Triffids Beard 2 - The Bearded Triffid

circumstances behind the production of this book. It might have been the fault of the translator rather
than of Lem himself. On the other hand, perhaps he was trying to tell an alternate world story -- though
if he was, he fails to give any clues and he never uses the situation for anything, so I doubt it.
The other side of the coin is admirably demonstrated by Phillip Mann's new novel A Land Fit for
Heroes: Volume 1 Escape to the Wild Wood. Here we really do have an alternate world novel and
the writer invokes a world that never was, but that might have been. For various reasons, the primitive
forest that once covered the whole of the British Isles has never been destroyed. Therefore this forest
has to be described and lived in during the events of the novel. He never sets a foot wrong. His
evocation of the forest is so strong you can almost smell it. Not only is disbelief willingly suspended,
belief is willingly enforced and the reality of the book is paramount. That is how the trick should be done
and it makes a good yardstick against which to measure the success of other stories.
The classic evocation of time and place is, without a doubt, Robert Heinlein's novel Beyond this
Horizon wherein a door dilates and the hero steps through. No more mention is made of it than this one
reference and if you blink you will miss it, but the hero's casual acceptance of a door with an iris in it
anchors the reader's imagination firmly in the future in which the book is set. It simply wouldn't have
worked if Heinlein had drawn attention to it and spent a page and a half lecturing about the history of
doors -- a time and a place must feel lived in and drawing unnecessary attention to commonplace details
is a sure way to make it feel artificial and break the spell. After all, how many novels set in contemporary
times do any more than say something like "He switched on the television and relaxed to watch it."? If
the next few paragraphs explained what a television was we'd give up in disgust. Why should SF be any
different?
John Campbell once remarked that the type of stories he wanted were stories that the characters in
them could conceivably read without getting turned off by the level of unnecessary detail; that it to say
he wanted contemporary stories of the future (and that is not an oxymoron).
You can't be too hard on the writer though. It would not be fair to condemn stories set on the canals of
Mars if the stories were written prior to the gathering of the evidence that refuted the existence of the
canals. A critic is not allowed the 20/20 vision of hindsight. Nevertheless it pays to examine the details
closely. If you ever get hold of a first edition of Larry Niven's Ringworld hang on to it -- his sense of
place was so dislocated that he had the Earth revolving back to front so that the sun rose in the west
and set in the east. This bug has been fixed in all subsequent printings!
A particularly science fictional problem is to make places that nobody currently alive has ever visited
seem real; or even to make places that simply don't exist seem real. If you set your story on a planet of
Alpha Centauri or within the event horizon of a black hole or in a wormhole between universes you face
a much more difficult task. Or perhaps it is an easier task. After all, nobody is going to criticise your
geography (Newfortress could easily be in Eboracumshire -- who could deny it?) In such a situation, all
you can ask yourself is how consistent the whole thing seems to be and also how well described it is.
This latter is particularly important the more outré the place is. I found Larry Niven's The Smoke Ring
quite unreadable because the descriptions of the ring were so vague and woolly that I was simply unable
to picture it, and that rendered much of the action of the story incomprehensible. With closer attention
to the sense of place the story would have been a lot stronger.
A sense of time is just as important as (and closely related to) a sense of place. Despite my carping
about the details of Connie Willis' story Jack, she really has done a magnificent job of evoking the time in
which the story is set. The past and the present are always a dangerous time for a story because we
know so much about those eras. The future is a lot safer because we don't know anything about it yet.
But wherever and whenever a story is set, it is important that the place and time feel lived in.
The drama of a story hangs most of all on the characters who act it out. If they don't work, neither will
the story. If they are boring and dull, we simply won't be interested in them. Neither will we care about
them if they never seem to come alive at all.
Characterisation is very difficult. What makes a character? The only clues are the physical descriptions