Triffids Beard 2 - The Bearded Triffid

that were published in the Azazel collection). There is a new Black Widowers story and a couple of
traditional fairy tales. All are lightweight. Of the twenty articles in the book, eleven have appeared in other
collections (four have appeared in two other collections) and the previously uncollected articles are of
little interest.
All in all, a disappointing book.
I followed this with the new novel by Maureen F. McHugh -- Half the Day Is Night. I bought this on the
strength of her brilliant debut novel China Mountain Zhang. In comparison this one was weaker.
Nonetheless it held my attention and I enjoyed reading it. It is set in the ocean-bottom city of Caribe. Jean
David Dai (he is of French extraction) has come to work as a bodyguard for Maya Ling a banker and
wheeler-dealer. As she negotiates the biggest financial deal of her life she comes to the attention of
terrorists and Jean David soon earns his keep.
The cleverness of the book lies in the detailed social, economic and political life that McHugh has realised
for her underwater cities. The story itself is as trite as the synopsis suggests, but the visualisation and
the writing skill are first class and McHugh makes you feel that you are really living in that (sometimes
very scruffy) world at the bottom of the sea.
The next book was a sequel that took nearly a hundred years to write, a sequel to one of the books that
defined SF -- H. G. Wells' The Time Machine. The sequel is by Stephen Baxter and is called The Time
Ships. It is superb. As I write, the new year is barely ten days old, but I would be willing to bet that this
book will stand head and shoulders above anything else I will read in the remaining eleven and three
quarter months of 1996. In the blurb on the back Arthur C. Clarke is tempted to remark that the sequel
is better than the original! High praise indeed.
Baxter has immersed himself in Wells' style and therein lies the first measure of the book's success. He
has included elements from many of Wells' other stories, and this too adds to the air of verisimilitude.
However he also has a hundred years of scientific progress to draw on -- knowledge unknown to Wells;
and he incorporates that knowledge beautifully into the story which stops it from being a mere period
piece.
The plot, of course, takes up where Wells' original leaves off and we follow the Time Traveller on his
return to the future to rescue Weena from the clutches of the Morlocks. What happens after that I
cannot say, for it would spoil too much. Half the fun is in the detailed working out of the complex
plotline. Read and enjoy.
I believe the book has been nominated for a Hugo. It richly deserves to win.
Of course there were other things to do during the holidays besides read books. There are some rather
large holes where the front veranda joins the house and I've been meaning to repair them for some time.
So I bought some Selleys stuff which proclaims that it is for BIG HOLES. That'll do me, I thought. I've got
lots of them. It's great fun to use. Polystyrene foam gushes out of the can into the hole and immediately
starts to expand in all directions. You leave it for a few hours to dry and you discover that you used far
too much and yellow polystyrene is bulging obscenely out of every orifice. I was lucky I didn't block off
the entire veranda.
I trimmed it down, smoothed it out, and covered it with another more cement-like Selley's product. And
while waiting for various bits of it to dry I read Love in Vein edited by Poppy Z. Brite which is an
anthology of vampire erotica. A word of warning, don't read this book if you are at all squeamish
because it contains some very over the top stuff. Needless to say, I loved it.
Also over the holidays I caught up with an old friend I'd not seen for many years and invited her round
for dinner. She is a strict vegetarian -- a vegan as near as makes no practical difference and that
presented me with a challenge. I could hardly offer to cook her a beef rendang, could I? That is a dish
which contains not a single vegetable, and I've just learned how to cook it and it is beautiful. But I
digress...