"A Museum Piece," "Divine Madness," and "Corrida" by Roger Zelazny

Cover illo by Lebbeus Woods

It has been five years, but Roger Zelazny is back, here at MPorcius Fiction Log.

I own a copy of the 2001 ibooks edition of Zelazny's collection, The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth, which I purchased at a Des Moines Public Library sale for ten cents.  This edition presents seventeen stories, and over three blog posts in 2014, I read nine of them:

"The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth," "The Keys to December," and "Devil Car"

"A Rose for Ecclesiastes," "The Monster and the Maiden," and "Collector's Fever" 

"This Mortal Mountain," "This Moment of the Storm," and "The Great Slow Kings"

By the time I read "The Great Slow Kings" I was getting a little tired of Zelazny, and decided to take a break from this collection.  I thought that break was going to be a few weeks, but that turned into a few years.  Best laid plans, I guess.  Today let's crack open this 500-page volume and continue our examination of The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth by reading Zelazny's "A Museum Piece," "Divine Madness," and "Corrida," all of which first appeared in 1960s magazines...and not necessarily the most prestigious ones, like Galaxy and F&SF, where many of Zelazny's famous short stories debuted.

"A Museum Piece" by Roger Zelazny (1963)

"A Museum Piece" was first printed in Fantastic, and maybe this one counts as prestigious, because it was one of the issues edited by Cele Goldsmith, who is beloved by the critics.

This is a joke story about an artist, Jay Smith, who pioneered "two-dimensional painted sculpture" and, ignored by the public and panned by the critics, abandons art to immerse himself in yoga.  This was not remunerative, so he decides to live by residing, clandestinely, in the art museum, standing naked and still in the classical section of the museum, mistaken by all for a Greek sculpture from two thousand or so years ago.  (In part the story is a satire of the limited interest people have in art--Smith is able to fool everybody because almost nobody even looks at old sculptures, and the only people eccentric enough to care about art are nerds with bad eyesight and mental cases subject to hallucinations, people who would not believe their own eyes if they suspected that a sculpture a real living and breathing person.)  Smith memorizes the movements of the night watchman and after closing time he steals food from the cafeteria.

The story (like 14 pages in this 2001 book, with its large type and wide margins, and 8 pages in the 1963 magazine) gets more absurd as it proceeds.  It turns out most of the statues in the Greek and Roman sections of the museum are actually failed artists and disgruntled art critics, and even the statue of a lion is a (albino) man-eating beast.  The mobile hanging in the modern art section is in fact a space alien marooned on Earth.

Zelazny is the kind of writer who likes to show off his erudition and "A Museum Piece" is full of allusions and mentions of Samuel Johnson, Dylan Thomas, Thomas Wolfe, and many artists and art movements.

I'll call this one an acceptable trifle, a piece of filler gussied up with learned references.  "A Museum Piece" was reprinted in Fantastic in 1979, where it had appended to it an analysis by a college professor, Robert H. Wilcox.  It also was included in Isaac Asimov, Martin H. Greenberg and Charles Waugh's 1982 anthology Science Fiction A to Z: A Dictionary of the Great S.F. Themes; I can't find online any indication of what theme "A Museum Piece" is supposed to illustrate--"A Museum Piece" is the second story in the anthology, so maybe it is under the "Alien" category?  I'll be grateful to anybody who can offer a solution to this mystery in the comments.

"Divine Madness" (1966)

"Divine Madness" first appeared in Robert Lowndes's The Magazine of Horror ("Bizarre - Frightening - Gruesome.")  We have already looked at a story in this issue, Robert E. Howard's "Valley of the Lost" AKA "King of the Forgotten People," a fun story about weird science, giant spiders and scary Orientals.  That very same year Michael Moorcock included "Divine Madness" in the same issue of New Worlds as Charles Platt's Garbage World, which both tarbandu and Joachim Boaz have read--I haven't read it myself, but Joachim donated his copy to the MPorcius Library and someday I expect to experience Garbage World (which both tarbandu and Joachim awarded two out of five stars) myself.

