This gets to be a serious problem when the Qualimosans discover that there are still religious people on Earth. Worse yet, a popular religious show, Not by Bread Alone, is produced at the same studio that does Brock Barton. Our hero, Kurt, atheist and logical positivist that he might be, is in love with Connie Osborne, the director of Not by Bread Alone, even though she is a Christian and doesn’t like science fiction. He cannot possibly approve of the aliens’ proposal to solve the superstition problem by linking a death ray to the broadcast frequency of Not by Bread Alone and disintegrating two million viewers. The rest of the book becomes a frantic scramble to convince the aliens that Not by Bread Alone is actually satirical and blasphemous. While two blue, eight-foot, three-eyed lobsters are touring New York or playing poker with the editor of Andromeda, Kurt and Connie must pull all sorts of strings to write, rehearse, and produce a genuinely blasphemous special episode. All of this leads from one situation to another to a kind of Marx Brothers explosion of farce as characters from Brock Barton (including Sylvester Simian, an intelligent gorilla) barge in on the resurrected Jesus, viewers, sponsors, and producers are screaming ... and then it turns out that the aliens were tuned to the wrong channel.
The serious undercurrent of all this is best expressed by Brock Barton, space hero, on page 136: “If God is a bad idea, then playing God is an even worse idea.” Having bashed religion and put God on trial in the past, Morrow now takes aim at intolerant atheists, particularly the sort who want to go around massacring anyone not like themselves. (“You’ve not rejected God at all.... You’ve turned him into yourselves. How theistic of you.”) Our hero, Kurt, comes to respect Connie’s goodness even though he does not share her belief. So do the two Qualimosans, who end up working with her at a soup kitchen for the poor. While it may be perhaps too much to suggest that Morrow himself is softening in regards to religion, he does clearly take the position that it is no use trying to convert people to rationality and “free” thought by pointing a gun (or a death ray) to their heads. Reason has its dark side, we are reminded.
The book may be great fun, but it also delivers something important to think about.
Darrell Schweitzer went to Catholic schools. He encountered no extraterrestrials there.
Christopher S. Kovacs
The Raw Emotion Behind “A Rose for Ecclesiastes”
“A Rose for Ecclesiastes” is one of the best of Roger Zelazny’s short works and most honored. It was also one of his earliest stories, the first written in his renewed effort to become a published writer. He took a clichéd plot—dying Martian civilization and miscegenation with an alien priestess—and turned it on its head to create a memorable tale characterized by its rich and poetic prose. What many readers will not have realized is that this Martian space opera is one of Zelazny’s most personal tales, for it was based on emotionally charged events in his life. There are several levels on which this story can be considered, with each successive one being more personal and revealing.
A synopsis
Arrogant, globally renowned poet and linguist Michael Gallinger travels to Mars to learn the language of its ancient, matriarchal civilization. He’s a loner, scarred by a demanding father he never satisfied and by Laura, the woman who broke his heart. After Gallinger rapidly demonstrates facility with and flawless pronunciation of the Martian Low Tongue, high priestess M’Cwyie teaches him the High Tongue and grants him exclusive access to the sacred texts that reveal Martian history, culture, and religion. Gallinger watches a young priestess, Braxa, perform some of the 2,224 Dances of Locar. The ancient Martian philosopher Locar had foretold that civilization would become pointless and futile when everything of meaning had been accomplished. Gallinger teaches Braxa some of the language and customs of Earth, including cigarettes and appreciating the beauty and complexity of roses. She seduces him, and he falls in love with her. He compares her to a rose in this poem:
In a land of wind and red,
where the icy evening of Time
freezes milk in the breasts of Life,
as two moons overhead—
cat and dog in alleyways of dream—
scratch and scramble agelessly my flight ...
This final flower turns a burning head.
But he also appreciates the dangers of trying to understand women and roses. Despite a “distinct, pleasing aroma” they have “a thorny stem”:
No! Never interpret roses! Don’t. Smell them ... pick them, enjoy them. Live in the moment. Hold to it tightly, but charge not the gods to explain. So fast the leaves go by, are blown....
Braxa unexpectedly conceives a child, but she flees into the desert and appears to seek death for herself and the unborn baby. Gallinger now learns that each Martian is centuries old, even Braxa. The current generation is the last because of a plague hundreds of years earlier that rendered all males sterile. Locar had also foretold that a stranger would mock the ancient teachings of futility and rescue the Martian race from its doom, but Braxa disbelieved. Gallinger treads boldly into the forbidden Martian temple and exhorts the matriarchy to reject their fate. He reads from his translation of Ecclesiastes to show them that humans once shared that sense of futility but turned away from it:
“And ours is not an insignificant people, an insignificant place,” I went on. “Thousands of years ago, the Locar of our world wrote a book saying that it was. He spoke as Locar did, but we did not lie down, despite plagues, wars, and famines. We did not die. One by one we beat down the diseases, we fed the hungry, we fought the wars, and, recently, have gone a long time without them. We may finally have conquered them. I do not know.
“But we have crossed millions of miles of nothingness. We have visited another world. And our Locar had said ‘Why bother? What is the worth of it? It is all vanity, anyhow.’
