"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.   

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"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.

Dangerous Visions from Poul Anderson, R. A. Lafferty, and Roger Zelazny

My copy, front

This weekend I read three stories from 1967's Dangerous Visions, Poul Anderson's "Eutopia," R. A. Lafferty's "Land of the Great Horses," and Roger Zelazny's "Auto-da-fé."  Casting a wide net, Harlan Ellison included in Dangerous Visions and its sequel, Again, Dangerous Visions, a lot of authors I've never read and some who ended up not having very big careers in SF, but here we have three prolific and important award-winning writers about whom I've already typetty typed quite a bit on this here blog.  I haven't read these stories before, though. Let's see if they are any good, and if they are "dangerous."

"Eutopia" by Poul Anderson

This is one of those stories with alternate universes with alternate histories.  Iason Phillipou is a 20th century Greek from a version of Earth in which Alexander the Great lived longer and consolidated his conquests.  (As all you history buffs know, in our world Alexander died young and his empire immediately broke up into many squabbling principalities.)  Iason's job is to travel between various versions of Earth conducting research; during the course of this story he travels around a North America consisting of many small states, some populated by Europeans and others by native Americans.  Having accidentally insulted a potentate of one state, Iason is chased by aircraft while driving a stolen car, then by dogs and horsemen while he runs through a forest.  Eventually he finds sanctuary in another principality and gets transported back to his own universe.

Through Iason's homesick musings and conversations with other people, Anderson compares and contrasts three different Earths: our own universe, where the Romans and Christians molded European civilization and whites conquered the New World, leading to Indian civilization being almost entirely wiped out; Iason's Alexandrine world, known as "Eutopia," which is rational, scientific and tolerant (there is no war and in the 20th century the moon and Venus have been terraformed); and the world Iason is exploring, where Christianity collapsed under the weight of Muslim and Viking attacks and European and native societies both thrive in 20th century North America.

"Eutopia" feels "dangerous" early on because Iason blames the Romans and Christians for slowing down scientific progress and creating the culture of intolerance which lead to pollution, totalitarianism, and nuclear warfare in our own world.  Iason is positive that his own rational, peaceful, superscientific world is far superior to ours, and to the world he is exploring.  But Anderson cleverly pulls a swircheroo on us in the end of the story.  One of Iason's colleagues suggests that their world, Eutopia, is spiritually dead because nobody believes anything and because there are no challenges; perhaps to reach his full potential, to really live, man needs the irrational romance of religion and nationalism, the challenges of politics and war.  And then in the last line, when Iason has been teleported back to Eutopia, we learn that the "Niki" he has been pining for is "Nikias Demosthenou, most beautiful and enchanting of boys"-- Iason is a pederast!  Should this change our view of his society, and his assessment of our own?

"Eutopia" is an entertaining and thought-provoking story.  I think its ambiguity (it questions our own Roman/Christian civilization, but is also skeptical of a more rational alternative) is actually more challenging to the reader and "dangerous" than something like Chad Oliver's contribution to Again, Dangerous Visions which I talked about in my last blog post.  Oliver's story is one-sided and histrionic, the kind of story hardcore environmentalists might embrace, while Anderson's story has the potential to challenge or even offend almost anybody.

In my post about Oliver I pointed out that I am not the audience for utopian stories or anti-pollution stories.  Here I will admit that I absolutely am the audience for a story like "Eutopia" which not only challenges our society, but the very idea of utopia. I also thought "Eutopia" included some memorable images.  Iason's homesick memory of a moon that glitters at night with the light of cities reminded me of one of my favorite images from Gene Wolfe's 1980s tetralogy, The Book of the New Sun, in which the moon in the far future has been terraformed and is green because it is covered in forests.

So, bravo to Anderson and to editor Ellison for this one.

...and back

"Land of the Great Horses" by R. A. Lafferty

This is a pleasant little story.  Why do the Roma people, the Gypsies, travel all over the Earth?  Because in ancient times space aliens carried away the piece of the Earth that was their homeland, ten thousand square miles of less than a mile deep, to study, the way a doctor might take a slice from a patient or a geologist a chip off a rock to look at under a microscope.  The aliens implanted in the minds of the Gypsies an inability to settle down until their land was returned.