(The sextastic cover of the October 1966 issue of New Worlds is apparently the work of Keith Roberts, author of Pavane and Molly Zero.  I have not been able to get this picture out of my mind since I first saw it over four years ago--this magazine cover should be available as a poster at all fine retailers, it should be as iconic as Raquel Welch's One Million Years B.C. poster.  That long neck, that perfect hair cut, the mysterious face mask, the extreme contrappasto pose--there's even the dirty toes for all you foot fetishists out there!) 

Alright, back to "Divine Madness."  The nameless protagonist of the story suffers seizures that have him experiencing periods of time, twenty or thirty minutes, backwards, a passenger in his own body who watches himself undoing all the stuff he just did, walking backwards as ashes leap up to make his cigarette longer, for example, as around him the sun sets in the east and cars drive in reverse, etc.  Zelazny fills the story with what you might call snatches of imagist poetry, not just the backwards-in-time stuff, but visions of urban life:

Clustered on the concrete, birds pecked at part of a candy bar stuck to a red wrapper.

****

Telephone lines were tangled with wooden frames and torn paper, like broken G clefs and smeared glissandos.

This guy is broken-hearted, constantly drinking, and near the end of the story, which is just ten pages in this edition of The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth, we learn why.  The protagonist has his longest seizure ever, time flowing backwards for days, and we learn that after a loud bitter argument his wife drove away, upset, and her reckless driving lead to her death.  The main character relives, in reverse, the funeral, the purchase of the casket, learning of his wife's accident, all the way back to the argument.  Because of all the talk of death and the gross images of booze flowing backwards out of a guy's mouth and birds eating trash and so forth, "Divine Madness" feels like a horror story, and I expected a downer ending, but at the very end (spoiler alert, kids) we get a happy ending--"Divine Madness" is a wish fulfillment fantasy that brings to life all our dreams of going back and undoing a mistake.  When time starts running forward again, right before his wife gets into the car, the protagonist apologizes and she decides to stay with him. 

At times I was getting close to dismissing "Divine Madness" as a gimmicky thing, but maybe because it came as such a surprise, despite myself I found the ending powerful, even moving.  I have to give this one a thumbs up!

"Divine Madness" has appeared in many anthologies, and I can concur with the judgments of such editors as Terry Carr, Martin H. Greenberg, and Robert Silverberg (and of course Lowndes and Moorcock) that it is a good, memorable, read.

Is it a coincidence that New Worlds and New Worlds of Fantasy
use the same font on their covers?

"Corrida" (1968)

"Corrida" debuted in the third issue of the fanzine Anubis, of which four issues were printed form 1966 to 1968.  With the possible exception of Vaughan Bode's "Dead Bone," I think "Corrida" is probably the most famous/successful thing to ever appear in Anubis.  (Check out Jeff Jones's fine portrait of Bode.)  "Corrida" would reappear in an odd anthology by Fred Corbett, Gerry Goldberg and Stephen Storoschuk called Nighttouch: Journeying into the Realms of Nightmare that includes work by SF stalwarts like H. P. Lovecraft, Theodore Sturgeon, Richard Matheson and Robert Bloch alongside that of major poets like Allen Tate, Conrad Aiken, James Dickey and Ted Hughes, and in an Asimov/Greenberg/Joseph D. Olander anthology of short shorts I sampled back in 2014.

"Corrida" is a brief (like three and a half pages here) piece in which a man wakes up naked in a dim room and sees a dark figure with four arms and a naked woman and pursues them, eventually grappling in gory combat with the tall four-armed creature.  There is something symbolic going on--the man is a New York lawyer, he remembers being accosted by a man on the street late at night, he thinks he is being treated like a bull at a bull fight, when he strikes the dark figure he himself feels the pain--but it feels like a waste of time to really figure all this out.  He feels guilty for putting people through legal trials and so hates himself?  Trials are as cruel as bullfights?  He was mugged and is having dreams as he lies unconscious on the streets of the Big Apple, bleeding to death?  Who cares?

Gotta give this pointless exercise a thumbs down.   

**********

"Divine Madness" is good, and so my belated resumption of my reading of The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth, has been worthwhile, even if "A Museum Piece" and "Corrida" aren't exactly winners.  Maybe we'll get back to this collection soon.

