Venus Smiles

Twitting about on the Internet alongside reading these stories, I've found that this one has the distinction of requiring its own Wikipedia page. Details of why this is will be found there, but it's interesting to see that the story is included here in 1957, rather than later in 1971.

We're in Vermilion Sands again, and it's only on my second visit that I notice something from Prima Belladonna. The fusion of plant life and music is almost synaethesia, and here we have a similar thing going on with a metal sculpture that moves and grows.  It also sings as well.

There's also another enigmatic female artistic type who made the statue. Could be another theme developing there, but I won't find out until I get to Studio 5, The Stars, which is the next story from the collection.

Writing in the preface to the collection, JGB defends the criticism that Vermilion Sands is not science fiction because it's not an 'invented future'. He suggests it's a 'visionary present', based on a real future that he could see approaching.  This explains everything I've already read of his, and it's also what I think science fiction is all about; our present hopes and fears.  The best example of this is how Peter Parker's radioactive spider in 1962 became a genetically modified spider for the Sam Raimi film in 2002. In the case of Venus Smiles, there's this wonderful exchange between the mayor and his secretary:

"The Medicis probably felt like this about Michaelangelo.  Who are we to judge?"
"You are," she said "You were on the committee, weren't you?"
"Darling," I explained patiently "Sonic sculpture is the thing.  You're trying to fight a battle the public lost thirty years ago"

There's so much in those three lines of dialogue that's familiar...

Prima Belladonna

Almost immediately in Vermilion Sands, where this first story is set, I can see traces of Estrella de Mar, and Eden-Olympia, the decadence, the quavering ideals and the characters who find niches in the underbelly.

Anyway, this is a story about a man who runs a choro-flora (musical plants, apparently) shop, whose life gets turned upside-down by Jane Ciracylides, a mysterious singer with an affinity for these musical plants. Weird stuff happens, beer is drunk on balconies, and Jane disappears at the end of the story, last heard of in several places, reminding me a lot of Holly Golightly of Truman Capote's novella.

I'm glad to see that even with his earliest stories, JGB can make the most outlandish situations sound perfectly normal. The first book of his that I read was Crash, which makes the shocking and perverse world of its characters make complete sense. Prima Belladonna pulls the same trick. Sample sentence:

The next three or four days at the store were audio-vegetative armageddon. Jane came in every morning to look at the Arachnid, and her presence was more than the flower could bear.

Great stuff. I'm looking forward to the rest of the stories and the development of Vermilion Sands into (possibly) the resorts I know from the novels.