tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6504598332261057441.post6994554798585137371..comments2024-03-21T19:03:19.133-04:00Comments on Where there had been darkness...: Roger Zelazny Book Review: Song of the Blue BaboonJugularjoshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03768939120752611597noreply@blogger.comBlogger5125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6504598332261057441.post-34063458278095852042015-03-27T00:00:35.609-04:002015-03-27T00:00:35.609-04:00Dunno . . . it's a puzzler. Maybe something s...Dunno . . . it's a puzzler. Maybe something subtle in there that Zelazny was trying to get at?Chris DeVitohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13954514417222660623noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6504598332261057441.post-12786359423652612122015-03-25T06:35:45.757-04:002015-03-25T06:35:45.757-04:00I think you've found it. The quote from the st...I think you've found it. The quote from the story fits that painting exactly. And Zelazny's story appeared in the August 1968 IF while Silverberg's story appeared in the August 1968 Galaxy, both edited by Pohl, who had assigned the painting to both writers. I had previously been looking for a painting with a blue baboon!<br /><br />The thing that puzzles me still is Zelazny's insistence that the story didn't make sense without the cover painting, that it was a miserable failure without the cover art. Looking at that painting now, and rereading the story, I don't think it makes a difference. It's an illustration of a small scene that is clearly enough described in that sentence you quoted.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6504598332261057441.post-26629955761326023782015-03-25T02:50:10.420-04:002015-03-25T02:50:10.420-04:00I think this is the cover in question, from the Au...I think this is the cover in question, from the August 1968 issue of Galaxy:<br /><br />http://www.isfdb.org/wiki/images/d/d8/GALAUG68.jpg<br /><br />The relevant connection from Zelazny’s story (published in the August 1968 issue of IF): “Then he remembered his tower group in the sea, so large a destroyer looked like a toy beside it.”<br /><br />The Galaxy cover, by Vaughn Bodé, is “from” Robert Silverberg’s “Going Down Smooth.” Here’s what Silverberg said about this story, which was commissioned to be written based around an already-drawn cover: “Fred Pohl asked me to do a cover story for Galaxy sometime in late 1967 ... [based on a painting] by a gifted young artist named Vaughn Bodé. It was a typically perplexing write-a-story-around-THIS-one sort of thing, showing an ocean-going vessel with a cluster of colossal periscopes rising from the water behind it. Bodé had deviated from the usual cover-rough format, though. Galaxy’s traditional cover format for decades made use of a white panel down the left side of the page in which the names of stories were printed. Bodé had not only drawn that panel into his painting, but had gone to the prankish extent of making up a bunch of bizarre story titles. I went right along with the joke, picking out the least implausible of his titles and using it for my story. (I think I lost my photostat of the Bodé rough in the fire that swept my home in February 1968; otherwise I’d list the other titles here. I’ve forgotten them, but they were fine crazy ones.)” [From Galaxy: Thirty Years of Innovative Science Fiction, p. 260.]<br /><br />So the blue baboon thing had nothing to do with the illustration itself, but probably Bodé’s list of “crazy” titles. Note, also, that the August ’68 Galaxy also included a Mack Reynolds story called “Among the Bad Baboons” -- likely another “crazy” title, or maybe a variant on the one Zelazny used (or vice versa).<br /><br />Anyway, that’s my theory.<br />Chris DeVitohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13954514417222660623noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6504598332261057441.post-69764210434443587412012-12-27T07:17:57.838-05:002012-12-27T07:17:57.838-05:00That's interesting. My reading of the Pohl'...That's interesting. My reading of the Pohl's note was that the cover was used, just not to accompany this story. This makes me wonder if it ever got used at all and or if it was sidelined for some reason and spawned a second orphan story.<br /><br />I'm more intrigued now by what the cover looked like, where it was used and what the other story that went with it was like.Jugularjoshhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03768939120752611597noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6504598332261057441.post-23561560128078786692012-12-26T07:53:34.941-05:002012-12-26T07:53:34.941-05:00The painting that inspired this story isn't in...The painting that inspired this story isn't in THE IDES OF OCTEMBER because I couldn't find it. I looked through several years of cover paintings for WORLDS OF IF (where this story was published) and the related SF magazines, but no painting depicting something like a blue baboon was ever published as a cover.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com