1965 stories by Keith Roberts, William Spencer and Robert Presslie

My copy 

Here's the fourth book from the new Joachim Boaz wing of the MPorcius library that I'll be reading, New Writings in SF 6, edited by John Carnell.  This is a copy of the American 1971 Bantam printing; this anthology of all new stories first appeared in Britain in 1965 as a hardcover from Denis Dobson and was presented in paperback by Corgi in 1966 and again in 1971.

Today we'll talk about the first three stories in the book, and then tackle the remaining four in our next blog post.  If you want to read what Joachim had to say about New Writings in SF 6 before or after (or instead of 😢) reading my comments, check out his November 2017 post on the book.  If you are desperate to read the stories before getting spoiled by Joachim or me, or after hearing what we have to say, you need not wait--the 1966 Corgi edition of New Writings in SF 6 is actually available at the internet archive.

"The Inner Wheel" by Keith Roberts

I've never read any fiction by Roberts, though I read his article in Brian Ash's Visual Encyclopedia of Science Fiction four years ago and poked (gentle?) fun at it on this blog.  "The Inner Wheel" is by far the longest story in this anthology, and Carnell uses up the lion's share of his Foreword to this volume discussing it.  I guess this is an important and widely admired story--it has been published numerous times as the title story of a Roberts collection (sometimes advertised as a novel) which has appeared with various interesting covers.  [UPDATE 8/19/18: isfdb labels The Inner Wheel a collection, but in the comments below Paul Fraser agrees with the people at Playboy Press that the designation of "novel" is appropriate.]

"The Inner Wheel" comes across as a self-consciously literary work, with passages full of italics meant to represent a collective consciousness (or "gestalt mind," as Roberts puts it), lots of poetical repetition, a surreal dream sequence in which rust spreads from a decaying train to the surrounding town and people, and plenty of Dickensian names.  Jimmy Strong, an artist, is our main character.  His father James Strong was a scrap dealer who struck it rich by purchasing old World War II vehicles like Bren carriers and half-tracks and then renting them out to film productions.  After his father's funeral, flush with his inheritance, Jimmy goes to the town of Warwell-on-Starr, which people tell him again and again is "nice."

In the town odd things occur that suggest Jimmy's mind is being read and his unspoken desires responded to; when he feels in need of company some World War II vets appear who tell him stories about their service in the Eighth Army, or a dog, or a sexually available woman.  He also has strange dreams, some of which vaguely hint that a  "Wheel" is "driving this town."  Jimmy is determined to figure out the town's strange secret; in some ways "The Inner Wheel" is structured like a detective story or a Western in which the hero arrives at a corrupt small town and confronts its evil establishment, and Roberts includes what I take to be clues that we should think of the story in this way.

Jimmy meets another attractive woman, Anne Nielson, and he engages in a psychological and psionic struggle over her mind and allegiance with the mysterious psykers who rule Warwell and used their powers to attract Jimmy and Anne to the place in hopes of integrating them into their gestalt.  Jimmy (whom late in the story the omniscient narrator sometimes identifies as "Strong" instead of "Jimmy," reflecting one of "The Inner Wheel"'s themes, that of the maturation process, the growing into adulthood of Jimmy the individual and of the entire human race) discovers the weakness of the gestalt mind, that pain felt by one of the psykers is felt by all, and this discovery facilitates his and Anne's escape.  This escape is likely to only be temporary, but we can hope that, just as Jimmy has grown to be a more responsible, less selfish person, so will the psykers of the gestalt, in course of time, grow into their powers and use them more benignly. 

This story isn't bad, but I felt it too long and in spots tedious with too much description, while the characters of Jimmy and Anne are sort of flat and boring.  The story is vague and dreamlike, and I would have preferred something sharp and bold.  "The Inner Wheel" certainly didn't hold my attention like the two Second Story Books Clearance Cart finds I was reading at the time, James Taylor and Martin Davidson's Bomber Crew and Lyndall Gordon's T. S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life, so I perhaps didn't give "The Inner Wheel" the attention it deserves as I was reading it 5 or 10 pages at a time over a series of days.

"Horizontal Man" by William Spencer

Am I crazy, or does this look like
Darth Vader's helmet?