“And the secret is,” I lowered my voice, as at a poetry reading, “he was right! It is vanity, it is pride! It is the hybris of rationalism to always attack the prophet, the mystic, the god. It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us.—All the truly sacred names of God are blasphemous things to speak!”
Braxa’s pregnancy represents a new hope that the Martian people can be reborn through cross-breeding with humans or that human doctors will solve the male infertility problem. Gallinger’s inspired preaching convinces the Martian matriarchy to reverse their decisions. Braxa’s child will be permitted to live, and their race will survive through this compromise. But Braxa had simply been following orders to seduce Gallinger and never loved him. He is left alone and alienated from cultures on two worlds now. He attempts suicide but is resuscitated. The story ends with Gallinger staring at Mars through the viewport of the spaceship Aspic:
Blurred Mars hung like a swollen belly above me, until it dissolved, brimmed over, and streamed down my face.
Gallinger won, but he also lost. He saved the Martian civilization and his unborn child, but Braxa is lost to him forever. And try as he might to escape the religious role model that he abhors, he is identified by the Martian people as a holy man, a prophet. His arrogance has been shaken to the core, contributing to his newly found self-doubt and despair.
Alert readers may wonder how I can refer to Michael Gallinger when only his surname is mentioned throughout the story. Hemingway had a dictum to leave certain things unsaid in a story, and Zelazny followed this by not revealing Gallinger’s first name:
I never mention in “A Rose for Ecclesiastes” that Gallinger’s first name is Michael. It wasn’t important; I had no reason for using his first name. I saw him as a whole character, but I’m showing only part of him in the story. I showed the part that was necessary to the action. If the writer sees more of the story than he actually tells, it adds strength to the story. It makes the character seem more real. (Krulik)
Level One: reimagined space opera
Zelazny claimed that he wrote some 150+ stories during his high school years and submitted many of them to profes
sional magazines. Every one of these was rejected, though a fragment of one story appeared in a fanzine. He did sell “Mr. Fuller’s Revolt” to the October 1954 issue of Literary Cavalcade. Three short stories and two poems were published in the 1954 and 1955 issues of Eucuyo, a literary magazine from his high school in Euclid. But Zelazny got frustrated and gave up writing prose for the duration of his studies at Western Reserve University and Columbia University. No unpublished stories from that era have survived.
In the fall of 1961, Zelazny submitted his thesis and prepared to graduate from Columbia in May 1962 with an M.A. in English and Comparative Literature. During this interval, he pondered the limited doors that his English degree might open for him. He began a determined effort to achieve his lifelong goal of becoming a professional writer.
In October 1961, the first story that Zelazny wrote after his self-imposed drought was “A Rose for Ecclesiastes.” He described it as a romantic, scientifically impossible vision of Mars, a space opera. Why had he written it?
I had grown up reading the science fiction of the ’30s and the ’40s (old magazines being available and cheap), and I had a strong sentimental attachment to what is now called “space opera.” ... I had long wanted to do something of that sort. When I began selling fiction in the early ’60s it was too late—almost. The space program had already invalidated the Mars and Venus of Edgar Rice Burroughs and his successors—almost ... If I wanted to do homage to those forces which had helped to shape me as a writer, if I wanted to pay tribute to Weinbaum and Kuttner and countless others, if I wanted to depict a dying red world and a Martian priestess.... I would have to act quickly and do my best. (R. Zelazny “Annotation to ‘A Rose for Ecclesiastes’”)
The day for this sort of story is over. There is no breathable atmosphere, no people, and so forth on Mars—but I wanted to write Space Opera. I felt if I didn’t write it then, I’d never write it. (Conner)
It was, let’s face it, a Byronic gesture, but I considered myself as a writer first, then an sf writer, and, as I said, I am sentimental. (Noël)
With “A Rose for Ecclesiastes” finished—a novelette that readers would repeatedly vote to be one of the all-time best science fiction stories—Zelazny set it aside and did not send it anywhere. Why? He said that more than just the impossible vision of Mars made him reluctant:
One of the reasons I refrained from submitting “Rose” to a magazine was that I felt I had overdone it, that I’d thrown in everything but the Martian kitchen sink, that I’d overwritten it, and that I’d made the character too introspective to be sympathetic. I wasn’t really sure of that as a story, but I was prompted to submit it because I wanted another story to send in that week. So for a time I did feel rather peculiar that that particular story should be so well-received. That phase has passed, though. It had to be written when it was written, but that’s really all I can say. (Apel and Briggs)
He didn’t write anything else for several months. When he resumed in early 1962, he concentrated on writing very short stories. By the spring of 1962, he was writing two or three stories per week and systematically submitting them in turn to every magazine that he knew of. He accumulated several dozen rejection slips and grew frustrated again. In a moment of introspection, he objectively read the rejected stories to gain insight into what he was doing wrong.
