Triffids Beard 2 - The Bearded Triffid

"Feels like a Black and Decker this end," remarked the dentist. "What's it feel like at your end?"
"Eee aah iiikke aat ooo", I said.
"Thought so," he replied.
Then he inserted a pin and began to build up the filling around it, like a sculptor building around an
armature. About half way through this operation, for no readily discernible reason, he called for varnish.
The nurse obliged, and my mouth filled with the taste and smell of shellac. Then we had a few more
scrapings, plane it square, rub it down with sandpaper and slap on a coat of paint and the thing was
done.
I paid over enormous sums of money and went back to my class. My numb jaw felt as though it had
swollen to the size of a big red bus (though the mirror assured me otherwise). I still had difficulty
speaking through the numbness, and I think I dribbled, but we managed...
Donnerjack is the book that Roger Zelazny left uncompleted at his death. It has been finished by Jane
Lindskold and in places the joins show. The collapse of the world net has allowed access to (or possibly
created) the worlds of Virtu. Our world is known as Verité. Donnerjack bestrides these two worlds -- and
he is powerful and important in both. He marries Ayradyss and loses her to Death, the Lord of the Deep
Fields. After striking an Orphean bargain with Death, he brings her back to Verité. But the price he
agrees to is the life of his first born child. Somewhat to his surprise a child is born of the marriage
(liaisons between Verité and Virtu are regarded as sterile). Donnerjack attempts to cancel his bargain,
but the Lord of Deep Fields has his own agenda.
The initial sections of the book are filled with dark designs and darker humour and the Zelazny magic
has never been better presented. But gradually the novel becomes more mundane (if such a word can
truly be used about a construction as weird and surreal as Virtu); and here I think we see evidence of
Jane Lindskold's work. She is a great writer -- but she lacks Zelazny's bizarre mastery of the outré. And
yet even here there are words, sentences and sometimes whole paragraphs which are pure Zelazny -thus
proving that at times she really did get into the skin of her collaborator. The novel is flawed by long
stretches of almost mediocrity, and it is badly in need of some editing to tighten it up. But it has so many
moments of sheer brilliance that these can almost be forgiven. And who can fail to love a novel which
has a sentient train called the Brass Baboon, and a phant called Tranto in it?
Joe Haldeman's Forever Peace is not a sequel to his 1975 novel The Forever War, and the book
opens with a caveat lector to this effect. It is thematically related, in the sense that its main concerns are
with war and its effect on the people who fight (and the people who don't), but there the similarity ends.
In 2043, the Ngumi War rages. It is largely fought by "soldierboys", almost indestructible war machines
under the remote control of soldiers many hundreds of miles away from the battle. And yet the
psychological effects of this war-at-a-distance induce traumas just as deep as those of the more
traditional confrontational wars of history. War is still hell.
Julian Class is one of these soldiers and he is coming apart under the strain. He and his lover Dr. Amelia
Harding have made a discovery about the nature of war and the nature of the linkage to the soldierboys
that threatens to change human nature and which may bring an end not only to this war but to war as a
whole...
These are large matters, and it is a measure of Joe Haldeman's skill that not only does he deal with the
themes convincingly, he also deals convincingly with the science-fictional Mcguffin that makes the whole
story work in the first place. And at the same time he tells an enthralling tale full of satisfying plot and
counter-plot, sufficient to keep the pages turning. I must have turned them very rapidly because I read it
in a sitting.
Over the next few days it became obvious that there was a small roughness in the filling. My tongue
rasped over it and it was shredding my dental floss, making it less than easy to dig out the carcasses of
rotting cows and pigs, along with the occasional chook that were hiding in there and holding parties. I