oger Zelazny, much beloved first as one of the most potent forces of SF's New Wave, and then for his 10-volume fantasy series set in the realm of Amber, passed away in 1995 at the too-early age of 58. This collection gathers up many of his previously uncollected stories, plus one or two familiar ones.
The stories, although not concentrated into groupings save for one set, tend to fall into a few distinct categories. First come the short-shorts, the vignettes. These are mostly vivid, albeit one-punchline, pieces, or sometimes exercises in surrealism. "Corrida" imagines a bullfight from a unique first-person perspective. "The New Pleasure" is a tale of vengeance in which a decadent hedonist meets a suitably ironic end. A enigmatic captive seeks escape from "The House of the Hanged Man" but is rebuffed. In a world of Amazons, a man must prove he can be a warrior in "Lady of Steel." And "Stowaway" illustrates how the smallest invaders may be the most deadly.
More substantial are the tales that Zelazny wrote for various theme anthologies or franchised projects in the later decades of his career. "Godson" tells the life story of a boy-into-man as the child deals with having Death Himself as a godfather. Larry Niven's cosmos of rationalized magic provides the setting for "Mana from Heaven." (The book's title is a deliberate twist on the story's title.) For an anthology of Christmas stories, Zelazny supplied a twisted tale of a fiendish savior with "Prince of the Powers of This World." A master assassin in an interstellar society is the amoral hero of two stories: "Kalifriki of the Thread" and "Come Back to the Killing Ground, Alice, My Love." And another Alice, she of the adventures in Wonderland, features in "Epithalamium," as the now-aged woman must return to set the Mirrorworld aright.
Four stories from Zelazny's early peak represent him as he first burst upon the genre in the 1960s. "The Furies" concerns a noble star pirate named Corgo and the three men of unusual talents who are hired by the government to track Corgo down. Co-written with Harlan Ellison, "Come to Me Not in Winter's White" is the tale of a rich man and his dying wife and the strange technology they use to remain united—until another lover intrudes. "The Last Inn on the Road," on which Danny Plachta shares a byline, is an apocalyptic allegory. And "Angel, Dark Angel," surveys the perfect world of the future created by an all-knowing and merciless AI, and what happens when two government killers fall in love.
Finally, six stories revolving around the deadly family squabbles of the royal courts of Amber and Chaos cohere to form a scattershot mini-saga.
This immortal continues to live on
When Roger Zelazny died, the science fiction newszine Locus ran a selection of photos along with his obituary and the appreciations of his peers. In one photo from the '60s, a handsome youthful Zelazny, smiling broadly, is sitting on a couch next to a beautiful woman. He had doubtless won one award or another when the photo was snapped, perhaps for his magnificent novel of Hindu deities at war in a futuristic setting, Lord of Light (1967), and was plainly on top of the world. And he surely deserved to exult in his status and in his accomplishments, for he had brought a hip, sexy, hard-bitten romanticism to SF that it had never quite had before, though some elements are present earlier in the work of Bradbury, Sturgeon and Bester. When Zelazny was writing at the top of his form, he fused myth, hubris and doom into a potent cocktail.
It is famously said that Zelazny passed his pinnacle eventually and began just churning out yard-goods. This collection should show that canard to be false. Stories such as "Godson" and "Epithalamium" and the Kalifriki duology still contain passages of real beauty and awe. True, some of the narrative tricks and tics are more transparent, but that's only because we've seen them before—in Zelazny's own groundbreaking work. Any revolution gets stale if its leaders don't continually reinvent themselves, and, truth be told, Zelazny did not break new ground after a certain point. But he never wrote falsely or out of base motives. Even a dull sentence such as the opener to one of the Amber stories, "Hall of Mirrors"—"Neither of us realized there had been a change until a half-dozen guys tried an ambush"—plunges us in medias res into a lively tale.
Zelazny's focus on superhuman characters frequently engaged in immortal rivalries, and his willingness to have his characters die for their beliefs, continue to provide a larger-than-life allure to his fictions. Not for Zelazny the miniature character study, wherein navels are scrutinized. His protagonists are too busy traversing alternate realities or blowing up suns. This is not to say that introspection or the finer gradations of philosophy are missing from his tales. Just the opposite. His miraculous achievement when he was at the top of his game was to combine the frenetic plotting of van Vogt with the ethical and esthetic sensibilities of Sturgeon. And this is a mix we shall not soon see again.
