Triffids Beard 2 - The Bearded Triffid

up is laughable (feudalism across the light years -- good grief!) and the characterisation non-existent. It
would not be out of place if it was shelved with the other bodice-rippers which are at least honest
enough to proclaim themselves for what they are instead of hiding behind a glossy facade.
The evidence of automatic writing with little or no revision applied to the text is even stronger in this
book. Consider this passage:
She was breath taking. Xris would have taken off his cloak -- had he owned a cloak -- thrown it
in the mud at her feet. Hell, he would have thrown himself into the mud at her feet, begged her
to walk with him. But he reminded himself sternly that business was business and he'd better
keep this on a business footing -- which meant standing on his own two.
This passage has four sentences and contains three grammatical errors, one ambiguity, one arguably
bad grammatical habit, one misuse of punctuation and two biological impossibilities. That is not bad
going for four sentences.
"Xris would have taken off his cloak -- had he owned a cloak -- thrown it at her feet." Ignoring the
parenthetical clause indicated by the hyphens, the sentence reads: "Xris would have taken off his cloak
thrown it at her feet." We should always be able to remove parenthetical phrases or clauses without
altering the major meaning of the sentence. If we do this here, we discover that the sentence has no
meaning since there is no conjunction joining "…taken off his cloak" to "thrown it at her feet." and
running them together turns the whole thing into nonsense. Probably the best way of joining them
would be with "and" though a semi-colon might just be acceptable. The structure of the sentence
suggests that the parenthetical clause is an afterthought interpolated into the flow. A better structure
which removes the interpolation would be: "If Xris had owned a cloak, he would have taken it off and
thrown it at her feet." Even this is not ideal since merely owning a cloak does not necessarily mean that
one is wearing it. A much better phrasing is: "If Xris had been wearing a cloak, he would have taken it off
and thrown it at her feet." This removes all the errors and also the ambiguity.
"Hell, he would have thrown himself into the mud at her feet, begged her to walk with him." A similar
mistake can be noted here. Again we have a missing conjunction between the elements of the sentence.
A comma is used to suggest it, but that is not correct. A semi-colon would be marginally acceptable.
Again though the word "and" is a much better choice. Thus we would end up with: "Hell, he would have
thrown himself into the mud at her feet and begged her to walk with him." This ignores the physical
impossibility of a person walking when lying in mud (or even speaking if one is face down), but it is still
better than the original.
"But he reminded himself sternly that business was business and he'd better keep this on a business
footing -- which meant standing on his own two." Starting a sentence with "But" is generally frowned on.
It can sometimes be an effective technique for adding extra emphasis (provided it is not overdone -- it is
a habit I often catch myself indulging in; but that does not make it any more correct). It does seems a
little out of place here. However, that possible error pales into insignificance when we examine the end of
the sentence. If we parse the sentence strictly, we see that the word "two" is used as a noun. Since Xris
is standing on his "own two", I am tempted to ask just which part of the body a "two" is! Obviously the
writer meant to say "standing on his own two feet." However she omitted the word "feet" because she
mistakenly assumed that "two" could be qualified by the previous word "footing". Since the context in
which "footing" is used is actually unconnected with the person's own feet, this is simply not the case.
Other passages from these and other books make it perfectly obvious that Weiss and Hickman are not
as illiterate as these extracts might suggest. They do know the elementary rules of English grammar. It
is just that sometimes, in the heat of the moment, they make mistakes. A little revision (or, since they
are using a computerised system, perhaps the application of one of the many grammar checking
programs that abound) would improve the prose immeasurably.
I'm not sure what to do about the puerile plots out of the stock cupboard, but that is a different
problem. Of course, the fact that such elementary mistakes still exist in the published book also raises
the question of exactly what Bantam's copy editors do all day long, but that too is a different problem.