Triffids Beard 2 - The Bearded Triffid

Gosh -- Haven't You Grown!
Happy birthday to you
Squashed tomatoes and stew
Bread and butter in the gutter
Happy birthday to you.
Or perhaps I ought more properly to say:
Phlogiston Thirty-Eight, 1994
It was twenty years ago today
Sergeant Pepper taught the band to play...
Except of course it was ten years rather than twenty and Alex Heatley instead of Sergeant Pepper all of
which ruins the scansion, but I'm sure you get the general drift of what I'm trying to say.
It is my proud boast that I have never had a subscription to Phlogiston, I have never paid a cent for
any copy of Phlogiston and yet I have a complete collection of the magazine because I have had an
article in every single issue. It happened like this.
"Will you," said Alex in a Machiavellian moment, "write something for Phlogiston?"
"OK," I said craftily. "I'll write things for you as long as you'll publish them."
"Good," said Alex, falling into my cunning trap and simultaneously springing his own. "I'll publish them as
long as you continue writing them."
That was ten years ago and we have both kept our own side of the bargain ever since. I have forced him
to keep Phlogiston going by the devious scheme of writing an essay every three months or so. He has
forced me to keep writing an essay every three months by the devious scheme of publishing
Phlogiston at regular intervals. It has now become a matter of pride. Neither one of us is going to give
up first and thereby lose face. Consequently the magazine will continue to appear as long as our friendly
rivalry goes on. I look forward to re-writing this essay for the fiftieth anniversary edition at which point I
will be well into my eighties, Alex will be a grandfather and Phlogiston will be published as an
audio/visual/olfactory multi-media laser diskette with a 3D cover holographically etched by Picasso via an
online ouija board running Windows 53.3 (and the next release really will have the bugs fixed -- honest).
One of the many things I've been doing in this column over the last ten years is to be highly critical of
some of the books I've been reading. However I've never really discussed the act of criticism and the
criteria I tend to use to judge these pieces of writing. If you don't know my criteria in detail how can you
judge my criticisms fairly? Therefore I thought I would take this opportunity to nail my colours to the
mast and see if anybody salutes them. Perhaps you could regard this article as a manifesto.
I always look for four things when judging a piece of fiction. In no particular order, I look for a sense of
place and time, a sense of character, the logic and believability of the plot and the language used to tell
the story. It's hard to consider any of these in isolation -- they all influence each other to an enormous
extent and the points of overlap are just as important as the topics themselves, if not more so. But let's
try and deal with each of them in turn.
The sense of place and time is intimately related to the reader's willingness to suspend disbelief. After all,
we know that all fiction is essentially a great big lie. We aren't supposed to believe it (or in it), we are just
supposed to wallow in it and enjoy it. If we simply can't forget our disbelief, our knowledge of the
essential unreality of what we are reading, we may as well not bother starting to read it in the first place.
Anything that the writer can do to make it easier for the audience to go along with the story is obviously
a good thing. Conversely, anything which makes it harder to accept things for the simple sake of the
story must be a bad thing. The skill (or otherwise) with which the writer sets up the place and time of the
story's events is vital.