The Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny: Volume 5: Nine Black Doves, Edited by David G. Grubbs, Christopher S. Kovacs and Ann Crimmins (NESFA, 2023)

Review by Paul Weimer: Nine Black Doves is the fifth and the penultimate volume in the six book NESFA series collecting the short fiction of Roger Zelazny.

When last we left the career of Roger Zelazny, Zelazny was starting to work his way writing through the Amber novels, and that, and other considerations meant that his short fiction output had continued to steadily decrease. In Nine Black Doves, we continue those trends, as the period of his work and life covered ranges from 1982 to 1990.  Let’s dig in.

 Amber comes up in a lot of the biographical materials here (although substantial work set in and about Amber per se will be in the sixth and final volume). Lots of other things are going on with Zelazny besides Amber (although it is looming ever larger) although I now really do see how weirdly backwards I got exposed to his career. The Zelazny of the 60’s and 70’s, writing the short fiction and mostly singleton novels is a different beast than someone working on what would ultimately become a 10 book series. I started with Amber and worked forward and back, but for readers who had been following “all along”, I can now see their point, and their unhappiness, as to how Zelazny’s career turned out.

And this is something Zelazny himself addresses at one point, talking about how his career is always about him trying new things, new forms, new ideas, and new experimentations. Zelazny is a writer who was always trying to “find new boundaries, only to break through them”. The Amber series itself can be seen of a piece with that, but more substantive discussion of Amber should wait until the sixth volume. Let’s put a pin in that, for now.

But speaking of experimentations, one of my favorite Zelazny works, and one where he was challenged and then challenged himself, is one of my favorite Zelazny stories, “24 views of Mt. Fuji by Hokusai”.  This is a very atypical story for Zelazny in that it has a female protagonist at its center. It’s an interestingly crafted tale, with our main character Mari traveling to various viewpoints of the mountain on her own personal pilgrimage, and slowly revealing how and why she is doing it, and the force opposing her.  Along the way with the technological entity that she faces, we get all sorts of literary allusions (including to the Mythos), a couple of different SFF styles of story and much more. It’s wildly ambitious and succeeds on every level, and it was a welcome friend to read again. 

We also get the pre-novel finale set of Dilvish stories here, as well. I can well see, after reading Devil and the Dancer, Garden of Blood, and the eponymous Dilvish the Damned just why Zelazny at this point decided to write The Changing Land and finally have Dilvish have his confrontation with Jerelak after all. The stories do not tire and do not get old, but in an aggregate, after a while, I could see why Zelazny would wonder “Well, when IS he going to catch his white whale, or die trying to do so?”  I do think that Dilvish has unfairly not been part of the genre conversation of sword and sorcery (The famous Appendix M of the 1e Dungeon Master’s Guide mentions Jack of Shadows and Amber, but not Dilvish specifically. A missed opportunity there by Gygax, I think).  I do think that some OSR game out there could be inspired by this set of Dilvish the Damned stories and run with some of the ideas, here. 

There are a number of shared universes that intersect with Zelazny’s work at this point. This is no surprise because the 1980’s are the height of the shared universe trend in science fiction and fantasy. It’s nothing new for Roger, of course,  Zelazny has always been collaborating, as we have seen. Here we get a small boomlet of them. We have a story in Fred Saberhagen’s Berserkers universe. We get a Niven Magic Goes Away story set in the modern day. I’d read the Magic Goes Away story (“Mana From Heaven”) and it is an old favorite of mine. I don’t previously reading the Berserker story. (“Itself surprised”). This was, of course, another clever Zelazny story playing with the premise.

And then there is of course, the one that is still ongoing, and that is George R. R. Martin’s Wild Cards. Zelazny had missed the Thieves World saga and he had regretted it. So when Martin asked him to join Wild Cards, he did with both feet. Famously, Zelazny created one of the more memorable, and potentially powerful characters in the Wild Cards verse, but circumstances meant that only a couple of those stories (by Roger) ever gotten written. This book collects “The Sleeper” and “Ashes to Ashes”.  

 “The Sleeper” introduces us to Zelazny’s character and his origin story, and slowly lets the character and the reader figure out his superpower. As it turns out, Croyd Crenson is a teenager who gains the ability to randomly change his powers, appearance, status as an Ace or a Joker, and even his personality between cycles of what amounts to hibernation. This makes him potentially the most powerful character in the entire Wild Cards verse, and he has an enormous flexibility as a result.  He loves his family, and wants to be there for them, and is afraid of them slipping out of his life through his involuntary hibernations. He’s functionally immortal, as a result, but it is an often pathos filled immortality.  While others have run off with the character in the two decades since, these two stories give us the original and undistilled version of Croyd, who he is and what he does. 