I was being a little too explicit, almost patronizing, in the way I explained every little detail.... I decided to eliminate everything I considered condescending in my writing and to speak to the reader just as if he were a person with me in the room, who seemed to be nodding when I was saying something to him. (Brady)
I resolved thereafter to treat the reader as I would be treated myself, to avoid the unnecessarily explicit, to use more indirection with respect to character and motivation, to draw myself up short whenever I felt the tendency to go on talking once a thing had been shown. (Krulik)
And then with this revised plan of brevity, indirection, and not talking down to the reader, he broke through. On March 28, 1962, he received his first acceptance letter from a professional science fiction magazine for “Passion Play.” Cele Goldsmith, editor of Amazing and Fantastic, bought it and many more of his stories over the coming months.
That sale reinvigorated his efforts to write more and learn from his mistakes. But it also prompted him to overcome his reluctance to have anyone read “A Rose for Ecclesiastes.” He was concerned that his rapidly accumulating sales were all to Goldsmith.
Of course it occurred to me that I’d been selling all these stories to a single editor, and I said, “Well, let’s see if anyone else likes my things.” And that’s why I began submitting to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. And it was sort of peculiar, because of the first story I had written before I made the attempt to break into writing in February of 1962.... I had written one story the previous fall. I’d simply put it aside.... From March through June [1962] I was selling them to Amazing and Fantastic.... I wanted to have ten stories out [at the editors] at all times, but I fell behind.... I had seven out, and I didn’t have an idea for a new story, so I decided to haul out the old story I had written in ‘61 and send it to a different market. I wanted to see if I could sell it to someone else. And that story was “A Rose for Ecclesiastes.” So I typed it up and sent it to F&SF. (Apel and Briggs)
Avram Davidson picked it out of the slush pile at F&SF and was effusive in his acceptance letter:
You have done a difficult and rare thing—taken a much-used (and a much-abused) theme, and done a new and good thing with it. All the equipment for cliché and bathos is in your story—the dying race, the beautiful priestess who dared, interplanetary miscegenation, etc.—but you have avoided absolutely any trace of either cliché or bathos. I salute you. And I wish to see more.... Prosper and flourish. And send us more, send us more. (Davidson)
“A Rose for Ecclesiastes” was accepted on July 7, 1962, prior to the appearance of Zelazny’s first professionally published sf story, “Passion Play,” in the August 1962 Amazing. He was an unknown when Davidson picked this rose from the slush and decided that it should be a cover story. Davidson commissioned Hannes Bok to create the now-famous painting, and the story appeared in the November 1963 F&SF.
The novelette prompted a surge in praise and attention from fans and critics. Theodore Sturgeon enthused that it “is one of the most important stories I have ever read—perhaps I should say it is one of the most memorable experiences I have ever had.... as objective as I can be, which isn’t very, I still feel safe in stating that it is one of the most beautifully written, skillfully composed, and passionately expressed works of art to appear anywhere, ever” (Sturgeon).
It was nominated for the Hugo Award in 1964 and finished third in the voting. Its publication predated the first Nebula Awards, but it finished sixth in SFWA voting for inclusion in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame Volume One, edited by Robert Silverberg, honoring stories published before the creation of the Nebula Awards in 1965; it is the only ranked work from the 1960s. It placed fifth in the 1971 Astounding/Analog all-time poll for best short fiction. It finished third as all-time best novelette in a 1999 Locus Poll. It is one of the classic pieces of “Martian literature” included on a DVD Visions of Mars: First Library on Mars attached to the Phoenix Mars lander and brought to the Martian surface on May 25, 2008. Most recently, a 2012 Locus Poll again found “Rose” in third place for all-time best novelette from the twentieth century. It is one of the most widely printed of Zelazny’s works, having appeared in at least 50 different English-language publications and an untold number of foreign translations.
All of these accolades for a reimagined but scientifically impossible version of a clichéd Martian space opera that Zelazny reluctantly submitted for publication.
Level Two: Gallinger as Zelazny’s mirror
At times, Zelazny denied that any of his characters were based on him:
I suppose there’s a little bit of me in each of my characters, but there�
��s no particular one that I identify with. I do try to keep myself out of the things I write, at least to the extent of not using any character as a personal spokesman. (Thompson)
But on several occasions Zelazny declared that Gallinger was the character who most resembled him, with Fred Cassiday from Doorways in the Sand being next closest. He was most blunt in this statement:
You ask me why I hated Gallinger so in “A Rose For Ecclesiastes.” The answer is that I hated him because he was me. (R. Zelazny “Re: A Rose for Ecclesiastes”)
In what way did Gallinger resemble Zelazny? In order to understand this, it is necessary to examine some more details from Zelazny’s personal life. He was born and grew up in the small town of Euclid, Ohio, the son of Irish-American Josephine Flora Sweet and Polish-born Joseph Frank Zelazny (other sources erroneously indicate Cleveland as his birthplace). His parents were practicing Catholics, and he was raised in the faith until he later became agnostic. Of note, during a radio interview 1970 he declared, “I still consider myself a good Catholic” (Kelly). But in two later letters he wrote:
I did have a strong Catholic background, but I am not a Catholic. Somewhere in the past, I believe I answered in the affirmative once for strange and complicated reasons. But I am not a member of any organized religion. (R. Zelazny “Walker March 10”)
Magazine - The New York Review of Science Fiction - 313 - 2014-09 Page 5