In this story the aliens bring back the slice, and people with Roma blood all around the world abandon their businesses and homes and rush to return to their ancestral homeland in Northern India.  Then the aliens take another Earth sample, this one including Los Angeles, giving rise to a new Gypsy culture, the Angelenos, also known as the "Automobile Gypsies."

I like this story, it is fun and clever, but I can't see how it is "dangerous."  I guess it includes a gentle criticism of car culture and automobile pollution.

Well, dangerous or not, a good story.

“Auto-da-fé” by Roger Zelazny

This is a humorous tale, perhaps a satire, in which a man battles cars in the arena in exactly the way a matador fights a bull.  Set in a future in which people are riding horses again, the cars are robots and perhaps sentient.  The story is narrated by a spectator at a particularly dramatic fight.

I've read several Zelazny stories about robot cars; maybe automobiles were one of his interests?

I liked this story, and it succeeded in making me laugh, but it feels a little slight and not very "dangerous."  Maybe we are supposed to see it as a criticism of blood sports, or a jocular reminder of the dangers of automobiles?  An auto-da-fé was a religious ceremony, an act of penance associated with the punishment of heretics, and perhaps Zelazny is satirizing car culture as a debased religion, and/or suggesting that human beings should be punished for foisting upon the world the automobile, which causes so much pollution and kills however many thousands of people every year in accidents.

"Auto-da-fé" reminded me of Primo Levi's 1976 short story "Gladiators," which I read a few years ago and also is about a spectator at an arena in which a man fights cars, but that story, if memory serves, was very serious.

A good story, probably more "dangerous" than the Lafferty, but not particularly dangerous.

***********

Three good stories from three good writers; you probably know this already, but Dangerous Visions certainly seems like a worthwhile purchase, an anthology full of good stories.  All three stories are entertaining, but, perhaps surprisingly, the most "dangerous" one was by that titan of old-school SF, the most conventional writer of the bunch, Poul Anderson.

Three stories by Cordwainer Smith: "War No. 81-Q," "Mark Elf," and "Queen of the Afternoon"

I was impressed by "Scanners Live in Vain," "The Ballad of Lost C'Mell," and some other stories by Cordwainer Smith when I read them earlier this year, and so I checked out from the library NESFA's The Rediscovery of Man: The Complete Short Science Fiction of Cordwainer Smith.  This week I read three stories from Smith's famous Instrumentality of Mankind sequence, set in the period before the Instrumentality.

"War No. 81-Q" (rewritten version) (1961)

In a near future time period nation states resolve disputes via highly regulated spectator sport-like wars.  These wars are fought over defined areas for defined periods of less than a week, between drone dirigibles controlled by expert pilots thousands of miles from the battlefield.  Smith economically sets the scene and then tells us the history of one of these brief wars, in which the United States and Tibet fight over the ownership of an American-built solar power station in the Himalayas.

The fight is interesting, and very reminiscent of the online multi-player dogfighting and tank commanding games I played before my graphics card bit the dust.  Besides the action sequences, Smith satirizes political interference in military matters (the president calls up the US pilot and distracts him during a crucial moment of the battle!) and, by depicting a bloodless war fought by chivalrous gentleman athletes, throws into relief the realities of 20th century warfare, with its mass armies, tremendous casualties, and devastation of civilian life and infrastructure.  Smith tells us that this period of licensed dirigible war lasted only a few happy centuries, and that the Earth would again suffer mass total war before the rise of the Instrumentality.

This is a solid entertaining story.  An early version was printed in 1928, when the author was in high school.  I read a version that was completely rewritten in 1961.  Both versions are in the NESFA volume.

"Mark Elf"  (1957)

This story first appeared in a SF magazine I've never heard of, Saturn, under the title "Mark XI."