Spencer, who worked in advertising and as a college lecturer in English, has like 16 short stories on isfdb; most appeared in New Worlds during the period John Carnell was editing the magazine (before the editorship was taken up by Michael Moorcock and the magazine became the flagship of the New Wave.)

"Horizontal Man" is one of those stories about how in the future everybody will be immersed in virtual reality games and abandon the real world (remember Kuttner and Moore's 1955 story "Two-Handed Engine"?)  Timon (named perhaps for the skeptical philosopher and/or the Athenian misanthrope and hermit?), an artificial umbilical cord providing all the sustenance he needs, sits in a room before a control panel; he has apparently spent hundreds or thousands of years in that couch!  Via the control panel he can call up any of thousands of fantasies to be pumped into his brain via a cable, including affairs with over 900 different women, but he has experienced every fantasy hundreds and hundreds of times and is bored of them all.  Spencer describes a few of the fantasies--surfing, playing four-dimensional chess, and a date at a night club with a sexy chick.  The author compares the fantasies to recorded music--after a few hundred listens a recording of a song is too predictable and becomes tedious, likewise grow boring the 900 women and the multitudinous variations of a game of chess, once Timon is intimately familiar with their every idiosyncrasy.

This is one of those stories that is more of an idea than a plot-driven narrative.  I thought maybe Timon was going to launch a rebellion or commit suicide, but when Timon is on the brink of boredom-induced insanity a robot just comes along and replaces the memory bank so Timon will have new fantasies to occupy him.  Merely acceptable, on the very brink of too boring (ironic, eh?)

It looks like "Horizontal Man" only ever appeared here in New Writings in SF 6.

"The Day Before Never" by Robert Presslie

Am I crazy, or does this look like
a woman's crotch?

Here's another story which never appeared beyond the various printings of New Writings in SF 6.  Robert Presslie has 40 stories listed at isfdb, and most seem to have seen print in British SF magazines like Carnell's New Worlds and Authentic Science Fiction, which was edited in its last two years by our pal E. C. Tubb.  Blogger Andrew Darlington has an extensive blog post about Presslie if you are curious about this guy and his career.

"The Day Before Never" is set in a sort of post-apocalyptic future Earth which has suffered abominably at the hands of hostile space aliens known as "the Barbarians."  These malefactors bombarded the planet with their "glazer" weapon, which "melts" things, but also preserves them, so that people and buildings struck by this ray become an ooze and actually run together, I guess like if you heated two different crayons that were next to each other and then cooled them when they were half melted, creating a blob one third blue, one third yellow, and one third green.

Our narrator is driving across Eastern Europe in a Ferrari (these post-apocalyptic stories generally include an element of wish fulfillment, providing the characters a chance to create a new and better society or, as with this Ferrari, just the opportunity to enjoy luxuries that were out of their price range before the catastrophe) past all the spectacular and grotesque half-melted people and buildings that are littering the landscape.  In a passage made to order for feminist analysis he looks at the bared breasts of the headless corpse of a teenage girl which is half absorbed into a wall.

Our hero isn't just some car thief--he's a secret agent on a mission for the anti-Barbarian resistance!  After thousands of miles of driving, he meets his contact in Riga, a woman.  The alien Barbarians are able to mimic human beings, so to prove his humanity our hero has to have sex with this woman--the aliens cannot convincingly ape human sexual passion.  (Oh, brother.)  Our narrator and this woman are key participants in a complicated resistance operation which seeks to kill all the aliens by simultaneously detonating a number of explosives set in precisely determined locations all over the world.  This scheme is unconvincing and so is the twist ending to Presslie's story.

Presslie tries to use his tedious and crazy tale as a means of talking about human nature (to what extent will people submit to tyranny to survive and to what extent will they risk their lives to oppose tyranny, and to what extent do both the collaborator and the resister compromise their values in their response to tyranny) and attempts to put across a metaphor in which a society's resistance to invasion is like the human body's resistance to infection, but the plot and style of "The Day Before Never" are not good and render any such ambitions a failure.  I have to give the story a thumbs down.  The noteworthy thing about "The Day Before Never" is the sensational/exploitative elements: the weird sex, the violence against women, and the body horror stuff; unfortunately, none of those components of the tale are entertaining or disgusting enough for me to call this a successful horror or shock story.

