overall the book was a disappointment; it was too predicable, too
stereotyped and therefore, in the final analysis, too dull.
But like all ERB novels, the ending promises a sequel. The clues are unambiguous; it will take place in
Pellucidar, that eerie land at the Earth's core. I always felt that ERB was most at home there. Apart from
the Martian stories (which are in a class of their own) the Pellucidar books were his strongest. If this