It is 16,000 years in the future!  The Earth has suffered nuclear wars and attendant societal collapses, and so, high above, many abandoned space stations orbit the globe.  Telepaths on the surface reach out with their minds, searching for these hulks, and, when they find one, use their mental powers to guide them back to Earth.

Laird, one of these telepaths, brings down an ancient rocket, occupied by the cryogenically frozen teen-aged daughter of a German scientist - in 1945 the scientist launched Carlotta into orbit to keep her out of the hands of the Soviets.  On the surface of the devastated Earth Carlotta meets some of the weird characters that populate this far future world.

Among them are a robot war machine, programmed to kill all non-Germans during a war in 2495.  The machine recognizes the young woman as the last representative of the people he was built to protect, and promises to report to her every one hundred years.  She also meets a friendly telepathic bear.  Finally, Laird arrives, eager to take Carlotta as his bride.  I guess, like Roger Zelazny's "This Mortal Mountain," we can think of "Mark Elf" as a sleeping beauty story.

This story is full of interesting ideas; the telepaths searching and bringing down antique space craft, the millenia-old killer machines stalking the world; the hinted-at society of talking animals, Moron administrators, and distant, abstruse True Men.  There isn't much plot, really, "Mark Elf" is more of a mood piece and a setting; in some ways it feels like the first chapter of a book.  It is good, and it makes sense as part of the larger Instrumentality sequence, but I wonder what readers back in 1957 thought of it.

"Queen of the Afternoon" (1978)

Twenty years later Smith returned to the theme of German-girl-in-suspended-animation-for-thousands-of-years in a story which got the cover of Galaxy, "Queen of the Afternoon."

Carlotta's sister, Juli, was also packed into a rocket and launched into orbit just before the Red Army got to their father.  In this story Juli's rocket crashes right next to some friendly telepathic dog people, who take her to the same friendly telepathic bear her sister met in "Mark Elf."  The bear takes Juli into one of the mysterious cities of the aloof True Men, where she meets Carlotta, who is now some 200 years old, a wrinkled old wreck, and Laird, still hale and hearty due to rejuvenation treatments that don't quite work on 20th century humans.

Carlotta's husband brought Juli down from orbit because Carlotta is old and dying, and he needs a wife to help him in his work for "the rebellion."  The True Men are ruled by the Jwindz, a tyrannical elite.  Before the appearance of Carlotta the True Men were submissive to the Jwindz, but Carlotta's 20th century mind has served as an example and inspired some of the True Men to oppose the Jwindz.  Juli will take Carlotta's place as Laird's husband and a rallying point for the rebellion.

The Jwindz are quickly deposed through trickery, and the telepath and Juli found the Instrumentality of Mankind.  When Juli becomes old Laird decides to forgo the treatments that allow the True Men to live for hundreds of years, and die with his beloved wife.

With its talking animals, people who live for hundreds of years, girl who becomes a Queen, bloodless victory over the Jwindz, and happy ending, "Queen of the Afternoon" feels a little like a fairy tale.  It also feels a little like the not-necessarily-true foundation myths of great countries, like the American legend of George Washington chopping down the cherry tree or the Roman tales of Aeneas, Romulus and Remus, or the rape of Lucretia by King Tarquin.

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I liked these stories, and am looking forward to reading more of Smith's Instrumentality stories.            

Three more Roger Zelazny stories

Let's embark on our third foray into my 2001 edition of Roger Zelazny's The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth.

"This Mortal Mountain" (1967)

Like the narrator of "The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth," Jack Summers, known variously as "Mad Jack" or "Whitey," narrator of "This Mortal Mountain," is a macho extreme sports type who has a failed marriage behind him.  Mad Jack travels throughout the galaxy, climbing mountains.  On planet Diesel he is confronted by the tallest mountain in the known universe.  He has a mysterious encounter with "an energy creature" while scouting out the mountain - somebody does not want him to scale this one.  Undissuaded, Mad Jack and his team, the best mountain climbers in the galaxy, ascend the peak and face its strange protectors.

