think ‘Damnation Alley’—” which had been nominated for a Hugo award—“worked as well as it might.” He grimaced a little.
“Actually,” he said, “I didn’t think so either, Chip. But it’s good to know you cared.”
That was the last time we ever spoke directly, though we were in touch in other ways. In ’68 in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction published my loving pastiche of what I felt to be Zelazny at his best, whose hero was a more realistic and, I hoped, a more heroic version of Hell Tanner. Only in 2012, did I hear—through a Facebook chat box of all places—Bruce Chrumka report “I once asked R. Zelazny what he thought of “We, in some Strange Power’s Employ, Move on a Rigorous Line,” [ . . . and] he said he loved it and wished he’d written it. This was in front of perhaps 300 conventioneers in Edmonton, [Canada, in] the late ’80s.”
Although I didn’t learn this until five years ago (twenty-two years after Roger’s death), it was a high compliment.
When, in mid-June of 1995, Roger died in New Mexico of cancer, my old student, George R. R. Martin, phoned me with the news and also told me that Roger had wanted me to know he was thinking of me—another high compliment.
However lightweight I found some of the Amber novels that came to dominate Zelazny’s output, through the 1970s, I could already reel off what I felt were Zelazny’s strongest stories from his early works, which—if they were collected in a single volume—would foreground his strengths as a writer and storyteller: “A Rose for Ecclesiastes” (1961, pub 1963), “The Ides of Octember” (a.k.a, “He Who Shapes,” 1965), “The Graveyard Heart” (1964), “The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of his Mouth” (1965), “The Furies” (1965), “The Keys to December” (1966), “For a Breath I Tarry” (1966), “This Moment of the Storm” (1966), “This Mortal Mountain” (1967), and the already discussed “Damnation Alley” (1967).
Both “The Ides of Octember” (under its alternate title) and “The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth” won Nebula Awards as best long stories (novella and novelette) of their respective years.
An amazingly bad film was made “from” Damnation Alley, about which neither Zelazny nor I had anything to say at all. (I have to put “from” in quotes: The film’s plot has nothing to do with Zelazny’s tale, and then some special effects are added that have nothing to do with anything.) In his note on the story, Roger makes the point that the main character grew out of conversations with a real person (he does not tell us who), who actually rode a motorcycle, which is revealing; as he says, it’s the only story he ever wrote in which this was the case. In the same note, he reveals his intention: “I wanted to do a straight, style-be-damned action story with the pieces fall (sic) wherever. Movement and menace. Splash and color is all.”
Writers be warned: adventure, psychology, and even comprehension are before all else affects. It’s impossible to achieve any of the three without at least grammar, whether acceded to or violated, or style of some kind under some control. Hell Tanner’s realness produces only banality and an unearned confidence in the material that the reading experience doesn’t support.
II
Speaking strictly, neither the Mars of “A Rose for Ecclesiastes” nor the Venus of “The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth” is a science fiction construct. Both are fantasy worlds put together to violate what relatively recently had come to be known about each: this Mars has (a) a breathable atmosphere and (b) an ancient, matriarchal humanoid race put together precisely when we became sure that it didn’t have either; Zelazny’s Venus is a water-covered waste envisioned precisely when the returning Mariner probes made clear what was generally already known: the brightest planet in our sky—both the morning and evening star, as Parmenides had identified it, during the time of the Doric Greeks—was a world covered with hot, hydrocarbon gases completely enclosing a scolding desert. Life of any sort, much less a giant aquatic monster bigger than Roosevelt Island in the midst of the Hudson River—was not even reasonable speculation.
“The Lowlands of Venus lie between the Thumb and Forefinger of the continent known as Hand . . . Next you study Hand to lay its illusion: . . . the thumb is too short, and curls like the embryo tail of Cape Horn.” In most reader’s mind, with any familiarity with maps of earth, Hand begins to look like the tail end of Africa. This is a Venus that is a fantasy landscape, covered with water and a few islands, and clouds and a few small continents emerging.
“The Furies” is a mosaic story, in which the carefully described talents of the double named main characters make the escape of the super prey all but impossible, though it is indeed ingenious the way Zelazny sets it up. That it actually makes sense in the midst of all the fantasy creates an effect that suggests a tour de force.
“The Ides of Octember” and the “The Graveyard Heart” are actual science fiction tales—or they were when they were written. But have been rendered into fantasy by the passage of time. The irony is that the first scene of “Graveyard Heart” was thirty-five years in the future (and, as though Zelazny had learned his lesson: all right, stop trying to be poetic: call something nice and simple, and “Party Set” was the initial title; but by this point, readers were looking for poetic titles on Zelazny’s tales: so it was changed to something “more poetic” and a much better title it is): “ . . . the party of the millennium . . . in a few moments it would be Two Thousand.”
The story turns on a famous quote from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, only the first quarter of which is in the text:
The Time is out of joint. O, curséd spite
That ever I was born to set it right.
One reads the story, however, not as something that took place 17 years ago, but rather as something that, if we’re lucky, might take place eighty odd years from now in our own future, if we have one.
The story was first published in 1964; that is, nine years before Roe v. Wade, when women’s right to a safe abortion became the law. In my old neighborhood, there was a Planned Parenthood office half a block west and north of my front door—and there are regular Catholic protestors there, in larger or smaller numbers throughout the week, even today. Our twenty-seven year old point of view character, Alvin Moore, is in love with Leota Mathilde Mason. He dances with her on New Year’s Eve, in the year 2000, so he must have be born in 1973—that is to say the story was written nine years before the right to a safe abortion for women was the law of the land, but none of the characters live in a world where this political/legal moment has yet come about.
This casts a strange light over the whole climatic scene, when a poet tries to drive a stake through the heart of a woman frozen in cold-sleep, which also takes out her baby (exactly how, I’m not sure), though the unsureness of the female anatomy is part of the confusion about female biology that goes along with the decade of the tale’s composition. (It was within a decade of a great public debate about whether women had two types of orgasms or just one.) But it is very different reading this story as taking place in 1964 or post–1973, not to mention 18 years into the next century, even as it goes on to make its general point that the passions and technology work together to obliterate the damages that the other inflicts.
*
A figure whose influence must be taken into account, at least in his influence on his names in “The Furies,” is Cordwainer Smith (1913—1966), pen name of the diminutive Dr. Paul Linebarger, who worked for the government writing on psychological warfare, and died of a heart attack at age 53, one of a number of writers who used science fiction to write about ideas that might not be so popular with the government he worked for. Another was James Tiptree