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The back cover of my copy of New Writings in SF 6 has the incongruous heading "SERIOUS BUSINESS" and claims that the stories in the volume represent "fresh new thinking."  The ideas in these three pieces (homo superior in conflict with homo sapiens, hi-tech entertainment leading to decadence, alien invasion, and journeys across a post-apocalyptic landscape) do not feel fresh or new, though I guess they are "serious."  Maybe in our next episode, when we read the rest of the stories in New Writings in SF 6, we really will find some "fresh" ideas?

**********

Bound within this copy of New Writings in SF 6 is the exact same ad for the Science Fiction Book Club we saw in my 1971 copy of The Yngling, the one which includes a "special coin carrier" in which you send the club a dime to pay for a copy of Anthony Boucher's A Treasury of Great Science Fiction.  I own that two-volume anthology, something which I have bragged about on twitter more than once!

The Visual Encyclopedia of Science Fiction edited by Brian Ash

Tarbandu at the PorPorBooks blog recently has featured the cover of Brian Ash's Visual Encyclopedia of Science Fiction on his site, and blogged about the similar Encyclopedia of Science Fiction edited by Robert Holdstock. Drake University has a copy of the Ash volume (sadly, the spine is quite broken and the pages threaten to achieve their liberty at any moment) and I spent some time looking through it.

After like 60 pages of timeline (called "Program"), listing major events in SF in from 1805 to 1976, the book is organized by themes (or as the book calls them, "Thematics") such as "Robots and Androids," "Mutants and Symbiotes," and "Warfare and Weaponry." This is the heart of the book, in which numerous stories and books are described. Then we get essays on topics like "Science Fiction as Literature," and "The Value of Science Fiction" in the "Deep Probes" section, and finally discussion of "Fandom and Media." Many of the sections of the book are written or introduced by recognizable SF authors and editors, including such important figures as Asimov, Anderson, and Pohl. This being a British book, British authors are well represented, including not only big names like Brian Aldiss and J. G. Ballard, but some I feel like I don't hear much about, such as Ken Bulmer and Edmund Cooper.

All 19 of the "Thematics" are introduced by "name" SF writers.  A. E. Van Vogt's contribution is characteristically bizarre; my man Van barely addresses the issue he was asked to talk about, espouses some of his weird theories, and actually calls out the people who produced the book he is writing for, saying "I observe that my current work is not appreciated by British critics of the genre; but it sells well...." Zing! Philip Jose Farmer writes about his religious beliefs, asserting that if we are not immortal, life has no meaning. Ouch! Ken Bulmer's contribution is all over the place; he decries technology as evil, complains that in SF "artefact" is usually spelled "artifact," and takes time out from his pessimism party to praise SF artists for their "honourable labour." The photo of Bulmer reminded me that I need to shave and get a haircut.

(I'll list all the Thematics and their introducers below the fold, as newspaper people say.  All you fashionistas will find Ken Bulmer's photo down there, too.  Get your clippers ready. )

I don't really like the design of The Visual Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.  The font is tiny and ugly and the pages feel crowded and cramped (every single page has a horizontal heading at the top of the page and most have a vertical heading on the outside margin.) There are many illustrations, mostly book covers and magazine illustrations, which of course is great, but I thought many of them mediocre.  I also don't understand why some particularly weak illustrations, like a panel from a Barbarella comic, are allowed to take up an entire page.  On the plus side, any illustration you haven't seen before has some kind of information value, and this book is full of illos I have never before encountered. There are many photos of author's faces, and, adding to the cramped feel of the book, many of them are cropped very close, the writer's chin and forehead beyond the borders of the image.

As with the illustrations, the text, even when I don't think the style is good, is full of interesting information about books, stories, and authors I have never heard of.  And the 19 Thematics intros provide some kind of insight into the character of writers with whom we may be familiar primarily through their fiction.  The Visual Encyclopedia of Science Fiction is definitely worth a look for classic SF fans, even if I don't grok some of its artistic and design decisions and I think some of the Thematics intros are wacky.