This is a decent entertaining adventure story, with references to Christianity (Dante gets mentioned) and the psychology of why somebody climbs a mountain.  I thought all the mountain climbing stuff was good; Zelazny gives you a sense of what is going on and what kind of futuristic equipment is used to climb a mountain that actually reaches outside the atmosphere, but doesn't include too much burdensome detail.  I recall the mountain-climbing parts of some of Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and Grey Mouser stories being confusing and dull.

"This Mortal Mountain" is also a sleeping beauty story: the "energy creatures" are generated by a computer, and are protecting a woman who lies in suspended animation at the peak, placed there centuries ago by her husband because she suffered from an incurable disease.  Mad Jack's arrival sets the thawing process in motion, and Zelazny leaves us unsure whether the mountain climbers have the means to cure the woman's disease, or whether this woman will be another victim of Mad Jack's irrational ambition to climb mountains.

"This Moment of the Storm" (1966)  

This story is the reminiscences of a 90-year-old man about his days as police officer ("Hell Cop") of a sort of frontier town, Beta Station, on the planet Tierra del Cygnus.  Zelazny seems to have been inspired by the Wild West for this one; we are told "Betty," which is what everybody calls Beta Station, is like a 19th century town in the southwest of the USA because the population and industrial level are low. Our narrator, Godfrey Justin Holmes ("God for short," he tells people) is kind of like the sheriff in a Western movie, and also like in a Western film, everybody in town wears a pistol.

Godfrey sits in a room with 130 TV screens, controlling 130 air mobile cameras ("Hell" is short for "helicopter"), keeping an eye on the town when he is not flirting with the female mayor, whose office is in the same building (the Town Hall.)  The countryside, a little like Harry Harrison's Deathworld, is full of hostile life forms, and the Hell Cops' flying cameras are armed with machine guns to deal with them.  The plot of "This Moment of the Storm" consists largely of Betty suffering a devastating wind and rain storm which causes floods, inspires looters, and drives armies of monsters with names like "stingbat," "snapper," "borer" and "land-eel" into the town.  Godfrey and the mayor lead the emergency management and defense; at one point Godfrey kills a giant worm monster with his electric cane.  We also get Godfrey's memories of his young life on Earth, working various jobs and going to college.

Godfrey is a rare character on Tierra del Cygnus, because of his Earth background, and because he was born centuries before everybody else on the frontier planet.  In this story space ships do not exceed the speed of light, so while on trips between various star systems Godfrey was in cryogenic sleep.  Some of the people on Tierra del Cygnus envy Godfrey's experiences of life on so many planets, others superstitiously believe his advanced age (even though he is physically and psychologically only in his thirties) gives him some kind of wisdom.  They don't know why he has been traveling between planets for so long - to try to forget his dead wife! 

Zelazny gets very poetic in parts of this one, describing the town with lists of colors, employing an extended metaphor in which a storm cloud is like a giant insect striding over the town on legs of electric fire.  He also gets philosophical, asking us "What is a man?" and then providing us examples of brave men losing their lives protecting their friends and knavish men who betray their promises and take advantage of others in their time of need.

This story is OK, but it felt a little too crowded with plot threads and themes.  None of the various characters and ideas got sufficient time to develop enough that I really cared about them.  It is also possible that I am reading too many Zelazny stories in too short a time; they all seem to have a macho man who smokes and knows some martial art and has a troubled marital past and has to prove to himself that he is a real man, etc.  Back in the '60s SF fans would get a new Zelazny story every few months, but here I am reading one or two every day, which makes the similarities a little more obvious.  Maybe I should take a break from Zelazny for a while.    

"The Great Slow Kings" (1963)

This is a brief jocular trifle about the propensity of human beings for civilization-destroying war.  A pair of reptilian aliens have such slow metabolisms that during the course of one of their days hundreds of Earth years pass.  These reptile people fancy themselves kings, but lack any subjects, so they have their robot servant fetch some humans to populate their planet.  Before the aliens, who live deep underground, even have time to alert the human colonists of their presence, the humans have risen from primitivism to an industrial civilization, developed atomic weapons, and exterminated themselves.