It should be noted, fittingly, that we get a remembrance of Roger Zelazny as a person and his work from George R.R. Martin himself. I find, personally, reading these as these volumes march toward his too-soon end of his life, that I feel them becoming more poignant and melancholia-inducing in me. This is not Martin’s intention, mind, but something I bring to the series and to these remembrances. We also get a lovely remembrance from Melinda Snodgrass, as well.

In addition to those, we get a good assortment of other odds and ends here. Outlines for COILS, which he would eventually collaborate on with Saberhagen. An outliner and a bit of a world document for his Alien Speedway shared world series, which sadly and tragically never was completed. A good selection of poetry, and, once again, a biography of the relevant period of Zelazny’s life covered by the publication of the stories. As you might have guessed, given his smaller short story output, this volume’s essay on his literary life by Kovacs covers more chronological years, 1982 to 1990, than in any of the previous single volumes (except for volume one, of course, which goes from his birth to 1961).  

With just one volume left to go, I look forward to, in the sixth and final volume, completing the literacy legacy and history of my favorite SFF writer. And, oh yes, “completing the cover art” that is spread across the volumes of this series. 

Stay tuned. 

The Collected Works of Roger Zelazny, Volume Four, Last Exit to Babylon (NESFA Press, 2009)

Review by Paul Weimer. Last Exit to Babylon is the third of the six-volume NESFA collection of the work of Roger Zelazny.

Again, to get an overview of the project in progress and my thoughts on it, I commend you to my first three reviews, of Threshold, Volume One, and Power and Light, Volume Two., and This Mortal Mountain, Volume Three.

Volume Four takes us into the later 1970’s and across the threshold into the early 1980’s. Once again, Christopher Kovac’s literary biography, toward the end of the book, gives the framework for the man whose stories and works we read in the course of the volume. And again, as acknowledged in the previous volumes, the copious noting and footnoting of the stories and poems often reveal parts of Zelazny’s life and career, as well as the more usual literary models.

The late 70’s and early 80’s were very much a switch to novels as the primary writing format for Zelazny. That does mean there are fewer stories in this volume, and Kovac’s discussion of Zelazny focuses a lot on his novels. Amber starts looming large in Zelazny’s life in this discussion and at this point, but so, too, his collaborations with Dick, Saberhagen, and other works.  I learned a lot about the later Zelazny and was particularly struck by a what-if that could have occurred.

Back when the world was young (okay, it was the early 1980’s), Robert Asprin put together what is for me still the definitive shared world anthology series: Thieves’ World. Thieves’ World brought together a plethora of writing talents to write stories in a secondary world set in a out of the way city at the edge of an Empire. Think Lankhmar if it sat far away from Rome and Rome had conquered it sometime ago, but Lankhmar simmers with resentment at being under Rome’s boot, and you can see what Thieves’ World and the city of Sanctuary are meant to invoke. It turns out that Zelazny HAD been invited to write for Thieves’ World, had initially accepted, but had to withdraw because of his schedule. I would have loved to have read a Zelazny story set in Sanctuary.  (To be fair, Zelazny missing out on Thieves’ World meant that when GRR Martin started Wild Cards, Zelazny made sure he turned in a story). But still, Zelazny writing in the world of Sanctuary is a what-if I would have loved to have read.

