The Best of Science Fiction 12

Searching with his eyes as the room swung toward equilibrium, Gottfried Helmuth Adler saw Death peering at him through the crack between the hinges of the open kitchen door.

Laboriously, half passing out again, Gott sneered his face at him.

'The Winter Flies' was written in 1959; sold to Esquire shortly afterwards; returned, unpublished, some years later; finally published — in F&SF as 'The Inner Circles' — in 1967. All of which throws some light on the fact that Fritz Leiber appears to be the only author from the late great days of space-and-atoms predictive science fiction (mainly Astounding, roughly 1937-1943) who is now regularly producing short fiction in a modern s-f vein. The other forerunners are (like Kuttner) dead, or (like Sturgeon) departed for other fields.

The suicide of Marilyn Monroe is in fact & disaster in space-time, rather like the explosion of a satellite capsule in orbit.

It is not so much a personal disaster (though of course Marilyn Monroe committed suicide as a single woman) but a disaster of a whole complex of relationships involving this screen actress who is presented to us on a series of gigantic billboards, on a thousand magazine covers, and so on — whose body becomes part of the eternal landscape of our environment, I mean, the immense terraced figure of Marilyn Monroe stretched across a cinema hoarding is as real a portion of our external landscape as a system of mountains and lakes. ...

( J. G. Ballard, on The New Science Fiction)

In America, as in England, there is a growing entente between s-f and poetry — both 'literary' and 'pop'. Dick Allen, who teaches at the University of Ohio and edits the Mad River Review, published a forceful article in Writers' Digest last year on the uses and usages of surrealist imagery in contemporary poetry and folkrock:

... Surrealistic satire is much more than simple pot-dreams and fantasy ... Traditional satire — like that of Pope — presupposes reason and an ordered universe. [ Whatever ] deviates from order and reason can be criticised. Surrealistic satire, conversely, presupposes a ... universe full of self-contradictions ... Sharing this kind of sensibility, the folkrock artist tells the older member of his society they have turned out the whole for the parts (i.e. Eliot's 'The Wasteland') and must again see with the eyes of a child before they can vision with the eyes of a man ... The modes of thought in Alice's Wonderland cannot be judged with words like 'selfish' and 'reason' The new thing here is that it is not just the poets who understand this — society has finally begun to catch up with them. ...

The weird imagery of folk rock is communicating the new modes of apprehension ... The modern world comes at us in all directions, on all sorts of sound waves. The lyrics reflect the absurdity of a television culture which finds nothing strange in watching a deodourant commercial interrupt a bloody filmclip from Vietnam ... It is the natural aftermath, the popularisation, of a sensibility which helped produce Waiting for Godot, Dr. Strangelove, Cat's Cradle and Catch-22.

He thinks of Max Ernst, Marilyn Monroe and the woman in the apartment; he conceives the 'false' space and time of the apartment; he visits the deserted planetarium; he sees Coma, the psychiatrist and the dancer; his impressions of Africa; he meditates on the persistence of the beach, the individual as an aspect of landscape; he witnesses the assumption of the sand-dune; he conceives the 'real' space and time of the apartment; he kills the woman when she occludes the interval between the 'false' and 'real'; he sees Marilyn Monroe, epiphany of this death; he leaves with Coma.

The Robing of the Bride.At noon, when she awoke, Tallis was sitting on the metal chair beside the bed, his shoulders pressed to the wall as if trying to place the greatest possible distance between himself and the sunlight waiting on the balcony like a trap. In the three days since their meeting at the beach planetarium he had done nothing but pace out the dimensions of the apartment, constructing some labyrinth from within. She sat up, aware of the absence of any sounds or movement in the apartment. He had brought with him an immense quiet. Through this glaciated silence the white walls of the apartment fixed arbitrary planes. She began to dress, aware of his eyes staring at her body. Then she realised that she was standing in his way.

Fragmentation.For Tallis, this period in the apartment was a time of increasing fragmentation. A pointless vacation had led him by some kind of negative logic to the small resort on the sand-bar. In his faded cotton suit he had sat for hours at the tables of the closed cafés, but already his memories of the beach had faded. The adjacent apartment block screened the high wall of the dunes. The young woman slept for most of the day and the apartment was silent, the white volumes of the rooms extending themselves around him. Above all, the whiteness of the walls obsessed him.

The 'Soft' Death of Marilyn Monroe.Standing in front of him as she dressed, Karen Novotny's body seemed as smooth and annealed as those frozen planes. Yet a displacement of time would drain away the soft interstices, leaving walls like scraped clinkers. He remembered Ernst's 'Robing ... ': Marilyn's pitted skin, breasts of carved pumice, volcanic thighs, a face of ash. The widowed bride of Vesuvius.

Indefinite Divisibility.At the beginning, when they had met in the deserted planetarium among the dunes, he had seized on Karen Novotny's presence. All day he had been wandering among the sand-hills, trying to escape the apartment houses which rose in the distance above the dissolving crests. The opposing slopes, inclined at all angles to the sun like an immense Hindu yantra, were marked with the muffled ciphers left by his sliding feet. On the concrete terrace outside the planetarium the young woman in the white dress watched him approach with maternal eyes.

Enneper's Surface.Tallis was immediately struck by the unusual planes of her face, intersecting each other like the dunes around her. When she offered him a cigarette he involuntarily held her wrist, feeling the junction between the radial and ulna bones. He followed her across the dunes. The young woman was a geometric equation, the demonstration model of a landscape. Her breasts and buttocks illustrated Enneper's surface of negative constant curve, the differential coefficient of the pseudo-sphere.