Triffids Beard 2 - The Bearded Triffid

I have no hesitation in recommending this novel -- it is Card's best book; streets ahead of his other
works. Even the award winning Ender's Game does not begin to approach the brilliance and subtlety of
Pastwatch.
For most of my life, even when cold free, I have sniffed and snorted. My mother always insisted that I be
well supplied with handkerchiefs and every week she would be presented with mountains of them to
wash because sometimes I was getting through five or six or more a day. Eventually they became so
saturated that they began to leak and my trouser pocket got soggy and I knew that it was time to get
another hanky. By the time washing day came round, of course, the hankies would have dried out and
sometimes they became so stiff that I thought they might shatter if they were screwed up.
The secret of washing a slimy mucous-impregnated handkerchief (wet or dry) is to soak it for a time in a
solution of salt. After that it can be washed safely and will come out white and pristine. Every week bowls
of soaking snot rags would festoon the entire house as my mother struggled to keep up with my leaking
nasal passages. Even more amazingly, after they were washed and dried, she would iron every single
one. I never understood why; though she claimed it would make them gentler on my nose. Mind you my
mother used to iron underpants, sheets, pillowcases, socks and similar unnecessary things. I think she
just liked ironing.
Once I moved away from home and became responsible for my own washing I ceased to use
handkerchiefs at all. Like every other sensible person I use boxes of tissues and I am never to be found
without an adequate supply about my person. However the definition of adequate tends to vary with the
state of my nose for I have never really outgrown that childhood tendency to leak.
In The Steampunk Trilogy Paul di Fillipo offers three short novels that give a very twisted slant on the
nineteenth century. In Victoria, the young queen becomes disenchanted with the throne and runs
away. In order to conceal this from the public she is replaced by a crossbred human/newt which is quite
docile (and very sexy) but which tends to eat flies in public. In Hottentot, strange Lovecraftian
monsters threaten Massachusetts and in Walt and Emily, Emily Dickinson hooks up with Walt Whitman
and travels to a dimension beyond time where she meets Allen Ginsberg. I found this last to be the least
successful of the three, probably because I know very little about Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman
and the nuances of the storyline escaped me. But the other two stories with their crazy technologies
had me hooked from page one. The nineteenth century was never like this, but it might have been more
fun if it was.
Jonathan Lethem has made a name for himself with two very successful surrealistic novels. The Wall of
the Sky, The Wall of the Eye is a collection of short stories and very dark and perverse they are. If
you feel like a good gloom, these are the stories for you.
Nothing, however, could be less gloomy than Alan Dean Foster's novel Jed the Dead. Ross Ed Hagar
wants to see the Pacific Ocean, so he sets out to drive across America. On the way he comes into
possession of the corpse of an alien. He calls the alien Jed and sits him in the passenger seat and talks
to him, though the conversations tend to be a bit one sided. Jed attracts a lot of attention, but Ross Ed
bluffs his way through. And then the government gets in on the act, and so do several other interested
parties, some of them more or less sane, some of them more or less legal and some of them more or
less human. But Jed doesn't care. He's dead. Nobody could possibly call this silly farrago literature, but
my goodness me it is brilliantly entertaining and I loved it.
Looking back, I suspect that my vast consumption of handkerchiefs in childhood can be blamed on
various allergies which were unsuspected at the time. I realise that allergies are conveniently trendy
things to exhibit, and they form a nice catch all explanation for otherwise mysterious events, but they do
really exist. When I moved to Auckland about ten years ago I was smitten with the worst sneezing
attacks I have ever experienced. There were times when I could get through two or even three large
boxes of tissues in a day and sometimes the non-stop sneezing was so debilitating that I just lay in bed
in utter exhaustion almost unable to move. At times like these nasal drips cease to have any amusement
value at all and so I sought medical advice. Not that it helped -- the doctor recognised the real nature of
the attacks and was even able to provide treatment (for the rest of my life I must spray my nasal