Triffids Beard 2 - The Bearded Triffid

Tony
Phoenixine One-Hundred, December 1997
When I lived in England I worked for a man called Anthony Kelso Kent. He was a jovial, rotund man, and
was much amused when it was pointed out to him that his name was an anagram of Hank's Ten Ton
Yokel. But the nickname didn't stick; he remained just Tony...
I don't like fantasy, but every so often some compelling reason or other makes me start reading a
fantasy novel (or on very rare occasions, a series) and sometimes I quite enjoy them for one reason or
another. The "Wiz" novels by Rick Cook repelled me for many years but recently, persuaded by some
reviews I had read, I decided to try them and I was very impressed indeed.
The basic premise is that a world where magic works is suffering a crisis -- the usual Dark Lord is
winning the usual fights and in desperation the good guys send a mighty summoning and conjure up a
computer programmer from our world to help them. The programmer, Wiz Zumwalt, is magically inept
and seems initially to be of little use. But he discovers that the rules of magic are susceptible to a
programming approach, and he devises a magic compiler (based on a programming language called
"Forth") which allows him to write spells in much the same way that he wrote programs in our world.
From there on in the story becomes predictable and if it was treated seriously I suspect it would be
exactly like every other fantasy novel ever written. But to Rick Cook's credit, he does not take it seriously
and the whole series exhibits an enviable lightness of tone which makes it very entertaining indeed. And
for those of us who are computer nerds, there are a lot of computer jokes to enjoy as a bonus.
Tony Kent and I both worked for the Chemical Society (later the Royal Society, but what's in a name?).
By the time I joined, Tony and his team had done a lot of pioneering work on computerised information
retrieval from large text databases. Specifically, the abstracts and indexes of Chemical Abstracts, a
publication which contains references to all published chemical research. As you can imagine, this was
not a trivial problem to approach from scratch. Not least of the difficulties was the fact that the data
collections exhibited little or no long range order, being essentially a conglomerate mass of text.
Well there are ways; and Tony found them and he and his team made quite a nice living providing the
results of computerised searches of the databases to chemists around the world. Given that this was in
the days of steam when dinosaurs roamed the earth and the mainframe computer we used had less
processing power than the chip that currently drives my watch, this was most impressive. Those of you
who surf the net, stopping off at places like Alta Vista and Yahoo are reaping the fruits of this research.
The databases of links that they maintain are essentially large free-text databases. You search them
using techniques that Tony (and similar people) pioneered in the late 1960s...
I have never heard of N. Lee Wood, but the novel Faraday's Orphans had an intriguing blurb so I
bought it. There has been a gigantic eco-catastrophe. The geomagnetic reversal of the poles has
changed the face of the planet and mankind is almost extinct. Only in a few high-tech domed cities does
civilisation survive. Now that the planet is settling down after the catastrophe, the cities are starting to
expand into the wilderness. Berk Nielson is a helicopter pilot from Pittsburgh. He monitors and scouts
the wild areas, trading with the scattered settlements, avoiding the feral natives in the wilderness and the
ruined cities. His helicopter is destroyed through a chapter of accidents and together with a companion
who rescues him from the crash he attempts to make his way back home.
Sounds awful, but it held me engrossed for hours. The story is as old as SF; the theme is hackneyed.
Surely nobody in this day and age could find anything new to say about this situation? Well N. Lee Wood
can. The SF trappings are there simply as a framework that allows the writer to explore the dynamics of
relationships under enormous stress. And what she exposes are weaknesses rather than strengths. In
other novels of this type the hero wins through against appalling odds and lives happily ever after. Not
so here. Neilsen is exposed as a morally weak man and his survival (for he does survive, but you already
guessed that) destroys rather than saves him.