Triffids Beard 2 - The Bearded Triffid

Where's the Tooth Fairy When She's Needed?
Phoenixine Ninety-Nine, November 1997
I was in one of my favourite restaurants with a couple of friends, chewing on a lamb samosa (not
normally regarded as a dangerous food), when I felt a stinging pain and with a clearly audible crack! a
lump of tooth fell into the masticated mass of my samosa. It being impolite to spit in company, I
swallowed bravely (though somewhat lumpily) and poked my tongue around my mouth to see what had
happened.
On the right hand side bottom jaw, towards the back, I could feel a large jagged hole. Since the hole was
on the inside of the tooth, the sharp edges rasped on my tongue every time I moved it. They felt like
razors.
I struggled through the rest of the meal, poking the tooth occasionally in the vain hope that I might have
been imagining things. No such luck -- to my tongue the hole felt like an enormous cavern and I vaguely
thought that perhaps my entire head would fall in to it and vanish if I wasn't careful...
With the two Endymion novels, Dan Simmons takes the story he began in the two Hyperion novels into
deepest A. E. van Vogt territory and the story turns into an excessively recomplicated space opera. In
Endymion, every plot point developed and explained in Hyperion turns out to be untrue or irrelevant or
both. In The Rise of Endymion, the explanations of Endymion are given the same treatment.
The story begins with the eponymous Raul Endymion rescuing Aenea when she re-emerges from the
time tomb she entered at the end of Hyperion. The remainder of the page count of these two
enormous doorstopping novels recounts Raul and Aenea's (often arbitrary) adventures as together and
apart they battle the plots of the Pax and the Technocore. Twisted theologies, power politics, genocide
and architecture(!) drive the story together with a travelogue through some of the most inventive
landscapes and societies in the genre. The shrike is both a seen and an unseen menace. But the story is
too long; too many revelations piled upon revelations. I got bored.
Theological concerns also drive St. Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman, which despite all
rumours to the contrary is not a sequel to the stunningly brilliant A Canticle for Leibowitz. It is merely
a continuation of the middle sections of the previous book. In some ways, the novel reads almost as if it
consists of out-takes; the boring bits that were edited from the original manuscript.
The world is slowly recovering from the catastrophe that almost destroyed it and the Church's influence
is making itself felt again among the temporal leaders of the tribes that roam the devastated country
that was once the USA. Brother Blacktooth Saint George and Cardinal Elia Brownpony are on a mission -
- but as usual all is not what it seems. Brownpony has a secret agenda and a Crusade is in the offing.
The book is so theologically and politically dense and introspective that I quickly lost sympathy with it.
While it doubtless reflects Miller's own concerns (he was a devout man who thought deeply about these
things) it does not reflect mine and I found it completely uninvolving.
The next morning I explained about my tooth to the class that I was indoctrinating into the mysteries of
Visual Basic. My words were less than distinct since I was trying hard to keep my tongue away from the
jagged edges of the broken tooth which appeared to have got sharper and more belligerent overnight.
However the class seemed to understand my mumblings and were duly sympathetic. Somehow I got
them to a point where they could do a lab exercise and then I left them to it and shot off to an
emergency dental appointment on the other side of town.
"Nice clean break," said the dentist enthusiastically. "Beautiful edges, good and sharp!"
"What caused it?" I asked.
"Hard to tell, but probably it was a bit of internal pressure from an old filling and it just cracked along a
weak spot -- like a fault line."