Triffids Beard 2 - The Bearded Triffid

And on top of that, the story is so gripping you won't want to put it down.
On the strength of this magnificent novel I raced straight out to the shops and hunted down Wood's
first novel Looking for the Mahdi. Kay Munadi (a reporter) and John Halton (a fabricant -- a sort of
android) are sent into a middle-eastern country which is becoming a world problem because of its
belligerent attitudes. Superficially Halton is a gift for the ruler, but the plot thickens quickly as mysterious
assassinations, stolen computer chips and palace politics are stirred into the mix. I began to lose track
of who was double crossing who, and I never did figure out why.
This one really is hackneyed. I gave up half way through, snowed under by the weight of the clichés.
Maybe it improves towards the end but I will never know.
Tony taught me to program. Every lunch time we would spend an hour or two together and he initiated
me into the mysteries of printers and tapes and disks; sequential and indexed files; punched cards and
how to spell "Identification Division". In later years this got me into trouble since one day I inadvertently
mis-spelled it "Indentification Division" and the compiler went into a loop and used three boxes of lineflow
paper printing out the same error message over and over and over again before the operator finally got
bored and killed it.
My research project at the time was the investigation of a rather odd idea of Tony's that perhaps the
computer could formulate the database questions as well as generate the answers. This isn't as mad as
it sounds -- when you sit at the search prompt of a web search engine, just what should you type in? It's
very hard to decide. So why not let the computer generate the search terms from a frequency analysis
of the words in known relevant documents? That was the basis of it, and if you care about the results,
go and search through the dusty back issues of the Journal of the American Society of Information
Science (JASIS) for the paper that I published.
Programming proved to be fascinating. The more I learned from Tony, the more neat tricks I could apply
in my own research -- this was much more fun than relevance judgements and frequency analyses.
Programming took up more and more of my time and information science research less and less...
Larry McMurtry is probably this century's best interpreter of what for want of a better phrase I must call
the wild west. I first came across his work with the absolutely unputdownable (and Pulitzer Prize
winning) Lonesome Dove and over the years I have collected all his other western novels.
One of the things that gives them their strength is the appearance in them of historical figures -characters
who are real people lend an air of truth to a book. He does it again with Zeke and Ned. The
Ned of the title is Ned Christie, a senator in the Cherokee tribal legislature who later became an outlaw.
He was eventually run to earth in 1892 and was killed after a twenty hour siege. These are historical
facts, but McMurtry and his writing partner Diana Ossana flesh them out with detail, providing a motive
for why Christie went bad and filling in the fine detail of their picture of the times with plot and sub-plot,
character and incident. There is so much verisimilitude that you can smell the sweat and the dust and
the blood.
The times were violent and McMurtry has never drawn a veil over violence and its effects. Other writers
often romanticise the era, but McMurtry pulls no punches. Grim times and grim people, but they are
fallible and human, eccentric and often funny, and the ever-present violence is only just beneath the
surface, ready to burst through at the least provocation. I am no great fan of McMurtry's contemporary
novels, but I yield to nobody in my admiration for his westerns. Zeke and Ned is another winner, a
classic of its kind.
Octavia Butler writes far too little -- in an age where sometimes it seems that everybody is pumping out
a thousand page novel every week, she remains austere, not at all prolific and her books (when they
appear) are invariably head and shoulders above those of her more fecund contemporaries.
Bloodchild is a collection of her short stories and it is a slim volume (only 144 pages). She has written
very few short stories. Her major works have all been novels. In a preface she claims to hate writing
short stories -- they are too difficult. Her works always want to grow up into novels. Well perhaps so,