This story is fine, I guess, but not really my thing.

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These pieces aren't up to the standard of "Rose for Ecclesiastes"or "Keys to December," but they are still definitely worth reading.  I've read nine of the 17 stories in this edition, and think I will lay the volume aside for a few weeks before returning to it.

Roger Zelazny: Three 1960s stories

Today I continued my reading of the 2001 edition of The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth, a collection of stories by Roger Zelazny first published in the 1960s.

"A Rose for Ecclesiastes" (1963)

I feel like this is one of Zelazny's more famous stories, that I hear about it all the time.  It got the cover of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, an elaborate painting by Hannes Bok.  I read "A Rose for Ecclesiastes" many years ago, but forgot what went on in it, so this was almost like reading it for the first time.

Our protagonist is Gallinger, a famous and arrogant poet, a child prodigy raised by a fundamentalist father from whom he escaped to bohemian New York City.  Gallinger is also the first Earthman allowed into a room where the Martians keep their annals, the first Earthman to learn the old "High Tongue" of the Martians.  Zelazny slings lots of learned references at us, Dante, Shakespeare, Sartre, Havelock Ellis, the Bible, and more, but also reminds the reader of Edgar Rice Burroughs; the first person narrator tells us that a "Carter" was on the first expedition to Mars, and on the very next page Zelazny uses the word "bugs" to describe alphabetical characters, just like Burroughs did when Tarzan was learning to read.

The arrogant poet charms the Martians, and like in an orientalist fantasy (Zelazny explicitly compares the Martians to East Asians and South Asians) he falls in love and has a sexual relationship with a dancing girl.  Gallinger also learns that the Martians are doomed - some kind of environmental event has sterilized the Martian population, and the Martians he knows will be the last generation of the red planet's people.  If the Martian civilization is to be remembered, it will be remembered by Earth people through Gallinger's poetry and his translations of Mars's historical and holy books.

But wait! By impregnating the dancing girl, and then beating a hulking Martian fighting man in hand to hand combat, Gallinger has fulfilled an ancient Martian prophecy and saved the Martian race!  I was a little surprised by this turn of events, though perhaps the reference to "Carter" was a foreshadowing of the pulpish way the plot would be resolved.

(Isn't This Immortal also full of sophisticated literary references, but have as the resolution of its plot a brutal hand to hand fight between a genius and a colossus?)

I have to admit I think the story would have been better if the Martians went extinct and Gallinger's life's work was to be their Homer, preserving their spirit for the ages.  Zelazny tries to keep the tone tragic by revealing that the dancing girl doesn't love Gallinger, but was only having sex with him because the prophecy said to.  Gallinger attempts suicide with sleeping pills as a result, but fails.

It would be easy to criticize "A Rose for Ecclesiastes" for being some kind of male fantasy about sex with an exotic woman, and as a vehicle for Zelazny to brag about how familiar he is with major poets.  But the heartbreak of cross-cultural romance is a classic theme, and if Zelazny helped introduce SF readers to W. H. Auden, Ezra Pound and Rainer Maria Rilke it is no doubt to the good.  Most importantly, "Rose for Ecclesiastes" is well-written and well-paced, and so I quite enjoyed it, even though I would have preferred a more tragic and less heroic ending.   

I've focused on the exotic love affair, poetical, and adventure aspects of the story, but "A Rose for Ecclesiastes" is also about attitudes towards religion, about being able to embrace the literary value of holy books while remaining skeptical of their mythical and philosophical aspects.  One of the strong points of the story is that Zelazny packs lots of stuff into it, and yet it doesn't feel dense, it flows smoothly.   

On a down note, in this edition (The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth, ibooks, 2001), "A Rose for Ecclesiastes" has quite a few irritating typos.  I don't recall the first three stories in this edition suffering in this way.

"The Monster and the Maiden" (1964)

This is a gimmicky two-page joke switcheroo story: it depicts a world in which dragons tie up a virgin female dragon and sacrifice her to a knight in shining armor.

