The Magic (October 1961–October 1967). Roger Zelazny

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      “The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth” is all size and speed, which would be a good story if told purely in a write-what-happens, this-is-the-plot style, and which would also be a good story if it confined itself to what went on in the heads and in the hearts of its people, and which is a good story on both counts.

      “The Furies” is a tour de force, the easy accomplishment of what most writers would consider impossible, and a few very good ones insuperably difficult. Seemingly with the back of his hand, he has created milieu, characters and a narrative goal as far out as anyone need go; he makes you believe it all the way, and walks off breathing easily leaving you gasping with a fable in your hands.

      “The Graveyard Heart” is in that wonderful category which is, probably, science fiction’s greatest gift to literature and to human beings: the “feedback” story, the “if this goes on” story; an extension of some facet of the current scene which carries you out and away to times and places you’ve never imagined because you can’t; and when it’s finished, you turn about and look at the thing he extended for you, in its here-and-now reality, sharing this very day and planet with you; and you know he’s told you something, given you something you didn’t have before, and that you will never look at this aspect of your world with quite the same eyes again.

      “A Rose for Ecclesiastes” is one of the most important stories I have read—perhaps I should say it is one of the most memorable experiences I have ever had. It happens (well, I told you this was an intensely personal assignment of rank!) that this particular fable, with all its truly astonishing twists and turns, up to and most painfully including its wrenching denouement, is an agonizing analogy of my own experience; and this astronomically unlikely happenstance may well make it what it is to me and may not reach you quite as poignantly. If it does it will chop you up into dog meat. But as objective as I can be, which isn’t very, I still feel safe in stating that it is one of the most beautifully written, skillfully composed and passionately expressed works of art to appear anywhere, ever.

      *

      Briefly, let me commend to your attention two novels by Roger Zelazny, This Immortal and The Dream Master, and sum up everything I have said here, and a good many things I have not said; sum up all the thoughts and feelings I hold concerning the works of Roger Zelazny, past and to come; sum up what has struck me at each of the peaks of all of his narratives, and without fail, so far, at that regretful moment when I have turned down the last page of any and all of them; sum up all this in one word, which is:

       Grateful.

       Theodore Sturgeon

       Sherman Oaks, California. 1967

      When Zelazny was Magic

      by Darrell Schweitzer

      I remember when Roger Zelazny was magic. This is not to say that he was ever anything but an accomplished, fine writer or that he ever lacked an audience, but there was a period, around 1964–1970, when he was magic, and every new story of his was an event. He was a tremendously variable writer too, so that each event was not like the past one. “He Who Shapes” serialized in Amazing was very special indeed, a mind-blower. Not at all like the novella “Damnation Alley” in Galaxy a couple years later. Not at all like “A Rose for Ecclesiastes” or “The Graveyard Heart.”

      I enter the scene in the spring of 1967. Probably the first Zelazny story I ever read was “This Mortal Mountain” in the March IF. I then read “Dawn,” an excerpt from the forthcoming Lord of Light, in the April F&SF. Then came “The Man Who Loved the Faoli” in the June Galaxy. This last, I realized later, a particularly remarkable achievement for Zelazny. The story was written around a cover, a painting by Gray Morrow which showed rectangular-bodied, tentacled robots wading through a valley of dry bones beneath a strange sun. This was clearly a reject or leftover from the Ace Books printings of Neil R. Jones’s Professor Jameson series. (The “robots” were the star-traveling Zoromes. The professor’s brain was housed in one of them.) This orphaned painting was shuffled over to Galaxy and then a popular contributor was given the assignment of writing a story around it, as was a common editorial practice at the time. But where most writers would have just typed some squib, Zelazny wrote a story which seemed, to me at least, stunningly beautiful.

      Zelazny was a name I learned to watch for.

      I was a little short of fifteen in June of 1967. I remember writing an excited high-school paper (possibly a couple years later) about the works of Roger Zelazny. I don’t think my English teacher was too thrilled. He tended to discourage any interest in popular or imaginative literature, particularly science fiction. But Zelazny was the first writer who made me aware of the possibilities of prose.

      He had style.

      This was, in science fiction fandom, the era of the New Wave Wars. We talked about “style” a lot. Zelazny was claimed by both sides, but he certainly had style.

      It was easy to imitate.

      Lots of short sentences.

      Asterisk breaks.

      *

      And a flourish of something you hoped was “poetic.”

      I wrote Zelazny imitations. I even sold a couple. I picked up on the concept we see in “The Keys to December” and “The Graveyard Heart” about a pair of lovers who go on through the ages, out of sync with everybody else, living a few years (or days) every century. I did it with time-dilation. But of course the difference between a Zelazny imitation by an apprentice writer and a real Zelazny story is like the difference between a kid in a garage band trying to sound like the Beatles and the actual Beatles. About the same time I received a review copy of a book from Doubleday, The Exile of Ellendon by William Marden (1974) which was very clearly somebody else’s attempt to write a Zelazny novel and published by Zelazny’s own publisher presumably on the assumption that it would sell to the same audience. I don’t blame Marden, certainly. He was no doubt as Zelazny-struck as I was.

      Imitating Zelazny is easy to do.

      But it won’t be the real thing. Art conceals art, and all that.

      What Zelazny did was considerably more complex and accomplished. Which does bring us back to the story I am supposed to be commenting on, “The Keys to December.”

      I read this one much later, either in the collection The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth (1971) or in New Worlds as by that point I had mastered the art of acquiring used science fiction, even from overseas, and those paperback-sized, Compact Books New Worlds (early Moorcock issues) were easy to get. This story had no American periodical appearance, but Zelazny, as a “new wave” writer, was a regular in New Worlds in those days, before he was summarily drummed out in early 1968 (presumably for the crime of being too popular; you can’t be a rebel underdog if you are successful) with a nasty, trashing review of Lord of Light, which signaled that he would never appear there again.

      This is another story that makes language sing. Its prose jumps through hoops. The 300-word description of a planet gives us a hint of what Zelazny is capable of. The concept of this story could have come out of the 1950s. Think of the pantropy stories (collected as The Seedling Stars) of James Blish, or Poul Anderson’s “Call Me Joe.” Then it would have been about tough, not-quite human pioneers struggling to make it on a planet to which they had been adapted. There would have been a lot of technical detail. I can envision that Kelly Freas cover, from mid-’50s СКАЧАТЬ