As far as the prose in this volume, it revolves mainly around three axes

The first is the “Legion” stories. I had only read the most famous of these. “Home is the Hangman”, but all three of the stories are collected here. For those unfamiliar, our nameless protagonist, when all the people in the world were being computerized and put into a worldwide database, managed to escape being included. As a result, he can’t use credit cards and a lot of modern conveniences, and has to live on cash and cash alone. But what this also means is that he is very much invisible to the system. As a result, he can go and do jobs that others can’t, he can slip in and use his skills (which are very much tied into engineering and computers) to solve problems and get answers. “Home is the Hangman” revolves around an interstellar telepresence (Waldo) robot which may have gained sentience, and its controllers and operators are suddenly all being killed upon its return to Earth. Is the robot gaining some sort of revenge? And if so, why? The previous two stories, which I had not read, are “The Eve of RUMOKO”, first in the trilogy and  “’Kjwalll’kje’k’koothaïlll’kje’k”.  The first story has to do with a rather audacious bit of geoengineering, trying to engineer the creation of a new undersea volcano and a new island chain. In a world where there are undersea habitats on the continental shelves, this turns out to be a spectacularly dangerous idea, and there are those who would sabotage the project, and cause chaos thereby.  The second story is also aquatic based and features our protagonist trying to figure out if a dolphin can be a murderer.  This story was clearly influenced by the work of John Lilly and dolphin intelligence and has a really solid feel of life in the islands. Having all three of the Legion stories, what I am reminded of is, strangely enough, is Buck Rogers in the 25th century. At the end of the pilot episode, it is pointed out to Buck that all the interstellar governments have all the files on people in all the others.  But Buck, being from out of time, is a complete cipher, and could thus be used as a spy and agent that no one knows anything about, and get things done that others can’t.

The second axis the prose runs around is more Dilvish the Damned stories. There are a couple of pieces here I’d not read before, and now I feel that I’ve read the entirely of the corpus. I’d only previously read some of the stories, and the novel, The Changing Land. Dilvish is one of Zelazny’s most driven and focused characters, his desire to find and confront Jelerak his overall obsession and desire. But when someone manages to throw you into hell for two hundred years, I guess you’d want revenge, too?  Most of the stories revolve around him getting ever closer to the sorcerer for a confrontation, running into former allies, apprentices, victims and other random people along the way. The style is pure Zelazny, with elements and touches that particularly make me think of Jack Vance’s The Dying Earth.

But aside from Vance,  Dilvish really reminds me of Erekose, one of the aspects of Moorcock’s The Eternal Champion, given his part-Elvish nature and heritage, and that (in the novel The Changing Land) he does go up against “The Old Gods”.  I have gone on the record that I make it as headcanon that Dilvish is indeed one of Moorcock’s Eternal Champions and these stories, and now having the entire corpus of the series read at last, feel confident in my statement. (Concurrent with reading this volume, I also listened in audio to a collection that included some Dilvish stories)

And the third axis is The Last Defender of Camelot. Given its importance in the Zelazny corpus and canon, it deserves discussion in and of itself. The Last Defender of Camelot is the definitive story of the return of members of the Round table coming back, the main character being Launcelot du Lac. Launcelot has, thanks to some spell or curse or both, been living ever since Camelot working as a soldier and a fighter. He’s lost a step or two, but his skill and experience are unmatched. But why he should be living all this time and for what purpose comes clear when he runs into, unexpectedly, Morgan Le Fay.  Morgan helps Launcelot figure out who and why Launcelot has been living all this time, and for what purpose.  Merlin has plans, and they are ill plans indeed.  The thing about the story, when I first read it (and saw the Twilight Zone episode) is that it introduced me to the idea of Merlin as an antagonist, and it also gives an absolution to Launcelot.  Le Fay patiently explains to Launcelot that his idylls with Guinevere are, in her opinion, not the mortal and horrible sin that Launcelot thinks it is, because her arrangement with Arthur is, in the end, a political marriage and that Launcelot has been beating himself up unnecessarily for nothing. The story does also play on “The one last fight” trope of the aging warrior called upon to get into the ring one more time against fearful odds, and it plays that trope rather well. The story makes Launcelot the most human of all the people in Camelot. He’s not the perfect knight that his son is, he’s not the almost alien Merlin, he’s not Arthur, trying to keep the sandcastle of Camelot from being washed out by the tide. Launcelot is a good, excellent fighter who winds up falling in love and that love leads to tragic consequences.  It’s a brilliant story and one of Zelazny’s best works.

In addition to these three axes, we get poetry, some apocrypha (some of which, no surprise, is Amber-related), and a little bit of nonfiction, and appreciations as well. One of the most interesting of these to me shows Zelazny’s catholic and insatiable interest in things, and that is a previously unpublished nonfiction piece called “Black Is the Color and None Is the Number” .  Written in 1976, it is Zelazny discussing and thinking about something far afield from most of Zelazny’s work and interest — Black Holes. The footnotes and notes at the end do point out, and I had forgotten, that nearly two decades later, Zelazny did write a story about someone encountering a Black Hole in “The Three Descents of Jeremy Baker”.  But to read Zelazny’s collected thoughts and knowledge about Black Holes, something far removed from history and mythology, was a treat.  There are also notes, elsewhere in the volume, that he was interested in manned spaceflight and was disappointed in the end of the Apollo missions.