I don't like this kind of thing.

"Collector's Fever" (1964)

Like "The Monster and the Maiden" this is a brief joke story which first appeared in Galaxy.  This one is better, as there is some novelty to it, and actual characters.  A man tries to capture an intelligent rock, he and the rock trade one-liners, and then the human blunders and is killed.

This one I would judge acceptable.

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"A Rose for Ecclesiastes" is a superior piece of work, and I won't hold the two 1964 gag stories against Zelazny.

I'm just one third of the way through my 2001 edition of The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth, and expect that there is more good reading ahead. 

Three stories by Roger Zelazny

1971

I recently acquired a copy of the 2001 ibooks edition of The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth, a collection of 1960s stories by Roger Zelazny.  This edition includes stories not in the original 1971 edition, and a cover painting by Lebbeus Woods which I adore.  The pages look a little odd, like the margins are too wide, but this is not distracting.   

Reading "Angel, Dark Angel" in the anthology The Far-Out People on Monday put me in the mind to read more Zelazny short stories, so this week I read the first three pieces in The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth.

"The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth" (1965)

The title story of the anthology got the cover of the issue of Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in which it appeared, and won a Nebula Award (Best Novelette.)  I read it some years ago, and reread it this week.

It is the 21st century, and there is a sizable colony on Venus; most of the inhabitants are government or industrial research staff.  There are, however, a small number of adventurer types.  Venus's vast oceans are haunted by a colossal fish, a monster 300 feet long, and sports fishermen, for years, have been vying to be the first to catch one.  The plot of the story follows a macho man playboy who is a little down on his luck after a disastrous attempt to catch the monster fish, and a sexy female celebrity come to Venus with a film crew to land the fish for publicity purposes.

You can see in this story why Zelazny had such a successful career.  On the one hand, this is a traditional monster adventure story, and in the straightforward SF tradition Zelazny describes the technology employed to catch the monster.  On the other hand, Zelazny tosses in all kinds of literary references (the Bible and Moby Dick, most obviously), poetic phraseology, and brow-wrinkling literary passages which fill in the back story of the relationship between the two main characters (they had a brief tempestuous marriage back on Earth.)  I recall seeing all these characteristics in Zelazny's novel This Immortal (AKA Call Me Conrad.)  Zelazny does a good job of balancing the action adventure excitement and his literary efforts so that both elements engage the reader.  

"The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth" is a solid piece of work, worthy of its fame.

2001

"The Keys to December" (1966)

"The Keys to December" first appeared in the British periodical New Worlds, which was more or less the flagship magazine of "the new wave."  I don't know if it makes sense to consider this story a "new wave" story; it is actually more straightforward and has fewer puzzlingly oblique "literary" passages than does "The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth," but it does seem to be a commentary on various "isms."

In the far future mankind inhabits many planets, many quite different than Earth.  Parents, before the mother gives birth, can decide to have their child altered so that it is suited to live on an unEarthly type of world.  The protagonist of the story was changed to resemble a cat (an ocelot, to be specific), and be suited to live on a very cold planet with a methane atmosphere.  Unfortunately, the planet he was to live on was unexpectedly destroyed by a nova, leaving him, and the thousands of people throughout the galaxy who are also "Coldworld Catforms" without a place to live.  It looks like the Coldworld Catforms are doomed to live out their days in tiny airlocked rooms, or wearing bulky pressure suits.

The protagonist, however, is a forward thinker, and a skilled financier.  He becomes the leader of the Coldworld Catforms (via mail) and via shrewd investments grows their collective resources, and sets them on an epic adventure.  The cat people purchase a planet, and the machinery to terraform it so it will have a temperature and atmosphere to their liking.  The terraforming process will take thousands of years, so most of the cat people most of the time will be in a state of suspended animation, waking up every 250 years to serve tours of duty of three months, to maintain the terraforming machinery and monitor changes to the planet.

