Triffids Beard 2 - The Bearded Triffid

teams, guerrilla units from an alternate Athens. A Pittsburgh private eye (the first person narrator of the
story) stumbles across a Crux Op operation and is soon embroiled in the fight. There's nothing new
about the premise -- Fritz Leiber did it in his Change War stories, Keith Laumer did it in his Imperium
stories, and doubtless many others have done it too. But that doesn't stop it being fun when it is done
well, and Barnes does it very well indeed. And now I'm going to have to buy the rest of the books as
they are published. Blast! Blast! Blast!
Not too far removed in the space opera stakes is the new L. Neil Smith novel Pallas. I bought this one
on the strength of his earlier book The Probability Broach which I enjoyed immensely, and I wasn't
disappointed. Emerson Ngu escapes from a government run prison colony on the asteroid Pallas.
Outside the colony he finds a semi-anarchic libertarian society. The slam bang adventure story of Ngu's
escape and subsequent battle against the government regime is used to dramatise the libertarian ideals.
Smith himself is a well known libertarian and survivalist and he uses his fiction as propaganda. Nothing
wrong with that. Unlike many propagandists, he can actually write well and tells a good page-turning tale.
The idealistic society he seems to yearn for strikes me as being fundamentally unworkable (he has a
rather naive view of human nature) and his insistence that everybody should be armed strikes a rather
sour note in the wake of tragedies such as Dunblane and Port Arthur. I detest his ideas, but I thoroughly
enjoy his stories.
In search of grue, I picked up Geoffrey Abbot's Lords of the Scaffold, subtitled "A History of
Execution". Abbott is a former Yeoman Warder at the Tower of London. As part of his duty of guiding
tourists around the tower, he would embroider his normal lectures with the odd ghoulish, macabre fact.
These went down so well that he has now collected these into several books, of which this is one. No
gruesome detail is omitted as Abbott gleefully discusses the gory details of various execution methods
used around the world, the executioners who put them into practice and their successes and failures on
the scaffold. The failures, naturally, make for the most interesting reading. Thus in 1571, a certain John
Storey was hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn. He was cut down from the gallows while still alive in
order to be drawn, and it is reported that while the executioner was 'rifling through his bowels', Storey
sat up and dealt him a blow before being quickly dismembered. And who can blame him?
The name of Sharyn McCrumb is well known to SF fans. She is the author of two screamingly funny
satires of the SF world, Bimbos of the Death Sun and Zombies of the Gene Pool. However she is
also a well respected novelist in her own right outside the SF field and I have just read two of the four
novels in her Appalachian series. All are set in the hillbilly country with an overlapping cast of characters.
The Rosewood Casket concerns the Stargill family. Old Randall Stargill is dying and his four sons
come back to the family farm. There they build him a coffin and argue over what to do after he dies.
There is an old scandal connected with the Stargill family. In his youth Randall had a sister who
disappeared and presumably died in the thick forest. Now that Randall himself is dying his old childhood
sweetheart Nora Bonesteel (who has the spirit sight) asks that a small box be buried with Randall. Inside
the box are the bones of a small child.
She Walks these Hills opens two hundred years ago with Katie Wyler who ran across Ashe Mountain
escaping from Indians who had held her captive. But she returned home to a greater tragedy. She still
crosses Ashe Mountain today, but only people such as Nora Bonesteel can see her now. Hiram Sorley,
who has escaped from prison and is making his way back home can see her. Jeremy Cobb who is
studying the period for a thesis would like to see her. Deputy Sheriff Martha Ayres does not believe in
ghosts. She needs to protect Hiram Sorley's ex-wife and daughter. After all, Sorley is a convicted
murderer who could easily kill again. All these deaths, past and present, link together in the climax of the
book.
I suppose, stretching a point, you could call these SF novels because of the small supernatural element
that they embody. But really they are just enormously well written and absorbing books full of incident
and character and grandeur. I read both books in a sitting, totally absorbed. And when I'd finished them
I dashed out and visited every bookshop in Auckland looking for the other two books in the series but I
couldn't find them anywhere and I'm annoyed. If any of you want to buy me a birthday present, I want
The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter and If Ever I Return.