the religious aspect, with the hero becoming a god to the natives and (one gets a sense) almost enjoying it? Maybe, but probably not. That is something Philip José Farmer might have edged toward, but not in Astounding. (Farmer never wrote for Astounding.) But certainly none of those writers would have described “stands of windblasted stones like frozen music.”
There are elements here we see elsewhere in Zelazny. The essentially alienated protagonist. The background of an interstellar capitalism that enables people or corporations to buy planets. Men who become gods. (Think of Francis Sandow in Isle of the Dead.) The myth elements are here, not in this case a replaying of something out of past Earth literature and religion, but a myth that is coming to being due to Jarry Dark’s intervention with the natives. His combat with the bear-thing will surely be retold down the generations and become the stuff of epics. The death of Sanza will become a deep Mystery, possibly to be re-enacted in mysterious rites, millennia in the future. The reader may be at first disturbed by what the December group is doing. They are of course, the invaders from space, changing the planet to their liking, to the detriment of the natives. There is no overt slaughter. There doesn’t need to be. But the invasion is more extreme than that described in H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds. About this same time (1965) Thomas M. Disch imagined aliens completely transforming the Earth for their own purposes. He called it The Genocides.
That the Worldchange machines are forcing the native lifeforms to evolve sounds like a corporate excuse. That this actually happens is intriguing, and of course it triggers the final crisis. Zelazny has not overlooked the moral implications of what is going on. Not all science fiction is that thoughtful. I remember reading a story in Analog once, by Christopher Anvil (“The Royal Road,” June 1968), in which the superior Earthmen induce the benighted natives to labor long and hard, at the cost of immeasurable suffering and death, to build a massive, completely useless structure. When it is complete, we are told this was for their own good, because it united them with a sense of purpose and prevented wars, or some such nonsense. Of course the paternalistic humans decided what was for the natives’ own good. Vile.
Zelazny is better than that. His character has to take radical action, then assume responsibility for what is happening. His is a far more nuanced, ambiguous solution. Yes, of course, this is one of the countless science fictions stories that prefigure the 2009 film Avatar. Its moral balance is considerably less black and white.
But mostly what we notice about this story is the style. Zelazny’s voice, then and later, was unique. His prose sang. It still sings.
The Magic
(October 1961–October 1967)
Ten Tales by Roger Zelazny
A Rose for Ecclesiastes
I
I was busy translating one of my Madrigals Macabre into Martian on the morning I was found acceptable. The intercom had buzzed briefly, and I dropped my pencil and flipped on the toggle in a single motion.
“Mister G,” piped Morton’s youthful contralto, “the old man says I should ‘get hold of that damned conceited rhymer’ right away, and send him to his cabin. Since there’s only one damned conceited rhymer . . . ”
“Let not ambition mock thy useful toil.” I cut him off.
So, the Martians had finally made up their minds! I knocked an inch and a half of ash from a smoldering butt, and took my first drag since I had lit it. The entire month’s anticipation tried hard to crowd itself into the moment, but could not quite make it. I was frightened to walk those forty feet and hear Emory say the words I already knew he would say; and that feeling elbowed the other one into the background.
So I finished the stanza I was translating before I got up.
It took only a moment to reach Emory’s door. I knocked twice and opened it, just as he growled, “Come in.”
“You wanted to see me?” I sat down quickly to save him the trouble of offering me a seat.
“That was fast. What did you do, run?”
I regarded his paternal discontent:
Little fatty flecks beneath pale eyes, thinning hair, and an Irish nose; a voice a decibel louder than anyone else’s . . . .
Hamlet to Claudius: “I was working.”
“Hah!” he snorted. “Come off it. No one’s ever seen you do any of that stuff.”
I shrugged my shoulders and started to rise.
“If that’s what you called me down here—”
“Sit down!”
He stood up. He walked around his desk. He hovered above me and glared down. (A hard trick, even when I’m in a low chair.)
“You are undoubtably the most antagonistic bastard I’ve ever had to work with!” he bellowed, like a belly-stung buffalo. “Why the hell don’t you act like a human being sometime and surprise everybody? I’m willing to admit you’re smart, maybe even a genius, but—oh, hell!” He made a heaving gesture with both hands and walked back to his chair.
“Betty has finally talked them into letting you go in.” His voice was normal again. “They’ll receive you this afternoon. Draw one of the jeepsters after lunch, and get down there.”
“Okay,” I said.
“That’s all, then.”
I nodded, got to my feet. My hand was on the doorknob when he said:
“I don’t have to tell you how important this is. Don’t treat them the way you treat us.”
I closed the door behind me.
*
I don’t remember what I had for lunch. I was nervous, but I knew instinctively that I wouldn’t muff it. My Boston publishers expected a Martian Idyll, or at least a Saint-Exupéry job on space flight. The National Science Association wanted a complete report on the Rise and Fall of the Martian Empire.
They would both be pleased. I knew.
That’s the reason everyone is jealous—why they hate me. I always come through, and I can come through better than anyone else.
I shoveled in a final anthill of slop, and made my way to our car barn. I drew one jeepster and headed it toward Tirellian.
Flames of sand, lousy with iron oxide, set fire to the buggy. They swarmed over the open top and bit through my scarf; they set to work pitting my goggles.
The jeepster, swaying and panting like a little donkey I once rode through the Himalayas, kept kicking me in the seat of the pants. The Mountains of Tirellian shuffled their feet and moved toward me at a cockeyed angle.
Suddenly I was heading uphill, and I shifted gears to accommodate the engine’s braying. Not like Gobi, not like the Great Southwestern Desert, I mused. Just red, just dead . . . without even a cactus.
I reached the crest of the hill, but I had raised too much