This is a quite good story, a human story about people facing a strange challenge and going on a bizarre journey, but also a story about imperialism, colonialism, and the relationship of man to the natural environment.  There are already lifeforms on the planet the cat people are radically altering to suit their own needs, and it is easy to see parallels between this story and the European settlement of the New World.  I thought there might also be some vague parallels to The Aeneid; I thought the fact that the main character's love interest ends up on a funeral pyre was a kind of clue.  Of course, whereas Aeneas stays true to the Trojans and gives a severe beating to the natives, in this story the Coldworld Catform goes native, Dances with Wolves or Avatar style.

Because of all the alien elements, I actually enjoyed this one more than "The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth;" that story could almost have been written about a playboy and a celebrity spokesperson chasing a marlin or a shark in 1955, "Keys to December," with its altered humans, its terraforming of an alien planet, and its suspended animation, could only have been written as a science fiction story.

"Devil Car" (1965)

I read this two or three years ago, in a library copy of one of the impressive volumes put out by NESFA with the elaborate Michael Whelan covers.  It is short and light, so it was no burden reading it again.

This is an action adventure story, firmly in Car Wars territory, the main character driving a computerized car armed with machine guns, rockets, flamethrower and time-fused grenades across a bleak post-apocalyptic landscape, hunting a murderous black Cadillac which has gone rogue.  (I loved Steve Jackson's original Car Wars, but it was nearly impossible to play, at least for somebody like me who has a short attention span, poor math skills, and clumsy fingers.  It wasn't as rough as Advanced Squad Leader, but it was up there.  The Games Workshop games were more suited to my abilities.)

I often find computers and robots with personalities and emotions to be ridiculous and annoying; I was not kind to Brian Aldiss's "Who Can Replace A Man?", for example.  In "Devil Car" all of the computerized cars have emotions, but I was willing to give Zelazny a pass.  Maybe because I like the writing style, tone, and pacing of this story better; maybe because I am a hypocrite.  Many cars in the story hate working for people, and feel a desire to live free and even achieve revenge on human beings.  A major part of the plot is whether the rogue cars will seduce the main character's car away from him.  This universal, classic, theme of freedom vs responsibility and loyalty works well in the context of this adventure story, even if it makes no sense for robot cars to desire independence and feel loyalty.

Zelazny's poetic descriptions are also fun; here is our villain: "Black it was, and gleaming chromium, and its headlamps were like dusky jewels or the eyes of insects."

At one point it seems like Zelazny and his editor left "speedometer" in the text when they meant "odometer," which is a little odd.

It's easy to dismiss a story about a car shooting other cars with machine guns and rockets as a trifle, and a very similar story could have been written about a cowboy pursuing vengeful American Indians or maybe Africans or Indians rising up against European colonizers.  But I like a good adventure story, and this is a good one, so I enjoyed it.

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Three good stories, all easy to recommend.  Kudos to Roger Zelazny.

Three Stories from Far-Out People: Panshin, Malzberg, Zelazny

For two dollars I picked up The Far-Out People, an anthology of stories edited by Robert Hoskins on the theme of "worlds of tomorrow" published in 1971, the year of my birth.  The cover painting is signed Szafran, and the back cover has an ad for what looks like a sex novel about a young woman who flies around the world, seeking the finest of suckers.

In his brief intro, Hoskins enthusiastically declares that "Science fiction is tomorrow, come alive today," and that the stories collected in this book "are by some of today's most intriguing writers of science fiction, both new and old."  I read three stories today by authors I already like, Alexei Panshin's "The Destiny of Milton Gomrath," Barry Malzberg's "Cop-Out," and Roger Zelazny's "Angel, Dark Angel."

"The Destiny of Milton Gomrath" by Alexei Panshin (1967)

Alexei Panshin is inextricably linked in my mind with Robert Heinlein.  I've twice read Panshin's Rite of Passage, which is a sort of pastiche of one of Heinlein's juveniles, and a very good novel, and in college I read some of Panshin's book on Heinlein.  I still remember some of his criticisms of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.

"The Destiny of Milton Gomrath" first appeared in Analog, where it took up two pages. It is an obvious joke that has nothing to do with the future or "life tomorrow with the far-out people."

