Triffids Beard 2 - The Bearded Triffid

Food is one of nature's great pleasures and eating it in company even more so. When in Wellington I
often dine with friends. In the course of one convivial evening certain universal truths were revealed.
"Once I started to shop", said the lady across the table, "my feet stopped hurting." I was so absorbed in
the philosophical ramifications of this statement that I failed to notice the minor attack of St. Vitus dance
that seemed to be afflicting the lady on my left. After a final enormous wriggle that broke through my
reverie she held out her left arm. "Pull!" she ordered in stentorian tones. A slim strand hung from her
sleeve. I pulled, and it lengthened and lengthened, revealing itself eventually as a bra which fell
seductively into my hands. And it was still warm! Fair melted my ice cream, it did.
Firestar by Michael Flynn is a tour de force. If you read no other SF novel this year, read this one. It is
everything that Ben Bova's Moonrise should have been but wasn't. It is set at the beginning of the
twenty-first century. Mariesa van Huyten, heir to an industrial empire, has a dream of space. She has
her own private reasons (and some might consider those reasons irrational) but they are reasons
nonetheless and she sets out to realise her dream. The huge novel follows the threads of several
projects that Mariesa initiates to put humanity back into space. These vary from educational initiatives in
which her industrial empire takes over and runs state schools as private institutions, to high tech
research and development on single stage to orbit spacecraft. But through all of these projects we
never lose sight of the people involved -- the children and their reactions to the new teaching methods
(some of these children will have a significant role to play in the years ahead); the test pilots of the
experimental spaceships known as "planks" and all the myriad of friends and enemies that help and
hinder Mariesa's plans. This is a book about humanity for humanity and despite the often very high-tech
scenarios this humanity is never forgotten. It is above all a people book and I found it profoundly
moving. I can even forgive Flynn his errors -- he confuses the Balkan Macedonia with the Greek province
of the same name and conjures up an utterly unlikely and unconvincing war as a result. But even this
absurdity is of little momentin the face of the magnificence of Flynn's vision.
Robert Silverberg's Reflections and Refractions is a collection of Agbergian essays that span almost
quarter of a century. Not unnaturally some are now a little dated and many, having seen life originally as
guest editorials and the like are necessarily a little shallow. But there is gold here to be mined if you dig
deep enough and it is probably the best insight we will ever have into the mind and methods of one of
this centuries more important (and prolific!) SF writers.
Recently someone asked the members of the Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.sf.written to post examples of
American authors making bad mistakes in their (British) English dialogue. So I pointed out my favourite
example from a story called Fire Watch by Connie Willis wherein several "English" characters discuss
vegetables and the word "rutabaga" is used. This is a word that would never sully the lips of a (British)
English speaker, though it seems to be a common (American) English word. I confessed myself puzzled
as to exactly what a rutabaga might be. This led to a heated discussion as we all attempted to pin down
the elusive rutabaga. After a brief digression into white hairy carrots (quickly revealed to be parsnips)
opinion solidified that the rutabaga was almost certainly a swede, although there were occasional
puzzled interjections from a certain Scandinavian gentleman who failed to understand why his
countrymen were being described as round and leafy.
Jon Swain is a journalist and I will never forget reading his reports from Vietnam and Cambodia in my
teens and twenties. He brought that horrible war into our living rooms as few other journalists have ever
done. Now in River of Time he writes of those years from a personal perspective. What was it like to
be a journalist in those places at those times? This book is heart-breaking in its grim honesty. Despite
the often sickening events that Swain describes there is still some hope. The mysterious appeal of war
and death contrasts sharply with a profound humanity and an immense love -- south-east Asia has
marked Swain for life. This book shows how the scar tissue was formed. I know of nothing else to
compare it with save perhaps Michael Herr's Dispatches, and that is the highest praise of all. The word
"classic" is so often overused and abused that it trivialises its subject; but no other word will do. This
book is one of the great ones. Read it and weep.
Leslie Thomas is one of this century's best comic novelists. What makes him so great is that behind the
surface farce of such famous books as The Virgin Soldiers, grim reality is always waiting to break