In the end, this fourth volume brings us to the early 1980’s, and shows Zelazny at the height of his popularity. There are definite tensions as Zelazny encountered and had to face people who had the opinion that he was past his prime and that he should return to the short stories of the 1960’s, but really, although not stated in the volume itself, given the realpolitik of making a living writing, it is no wonder that his focus at this point and here on out is to be able to write full time and that meant novels. (Zelazny also moved to Santa Fe at this point because he could write anywhere and he wanted to live near mountains). But even if the sheer output of stories is not in this volume (and I suspect in the last two volumes), this book remains the definitive collection on Zelazny.

Oh, and what does the title of this volume mean, you might ask? Well, the original title of Roger Zelazny’s novel Roadmarks (a favorite of mine) was, in fact, The Last Exit to Babylon. Given Roadmarks was written during this period, it is a very fitting title for this fourth volume in the NESFA collection.

Review by Paul Weimer: This Mortal Mountain is the third of the six-volume NESFA collection of the work of Roger Zelazny.

 Again, to get an overview of the project in progress and my thoughts on it, I commend you to comments in my first two reviews, of Threshold, Volume One, and Power and Light, Volume Two.

Volume Three brings us from the late 1960’s into the early 1970’s. Once again, Christopher Kovac’s literary biography, toward the end of the book, gives the framework for the man whose stories and works we read in the course of the volume. I noticed the switch from lead to back matter between the first and second volumes. It feels like an evolution in the series, now that Zelazny is on stage, to let the works talk first, and then discuss the context of his life. Although, as always, the copious noting and footnoting of the stories and poems often reveal parts of Zelazny’s life and career, as well as the more usual literary models.

This is a transitional part of Zelazny’s career and it gets play from a couple of angles.  Before we dive in, the book acknowledges that for a spectrum of fans, by this point, after Lord of Light, Zelazny has seen his best work come out and he will never hit those highs again. It is true the number of awards and award nominations does fall away at this point.  It is also true as Kovacs details:

By 1972 Zelazny had largely dropped mythology from his writing. “Science fiction has pushed ahead and left some things behind. In changing, the science fiction world has changed me. I did sort of have to get rid of my gods. When I reached self-parody of myself, I had to stop.

“I have not resolved in my own mind the manner in which I will deal with mythological material in the future. I would have to find a different way of using it.

“My mythological material has been invaded by the light

It’s true. The furious and highest use of mythology in Zelazny’s work diminishes at this point (Creatures of Light and Darkness, of which I will say more shortly, being that final signpost). The Zelazny of the 1970’s and on would use Mythology more sparingly, rather than dumping the bag of contents into the blender, baking the dough and seeing what comes out of the oven. It wouldn’t be the end of mythology in Zelazny’s work, but it definitely marked a change in what he was doing. 

And while many seem to feel that meant Zelazny’s work diminished in quality after the work covered in the first two volumes, critic David Hartwell, in a piece at the front of the volume, disagrees:

A lot of people in the sf community felt that Roger Zelazny’s literary career began to decline at the end of the 1960s as his commercial reputation grew. Nine Princes in Amber, a hard-boiled adventure fantasy, sold well but was compared unfavorably to his best early work by most genre commentators… In spite of all the profound impact of his sixties work, his body of short fiction contains more masterpieces from later decades than from that first flowering.”

And so here we are, in the 1970s. A future fan writer (me) was born in 1971. Zelazny may have moved past the high mythology of Lord of Light, but his most successful series, the Amber Chronicles, was to take hold of his writing life.

And yes, like Banquo in Hamlet, The Ghost of Nine Princes of Amber is one that does haunt this book, and its publication does correspond with the other pieces that we find here in this volume. I admit freely that Amber is where I first encountered Zelazny (I think that is probably fairly well known in fandom at this point), and my love of his work grew from there. So the period in this volume, then, is prime material for me as a reader, since it shows Zelazny working and developing his craft in a period and a style and a level I had first come to him in. 

Let’s dig in.

It emerges that some of my favorite Zelazny pieces are collected in this volume. 