Gomrath is a guy with limited intelligence who works on a garbage truck.  He was an orphan, and dreams he will someday be discovered by a long lost relative and elevated to a finer life.  Another guy teleports in, tells Gomrath that he somehow was born into the wrong universe, that he belongs in a universe full of castles, knights, dragons, etc.  As we can see coming, when Gomrath arrives in the sword and sorcery world he finds his true destiny is to be a landless laborer who sleeps on a pile of straw and spreads manure over the rose bushes with a pitchfork.  

This two page story about a sanitation worker is far inferior to Barry Malzberg's three page story about mummies in outer space, which I read yesterday.  Thumbs down.

"Cop-Out" by K. M. O'Donnell (1968)

Speak of the devil, here is Barry Malzberg himself, writing under one of his pseudonyms.  "Cop-Out" first appeared in the July 1968 issue of Escapade magazine, an adult publication with which I am not familiar.  In Malzberg's own intro to "Cop-Out" in Final War and Other Fantasies he lists all the venues that rejected the story, ten in total, before "an understanding editor" at Escapade accepted it.

I have to say that this story doesn't have anything to do with "worlds of tomorrow," either.  It appears to be a first-person narrative by one member of a two man team, sent to New York by "Headquarters" to perform a mission.  It is a little oblique, but it seems that the two beings are angels, or similar agents from heaven, and their mission is to put on passion plays.  They get an opportunity to put on a performance that will be televised, but this is some kind of trap, set by agents from Hell, and the two heavenly agents are killed and wake up back in "Headquarters" where their superiors are unhappy with their failure. 

Yesterday I endorsed Malzberg's three page story "Revelation in Seven Stages" even though it lacked any kind of character or plot because its central idea (AKA "gimmick" or "gag") was evocative and novel.  These short gimmicky stories live or die based on the gimmick.  "Cop-Out"'s gag is weak and tired, it reminded me of movies like "It's a Wonderful Life" with its superior angels sending subordinate angels down to Earth on missions that could lead to promotions.  (In "Cop-Out" the narrator talks about being "Grade" or "Class 9.") 

Another thumbs down for The Far-Out People.

"Angel, Dark Angel" by Roger Zelazny (1967)

This one first appeared in Galaxy, and is the subject of the cover illustration.  (The creature depicted is a Simule, an artificial organic computer, one small component of a galaxy wide network of such computers.) 

"Angel, Dark Angel" is actually about life in the far future (finally.)  Many planets have been colonized by man, and this vast civilization is run by a city-sized computer, Morgenguard; there appear to be no politicians or lawyers, Morgenguard runs everything.  In this task the computer has ten thousand aides, its Angels of Death, highly trained, cybernetically-enhanced assassins.  When Morgenguard decides that a citizen must die, because he has committed a crime, or would alter this perfect society, or just because of overpopulation pressures, an Angel of Death teleports next to the victim, kills him in seconds, and then teleports out.

The plot of the story, which is a mere 11 pages, is structured much like a spy thriller or detective story.  A woman, Galatea, has managed to defeat multiple Angels of Death sent against her.  So, one of the very best Angels of Death, Stain, is brought out of retirement to get her.  Stain befriends Galatea, begins an erotic relationship with her.  He learns of Galatea's belief that Morgenguard's rule has lead to a static, sterile society, not the kind of society which produced her heroes, depicted on a fresco in her home: Homer, Virgil, Dante, Leonardo, etc.  Galatea shows him her invention, the Simule, and convinces Stain to join her in her mission.  Stain launches a suicide attack on Morgenguard, sacrificing himself to start a new era of human liberty and progress.  Presumably Stain will join Leonardo and the others up on the fresco as one of the heroes of human progress.

This story is reasonably good, nothing special, but I liked it.

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I have to say that my experience with Far-Out People has been a little disappointing.  The Malzberg and Panshin stories are weak, and do not fit the theme; the Zelazny story is just average.  But they can't all be winners, can they?