the philosopher (another voice): Ah, yes, the Void. Imprimis —
death: Silence.
In the great obedient silence Gott heard the unhurried click of Death's feet as he stepped from behind the sofa across the bare floor toward Heinie's spaceship. Gott reached up in the dark and clung to his mind.
Jane heard the slow clicks too. They were the kitchen clock ticking out, "Now. Now. Now. Now. Now."
Suddenly Heinie called out, "The line's gone. Papa, Mama, I'm lost."
Jane said sharply, "No, you're not, Heinie. Come out of space at once."
"I'm not in space now. I'm in the Cats' Graveyard."
Jane told herself it was insane to feel suddenly so frightened. "Come back from wherever you are, Heinie," she said calmly. "It's time for bed."
"I'm lost, Papa," Heinie cried. "I can't hear Mama any more."
"Listen to your mother, Son," Gott said thickly, groping in the blackness for other words.
"All the Mamas and Papas in the world are dying," Heinie wailed.
Then the words came to Gott, and when he spoke his voice flowed. "Are your atomic generators turning over, Heinie? Is your space-warp lever free?"
"Yes, Papa, but the line's gone."
"Forget it. I've got a fix on you through subspace and I'll coach you home. Swing her two units to the right and three up. Fire when I give the signal. Are you ready?"
"Yes, Papa."
"Roger. Three, two, one, fire and away! Dodge that comet! Swing left around that planet! Never mind the big dust cloud! Home on the third beacon. Now! Now! Now!"
Gott had dropped his Plutarch and come lurching blindly across the room, and as he uttered the last Now! the darkness cleared, and he caught Heinie up from his spacechair and staggered with him against Jane and steadied himself there without upsetting her paints, and she accused him laughingly "You beefed up the martini water again," and Heinie pulled off his helmet and crowed, "Make a big hug," and they clung to each other and looked down at the half-coloured picture where a children's clubhouse sat in a tree over a deep ravine and blob children swung out from it against the cool pearly moon and the winding roads in space and the next to the last child hooked onto his swing with one hand and with the other caught the last child of all, while from the picture's lower left-hand corner a fat, black fly looked on enviously.
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)
When I First Read ...
Dick Allen
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.
You: Coma: Marilyn Monroe
J. G. Ballard
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.