Let’s start with “The Game of Blood and Dust”, first published in 1975. It is a pinnacle of Change War sort of time travel stories, as history is changed by two beings again and again in a game. In a short space of a few pages, we get to see the blossoming of ideas of alternate worlds and jonbar points that could fill a Kevin Kulp Timewatch game. There is a playfulness and a pathos at the ending, as we figure out the changes the two beings have wrought have ended in our world…and that they are about to play again, and change our existence utterly.  There is a meta-thrill to that idea and it makes it one of my favorite Zelazny stories of any era.

I’ve never been a fan of the full novel Damnation Alley, and the movie, even with George Peppard fighting “killer cockroaches”, is too much camp for me. But the shorter novella story of Hell Tanner’s run across the United States to deliver medicine to Boston on time is a much more effective piece. You don’t have to like Hell Tanner much, but he gets the job done. I could see a bit of Snake Plissken in Hell Tanner, for certain, especially the raised-finger sort of ending that Tanner gives as a coda. It does occur to me that in an endless set of remakes that Hollywood seems to want, Damnation Alley hasn’t been touched…yet. Maybe The Walking Dead and the like has dried up the market.  Although, maybe if you had someone like Rhona Mitra or Millie Rae Brown play a genderflipped Hell Tanner, THAT could be fun. Hollywood, call me!

Anyway, moving on.

“Corrida” is a very dark and intense short story, inspired by Zelazny attending bullfights.  The utter confusion of the man thrust into the ring makes it a short and chilling piece. It’s not what you normally think of Zelazny — but the use of imagery, detail and sense and focus are absolutely all that.

Again, unusual for Zelazny, perhaps are a pair of stories, “Here Be Dragons” and “Way Up High”. They are, in fact children’s stories, that capture wonder, happiness, magic, and ultimately pushing back the boundaries of the unknown. “Here Be Dragons” is a story about cartography and maps and the titular warning and what happens when actual exploration and necessity hits the reality of what was formerly just blank map space and the unknown. 

“Way Up High”…well, reading that always makes me cry as we follow the story of Suzi as she meets and develops a friendship with  Herman, the pterodactyl.  Yes, a pterodactyl.  The last pterodactyl? Well, that would be telling but you can probably guess where this story goes. It’s a story of wonder, and sadness at the end of wonder. 

More typical and on brand for Zelazny is an excerpt from Creatures of Light and Darkness as Horus meets and encounters The Steel General. This volume reveals that the Steel General, in fact, was the initial seed for the book and things grew out from a being that would fight endlessly throughout history, even if utterly destroyed. Zelazny’s style of book writing, no surprise, was very much what we would call a Pantser, and in the case of Creatures of Light and Darkness, he started with The Steel General as a character and went from there. The “Agnostic’s Prayer” from this book appeared in the previous volume.

And then there is “The Man Who Loved the Faioli”. It is true that death, or immortals who defy death, are a common theme in Zelazny’s work. Some might say that most of Zelazny’s protagonists run around these two themes to a greater or minor key. “The Man Who Loved the Faoli” goes with the former. Again, we have an artist as the protagonist, and a very strange relationship between the dying artist and the creature come to witness his death. Or so the story should go. This being Zelazny, it takes a left turn at Albuquerque, in a sad and melancholy mood and key.

This book also covers the era where Zelazny started some more collaborations with other writers. There is “Come to Me Not in Winter’s White”, a collaboration with Harlan Ellison® that reminds me a bit of Time travel romances, and, it will make sense in context, The Pirate Planet in Doctor Who.  

 Although there are no excerpts from Zelazny’s novel length collaboration with Philip K Dick directly (Deus Irae), Dick, too, haunts the pages of this volume. In the non-fiction, we find the funny story of Zelazny and Dick at a SF festival in Metz, France (as it so happens, Ellison was there as well). We also get a poem from Zelazny on Dick, and we also get a story, new to me, written with Dannie Plachta, called “The Last Inn on the Road”. This story feels like it could almost be in the world of Deus Irae and I agree with the editor that it seems to have influenced that collaboration. 

There are some additional interesting curiosities as well.  

There is the “Deleted sex scene” between Corwin of Amber and Dara from the second Amber volume, The Guns of Avalon. Although I had heard about this scene, I had never read it before now.  Frankly, by the standards of today, if I were to write it and show it to say, Kit Rocha, I am pretty sure Bree and Donna would return it asking for at least some heat to the scene. 

