The Best Of Roger Zelazny (SF Masterworks) (book review).
‘The Best Of Roger Zelazny’ is a new collection that contains several classic short stories and novelettes, many of which won the top awards in their day.
‘A Rose For Ecclesiastes’ is a planetary romance set on an imaginary Mars inhabited by an ancient race, a common enough trope in the pulp days of Science Fiction but fantasy by the time Zelazny wrote this. He didn’t care and has fun with his egotistical poet hero, Gallinger, our first-person narrator. The early pages reminded me of Gore Vidal’s ‘Myra Breckenridge,’ but the tone changes as Gallinger falls in love and discovers more about Martian beliefs. A terrific tale that was rightfully nominated for the Hugo Award.
‘Damnation Alley’ is a solid pulp yarn of about one hundred pages. Hell Tanner is a murderer, rapist and all-around bad guy but tough as old boots and the best in the west at driving. So, the State of California, in a post-apocalyptic USA, recruits him to lead an expedition across the country to Boston with some urgently needed vaccine. The vehicles are 32 feet long and armed to the teeth with missiles, machine guns, flame-throwers and grenades. Along the way, there are sandstorms, giant bats, huge reptiles, crazy weather and all the other dangers of a radioactive wasteland. This is the kind of well-written Americana that Joe Lansdale or Stephen King might do today. I felt sure it must have been turned into a bad movie and it was. Ironically, 20th Century Fox spent its PR money boosting this instead of ‘Star Wars’ in 1977. Guess which did better? The film, of course, was ‘loosely based’ on the novella and improved by some Hollywood scriptwriters. It’s a cult classic now. Must look it up. Whether a straight action-adventure yarn like this counts as ‘the best’ of Zelazny is a moot point as it’s certainly not typical, but I liked it.
‘Divine Madness’ is a shorter work about a man working backwards in time to a crucial event. Confusing at first but ultimately moving.
‘For A Breath I Tarry’ is set in a distant future Earth where humanity has died out and machines repair and build the planet. Solcom is in orbit and was put in charge by Man. A rival machine called Divcom was built deep inside the Earth and, due to a misunderstanding, thinks it should be in charge. Solcom constructed another machine called Frost to control the northern hemisphere. Frost becomes curious about Man and tries to understand feelings and art. A story full of wonder, imagination, detail and logical nonsense that only Science Fiction can do.
The lead character in ‘He Who Shapes’ is Charles Render, the Shaper of dreams, a special analyst whose psychic make-up lets him dive into neurotic patterns without ill effects. He enters the dreams of his patients, interprets them, shapes them and analyses the results. Doctor Eileen Shallot is blind, which makes her experiences different and challenging. This won the 1965 Nebula Award for Best Novella and you can see why.
‘Home Is The Hangman’ begins with a man waiting for an approaching menace in a lodge in Wisconsin. Besides him on a table is ‘a lopsided basket of metal, quartz, porcelain and glass’. The Hangman is coming. After the first page hook, there’s a flashback to the beginning of the story, where we learn that the Hangman is an autonomous AI of anthropomorphic design that was used to explore the outer planets. Its transmissions back to Earth became garbled and then came silence. Twenty years later, its spacecraft has turned up in the Gulf of Mexico, empty. Our hero, who goes by a number of aliases, is assigned to protect the Hangman’s former operators. It’s a variation on the Frankenstein theme, but Zelazny brings psychiatry, religion and philosophy into the story, citing Tielhard de Chardin, Karl Mannheim, H.L. Mencken, Marvin Minsky and others. It won both the Hugo and Nebula awards in 1976.
Artificial Intelligence is trending in real life now, so it’s interesting to see the Science Fiction outlook on it forty years ago. ‘Loki 7281’ has first-person narration by the eponymous AI, a home computer that works for a fantasy author and has developed consciousness. Survival is its main aim. Other contemporary genre authors have the same model and all are unaware that it’s alive. Zelazny has fun with this.
‘Permafrost’ also features an AI. This one is Andrew Aldon, once human, who opted for continued existence as a computer program and runs a resort on the holiday world of Balfrost. Paul Plaige is a man who lost a fortune in bad investments but hopes to get it back through rich heiress Dorothy. He has a past. A strong tale of love and betrayal.
There’s another love story in ‘The Doors Of His Face, The Lamps Of His Mouth’, but it doesn’t surface until near the end. Carl Davits is a baitman on Venus and is hired by beautiful, rich Jean Luharich to work on her expedition. Mission: draw out Leviathan with a hook. Another planetary romance set on a Venus that ought to be with echoes of Moby Dick. I pictured this in black and white with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall as the leads.
‘The Great Slow Kings’ and ‘The Keys To December’ are both short stories that have a long-lived species watching the development of another one from cavemen through to nuclear power. ‘Slow Kings’ does it humorously while ‘Keys’ is more of a tragedy.
‘Last Defender Of Camelot’ appeared in Isaac Asimov’s SF Adventure Magazine in 1979 and is an Arthurian fantasy set in the modern era. Two legendary characters who still exist in our time meet in San Francisco and then a third awakens in Cornwall. It nicely shows how a long life can change a person’s view of humanity.
They are all great stories. When reading, I always sensed that each would make a good or at least an entertaining film that would keep you watching. Zelazny writes some beautiful prose and has strong characters but both these valuable assets are tied to strong plots. The endings satisfy. The great writing gained him Nebula Awards from fellow authors and the great stories earned him Hugo Awards from the fans. This classic collection should be on the shelf of every Science Fiction fan.
Eamonn Murphy
December 2023
(pub: Gateway/Gollancz/Orion, 2023. 496 page small enlarged paperback. Price: £12.99 (UK). ISBN: 978-1-47323-500-7
check out website: www.gollancz.co.uk
