Triffids Beard 2 - The Bearded Triffid

almost a reprise of the war of 1812) invades from Canada. America finds itself fighting a war on two
fronts. This is unsustainable and the warring states patch up their differences and unite against the
common enemy. History takes a dramatically different turn from that which we lived through!
This first book, while full of dramatic events and much thud and blunder, is really only a scene setter.
The meat of the story is still to come as this vastly new historical reality is explored. I suspect it will be
hard to judge the worth of the project until the project is complete. But in the interim, let it be said that I
enjoyed the book and will most certainly continue to follow the series as it progresses.
Perhaps it is the season for alternate history books. Jake Page's Apacheria has the Apaches fighting the
United States government to a truce and negotiating a new homeland for themselves. Apacheria (the
territories of New Mexico and Arizona) becomes a completely separate country within the American
continent and the bulk of the book explores the sometimes uneasy relationship between this country
and its larger neighbours.
The plot is only superficially convincing. Everything falls into places for the Apaches a little too easily and
too much is left unexplained. The long arm of coincidence is invoked a little too frequently. It is a mildly
entertaining book, but ultimately an unconvincing one. I simply couldn't get lost in the story.
Helm, the new Stephen Gould novel, is a huge disappointment. I loved his previous novels so much that
I fell on this with glad cries of glee, but it turned out to be a routine and rather dull skiffy book with far
too many detailed and long drawn out descriptions of Aikido contests.
Faced with global devastation, Earth sends colonies out to the stars in an attempt to perpetuate the
race. The colonists are supplied with imprinting devices -- glass-like helmets that contain all of Earth's
scientific knowledge. The colonists barely survive their landing on the new world. Much of the Earth
technology is lost, destroyed in the crash. But one imprinting device remains. Once a generation, the
heir undergoes rigorous training to prepare himself to absorb knowledge from the Helm and use it to
successfully continue to lead the colony. As the book opens, the younger son of the current leader has,
against all instructions, donned the helm -- the shock to his brain is almost overwhelming. He barely
survives and it becomes imperative to fast track him through the training procedures. During his
training, he falls in love with the daughter of his father's political rival.
You can probably write the rest of it yourself.
Mike Resnick's stories of Kirinyaga have been published piecemeal for almost ten years. Each separate
story won many of science fiction's most prestigious awards. Now they have been put together into a
fix-up novel and seeing them all together in one place, reading them as a coherent whole, makes me
realise just what a wonderful tour-de-force of writing they are. Each story is like a facet of a diamond,
sharp and polished and shiny, a lovely thing in its own right. But put all the facets together, create the
diamond out of its constituent parts (as it were) and the jewel becomes infinitely richer for it. The sum of
all the Kirinyaga stories is like that -- a jewel of incomparable beauty.
By the 22 nd century the African nation of Kenya is a polluted sprawl of cities. The great animal herds of
history are extinct, European crops grow on the savannahs, the nation is losing its identity. Koriba is a
distinguished and educated man, a Kikuyu by birth, fiercely proud of his heritage and disturbed to see it
dying. He wants to preserve the old ways and the true culture of his people, the thing that makes them
Kikuyu, that separates them from the other people of the Earth.
So he founds a colony on a terraformed planetoid which he names Kirinyaga (after the Kikuyu holy
mountain). Here there is only the traditional Kikuyu lifestyle and modern influences are not allowed to
intrude. The colony is run strictly according to historical and cultural practices; no exceptions are
allowed. It is paradise, it is utopia.
But it isn't of course. And the examination of why it isn't and the ways in which the noble experiment
fails are the reasons why this book is such a seminal work. It demonstrates the ephemeral nature of too
rigorous an interpretation of cultural history. Rules that allow no exceptions (because our ancestors