Other curiosities include a couple of previously unpublished stories, a few GOH speeches, and of course, always the poetry. I was particularly intrigued by Bridge of Ashes, an outline for a book that, sadly and tragically, gets little coverage even from Zelazny’s most ardent fans (of which I am one).  Frankly, the 30,000 foot level outline here might, I think, be somewhat more effective in conveying matters than the book was when I read it. It does illuminate how ideas can go from outline to novel in ways that one does not entirely expect, or perhaps even want. I may owe myself a re-read of Bridge of Ashes, now.  There is also an outline of Doorways in the Sand, a more successful novel from Zelazny on every level, and a favorite of mine. And, especially given our economy and the problems of student debt, the idea of a student desperately trying to remain one forever to keep a trust paying room board and tuition feels awfully modern, doesn’t it?

Once again, in an excellent volume, NESFA has captured the soul and art of Roger Zelazny and in the period of work I first came to know it. I look forward to what comes next, in Volume Four: Last Exit to Babylon.

The Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny, Volume Two: Power & Light. Edited by David G. Grubbs, Christopher S. Kovacs and Ann Crimmins. Cover art by Michael Whelan. (NESFA Press, 2009)

Review by Paul Weimer: Power and Light is the second of the six-volume NESFA collection of the work of Roger Zelazny.

 Much of what I said in my review of the first volume, Threshold, stands and is built upon, here. (Read the review of Threshold at the link). This volume, like it’s first, covers a slice of Zelazny’s work, and is full of biographical detail, strange and unusual pieces never seen before, and continues the device of putting most of the words under exegesis, untangling references common and oblique alike, giving a full view of the mythopoetic work that Zelazny was creating. Once again, we get a variety of poetry, incorporating whimsy, humor, and mythological themes alike.

This volume, whose slice concentrates on works from the mid 60’s, is much more about the meat and drink of his career, or to use the stellar metaphor I used previously, this is when the nova began to truly shine.  You’ll find the original Divlish the Damned stories here, for example, and having them together helped me appreciate him as a somewhat neglected icon of Sword and Sorcery. But there is plenty more: “Lucifer” and “For a Breath I Tarry”, “Auto-Da-Fe”, and a number of others you will likely recognize if you’ve read any SF from the period. I’ve loved and enjoyed many of these stories before, but I’ve never before had the context and positioning these stories are given here with other Zelazny works. The works involving vehicles, for example, a motif in this volume, all seem to stem from a serious auto accident he was involved in. Adding insult on top of injury, Zelazny’s father died while his then-girlfriend was recuperating from the injuries. That sort of biographical detail really helps contextualize these stories and give them additional meaning and insight.

 And I think that it helps make the individual stories and works stronger, and deeper and paradoxically harder to hurtle through, to take at speed. It seems that for me as a reader, and perhaps this is a warning to you, too, that Zelazny at the height of his powers is a strong draught of whatever spirit you want to name, or perhaps just a very strong tea if you do not. Reading, savoring and enjoying these stories was something I could not do for hours on end, for they invoked such imagery and power as to leave me giddy with delight, and the endless clouds of grey clearing to allow me to see the green field realms of myth and story beyond the glass barrier between the world. I took this book in stages, and every time I gave myself space to turn away and then return, the power of the words came flowing into me once again.  

 The volume claims that his shorter works contain his best writing, and certainly, in this second volume, that seems to be entirely the case for me, even given my longstanding and well known love of the longer forms of the Amber Chronicles and other novels he wrote.

 Some of these stories, though, were new and unheralded delights for me, too. For example. “Comes Now the Power”, which I have missed reading until this time even though it was a 1967 finalist for Best Short Story at the Hugos. It’s a short, sharp story about a telepath who is blocked, cannot use his power, and has not been able to for a couple of years now. A world that would not believe that he had such a power. And, then, he contacts someone else who has the same spark.  It feels like a brief antecedent by several years to Robert Silverberg’s novel Dying Inside, and in a weird timey wimey way giving an answer to Selig’s problems in a short few pages. Did Silverberg read the story and get inspired to write Dying Inside? I don’t know, and I would love to ask Silverberg if that was the case. Psionics and telepaths were certainly “in the water” in the 60’s and 70’s, but telepaths having problems with their powers are a much less common story motif. In any event, the two works feel like they are in dialogue with each other.

Or take his 1966 story “Love is an Imaginary Number”. Doing what Zelazny does best, diving into the world of myth, here he makes an interesting connection and junction I had never considered before.  What if you had a character who melded aspects of two mythological characters who are famous for being bound and tormented. Prometheus, and Loki. And, add to that, our protagonist can shift and change realities. Yet another idea that he would eventually take into later and longer works. 

