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(Gollancz, February 2024)
Review by Juliet E. McKenna
I’D NEVER READ anything written by Roger Zelazny before picking up this collection. That wasn’t a conscious choice. In the 1970s and 1980s my SF&F reading was governed by what was available in Dorset’s public libraries. His novels never came my way, and I had no access to the genre magazines which published his shorter fiction. Later, particularly once I started going to SF conventions, I heard his name mentioned as a foundational genre writer in the same breath as Asimov, Heinlein and Clarke, whose books I had found on my local branch library shelves. While I found that interesting, it didn’t prompt me to seek out Zelazny’s work. I had moved on from that triumvirate, and was much more interested in reading new books from currently writing authors. This collection offers me the chance to read some of what I missed, and to decide if I missed out.
These thirteen selected stories were published between 1963 and 1984, and include Hugo and Nebula award winners. They range from novellas to taut one-turn-of-the-page tales. While I don’t propose to offer my opinion on each one, they are: “A Rose for Ecclesiastes”; “Corrida”; “Damnation Alley”; “Divine Mad-ness”; “For a Breath I Tarry”; “He Who Shapes”; “Home is the Hangman”; “LOKI 7281”; “Perma-frost”; “The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth”; “The Great Slow Kings”; “The Keys to December”; and “Last Defender of Camelot”.
As I read through these varied pieces, I am struck by the sustained relentlessness of the male gaze, in terms of viewpoint and priorities, as well as in the depiction of women and the roles they are permitted in the narratives. Oddly perhaps, that’s not as much of a problem as it might be, because these old-fashioned attitudes go hand in hand with frequent references to cigarette smoking. Both are continual reminders that these stories are now period pieces. Other elements reflect the preoccupations of those turbulent decades, such as imagining life after the looming threat of nuclear war, and fear of climate disaster when the planet would freeze rather than fry. I also encounter stories reminding me of some of my earliest SF reading. In visions of what is now termed Old Mars, and Old Venus, those planets are portrayed as habitable with aliens living in their barren wastes and boundless oceans respectively. This collection certainly has value as an entertaining and informative genre retrospective.
More than that, I see early iterations of ideas and questions that recur in contemporary science fiction, as writers continue to explore the impact of technology on individuals and society. How might a truly artificial intelligence arise? How might a robotic mind behave? How would humanity interact with such things? Could human intelligence somehow be uploaded into a machine? How far could genetic engineering go, and should that be allowed? Many of these stories are well worth reading in the light of ongoing current debates.
Zelazny’s stories also go beyond considering practicalities into what are sometimes disparagingly called the ‘soft’ sciences, such as psychology, sociology and related disciplines. He considers a broad range of unintended consequences which might follow technological advances. Meditations on the nature of free will, of fear, guilt and responsibility, of perception and reality, and humanity’s relationship with time itself are threaded through these stories, along with flashes of humour.
If I had encountered Zelazny’s work in my teens, it’s clear to me I would have found everything I found so fascinating in the work of Asimov, Heinlein and Clarke, and elements that would have offered additional appeal. I would have assuredly looked for more Zelazny to read back then. Will I do that now? With so many excellent new books on offer, to be honest, I think that remains unlikely, though not impossible. However, I now understand far more clearly why many of my favourite SF authors writing today cite Zelazny as a formative influence. All told, reading this collection has been time well spent.