The Best of Science Fiction 12

'The Winter Flies' was written in 1959; sold to Esquire shortly afterwards; returned, unpublished, some years later; finally published — in F&SF as 'The Inner Circles' — in 1967.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)