 The real star of the volume, though, I think, even beyond his sizzling and scintillating stories, and even his poetry (recall what I said in the first review regarding his poetic nature) is the two parts of “…And Call me Conrad” aka This Immortal. This Immortal was an extraordinary work (it tied for Best Novel with a little known SF novel called Dune) and I want to talk about it. I had read it about a year ago for a podcast, and so I came to the story relatively fresh. So, instead of this being a read for me that was trying to cover ground I had read last years ago, I came to the reading of This Immortal with a strong and specific eye for detail.

And the detail I found. I completely missed in previous readings, intuited here, and was confirmed in the end notes the strong theory that Conrad is not just several hundred years old, but is indeed the Immortal of the title, and may just simply be the god Pan. The book is crammed with mythological motifs and ideas, and I see it as a waystop for him to develop ideas that he would later carry into things like Jack of Shadows, and the Amber series.  His dog, Bortan, the Hellhound, such a good and loyal dog. Prince Julian of Arden would be proud to have a dog like Bortan as part of his hounds, for certain. The subtlety of Conrad’s plan to deal with the Vegans, the emigres and everything else shows the patience of someone who lives a long time, but that circumstances and chance can upset even the most well layed plans. I had missed the detail about the deconstructing pyramid gambit in that former bit. And the story renewed my as yet unfulfilled desire to see Greece and Egypt. 

Overall, by this now second volume, I can see how the short fiction of Zelazny is definitely his work at its highest concentration, ideas and mythological concepts and motifs in their purest and most undiluted form. Neil Gaiman is quoted:  “Nobody else makes myths real and valuable in the way Roger Zelazny could”.  And he is absolutely right.

But to be sure, there is some nonfiction here, too. Zelazny was becoming a Big Deal at this time, his star burning bright. And so we get his Guest of Honor Speech from Ozarkon 2. This is an amazing piece because it shows how Zelazny thinks, how much he incorporated mythological themes and ideas into all of his writing, as he discusses the motif of the dying and resurrected god. The volume makes clear a lot of these speeches, with all of their value and humor, have NOT been collected; I am very glad this one survived, and is included in this volume, as well as the several other similarly formatted speeches and talks that are in this volume. 

Once again, in an excellent volume, NESFA has captured the soul and art of Roger Zelazny. I look forward to what comes next, in Volume Three, The Mortal Mountain.

Threshold: The Collected Works of Roger Zelazny, Volume One. Edited by David G. Grubbs, Christopher S. Kovacs and Ann Crimmins. Cover art by Michael Whelan. (NESFA Press, 2009)

By Paul Weimer: Roger Zelazny. He came upon the SFF world like a nova, and sadly died too soon at 58. A beacon of the new wave, making a splash immediately with “A Rose for Ecclesiastes” (1964 Hugo finalist) and writing through the 60’s and 70’s, his writing had an intensity about it that leaps off of the page, be in novels, short stories, or poetry.

Threshold is the first in a series of six volumes of collected stories by NESFA Press. As is the wont of NESFA’s organization, the volumes are in chronological order. Thus, this collects the earliest of Zelazny’s work. Thus, in addition to some of his early brilliant work (such as the aforementioned “Rose”) we also get some of the protostar origins of what would build toward his writing achievement and career such as fanzine work and drips and drabs. 

The collection is full of biographical and contextual detail for the works in afterwords and forwards that bookend each of them. There are also a few remembrances at the beginning as well. This doesn’t quite make the book a biography of Zelazny but Threshold could be considered a biography of Zelazny’s work, putting the stories , poems and fragments into perspective and parallel and dialogue with each other. Time and again, the volume shows how a work was clearly in the same vein or mining early fanzine and unfinished work you read earlier in this volume.  This gives the book a richness and a third dimension far beyond a simple cataloging and list of works.

Another quality of life, and one absolutely necessary in dealing with Zelazny and his work, is the untangling and cataloging of the various references. Zelazny’s work was and is rich with allusions, parallels, and borrowings, especially from mythologies and theologies all over the world. While I consider myself a fairly erudite and well read person, I found time and again, in these early works and stories, references that I did not get at all or understand, but the afterword happily lays out for the reader. 

“Nine Starships Waiting”, a Zelazny story I had never read before (first published in Fantastic 1963) is a great example of how this book manages it. While some references like Trotsky, the seals of the apocalypse, Cassiopeia, were clear to me, other references were more obscure and the afternotes illuminated what Kraepelin is referring to (mental disorder classification, or “Tonight in Samarkand”, a Deval melodrama).  But the entire story itself is based on an Elizabethan play, “The Revenger”, a favorite of Zelazny’s, and the end notes go into detail just what Zelazny was borrowing from that work.  

 This all reminds me of a different NESFA volume, and that is John Myers Myers’ Silverlock, where the book goes into detail pulling out all of the references that book is filled with, so that the reader can even more appreciate the subtlety and depth Zelazny brings. 

And his diversity. If you think Zelazny is just Amber fantasy, A Night in the Lonesome October, and not much else, this early first volume puts paid to that notion right away. There is a range and power to these early stories that show (as well as his fanzine stuff collected here) that Zelazny was clearly reading from and thinking about the writers who preceded and then he was writing in parallel with.  Take another new-to-me story, “The Malatesta Collection”. It’s a post-apocalyptic story that feels a bit like Dick, a bit like Leibowitz, and a lot like Zelazny, with the uncovering, after an apocalypse, of a trove of lost literature. I also found out in those aforementioned afternotes, just who the people in Rodin’s statue “The Kiss” are supposed to be (surprise, one of them is named Malatesta…) . “The Stainless Steel Leech”, again, feels a little bit like Dick and perhaps Bester and Sturgeon as well. This story, which pairs an unusual robot with the last Vampire, is all Zelazny, in the end, but one can trace science fiction he read through this and into it and see what Zelazny has alchemically made of it. 

And poetry! It should not surprise that Zelazny wrote poetry, rich and vivid and sometimes experimental from the get go. (His character Galagher in “A Rose for Ecclesiastes” is, perforce, a poet). There is a poem devoted to the aforementioned Rodin sculpture, and many other ones, besides. Most of these are short, Zelazny does not go for the long epic form in any way, but the use of language and imagery is always memorable. There are some textual experiments (in length of lines) and other tricks Zelazny played as well.  

Poetry, as the volume’s thesis seems to make clear, is really the heart of Zelazny’s work, in general and particularly in this volume. Poetry was, in fact, Zelazny’s first love, first desire when it came to writing, but there are precious few ways a poet can make a living as a writer in that day and age (or this one for that matter). Zelazny turned to genre fiction to help pay the bills (as opposed to his mundane day job) but his love of poetry infuses this volume. And once again, see “A Rose for Ecclesiastes”, with its poet main character. A brilliant poet, a genius, someone who lives by his poetry. While people have pointed to Roger the guard in the Amber chronicles as Zelazny, especially because he is a writer, perhaps Gallagher, earlier, is as well. 

There are some curiosities here, as well, in the back portion of this substantial (576 pp) book.  A manuscript he stopped, and abandoned. A joking piece tuckerizing himself and his longtime friend Carl Yoke (who also has a forward piece on him and Zelazny) . Bits and bobs, as is expected for the first volume of this series. I expect these more unusual types of things will be less common as the series of stories progresses. 

My only regret is not diving into this volume sooner. In some ways, though, my delay in not reading this in the last ten years to be to my benefit. You might feel a little differently as to why. It turns out that the ebook edition of this is the 4th edition… Additional early items by Zelazny have been found, and added, to the ebook version of this collection. In many ways, this book was and is more of a living document, record, testimonial and biography of Zelazny’s work. 

But, lest you think that this is unpolished story gems all the way down, remember my comment before about Zelazny coming on the scene like a nova. The three big stories that anchor this book are the aforementioned Rose (his Mars story), “The Doors of his face, the Lamps of his mouth”, his Oceanic Venus story, and “He Who Shapes”, the novella that would eventually be expanded to The Dream Master.  Reading this original again, I am struck once more just how dense and potent the original length story is. It is my favorite of these “big three” in this volume, and it does a lot of what you are looking for in a Zelazny story at moderate length.

The editorial eye, the enunciation and elaboration of the imagery and ideas Zelazny uses, and the stories and poems themselves make me conclude that this is the sort of volume that if you are a Zelazny reader, you should beeline for (now that there are ebooks instead of the uncommon and expensive print versions). If you are just interested in excellent fantasy and science fiction, and seeing where one of the greats started, Threshold is your cup of tea, too. 

As for me, I look forward to finding time to diving into the second volume, Power and Light.