"I see myself as a novelist, period. I mean, the material I work with is what is classified as science fiction and fantasy, and I really don't think about these things when I'm writing. I'm just thinking about telling a story and developing my characters."
Roger Joseph Zelazny (May 13, 1937 – June 14, 1995) was an American Speculative Fiction writer who loved to blur the boundaries between Science Fiction and Fantasy. He is best remembered for his series, The Chronicles of Amber, but he wrote much, much more.
He began during the early days of the New Wave Science Fiction movement, in the mid 1960s, and while he never identified with that movement, he did share its interest in literary technique. He wrote in a style that veered wildly between the flowery prose of high fantasy and the mundane prose of everyday life—the former to give his readers a sense of wonder; the latter to draw them in and make them feel a part of the story, and, often, to add a touch of humor. Together with New Wave authors like Michael Moorcock, he helped redefine modern fantasy, and influenced many younger fantasy authors like Neil Gaiman, who dedicated American Gods to Zelazny and Kathy Acker.
Early in his career, he developed a reputation for writing mythology-based SF. His first novel, This Immortal (originally, Call Me Conrad) borrowed from Greek Mythology, and Lord of Light and Creatures of Light and Darkness were based on Hindu and Egyptian Mythology, respectively. He quickly branched out into more general forms of Science Fantasy, while still relying heavily on archetypal themes, like the Tarot and the conflict with Chaos in The Chronicles of Amber. He did return to his mythological-SF roots with two later works: Eye of Cat (Native American Mythology), and The Mask of Loki (Norse Mythology).
Zelazny engaged in several collaborations, including works created with Philip K. Dick, Robert Sheckley and Alfred Bester. His last two novels, Donnerjack and Lord Demon, were completed posthumously by friend and mentee Jane Lindskold. An anthology, Lord of the Fantastic, was put together after his death in his honor, showcasing short pieces by authors inspired by his work.
His Post-apocalyptic novel Damnation Alley lent its title (but little else) to a 1977 film. His short story "The Last Defender of Camelot" was adapted (by George R. R. Martin) for an episode of The Twilight Zone (1985).
For biographical details and analysis, see the analysis page.
Roger Zelazny's works with their own trope pages include:
- "Auto-da-Fé" (short story)
- The Chronicles of Amber
- Creatures of Light and Darkness
- Damnation Alley
- Dilvish, the Damned series
- Doorways in the Sand
- Jack of Shadows
- Lord Demon
- Lord of Light
- My Name Is Legion
- A Night in the Lonesome October
- Roadmarks
- "A Rose for Ecclesiastes" (novelette)
- This Immortal
Roger Zelazny's other works provide examples of:
- Adam and Eve Plot: "For a Breath I Tarry", in a complicated (but very sweet) way.
- After the End: Several of his short stories, including "For a Breath I Tarry" and "The Stainless Steel Leech" among others, are set in various post-human worlds, amongst the robotic servants who have inherited the Earth.
- Animated Armor: Merlin's servitor in "The Last Defender of Camelot"
- Author Appeal:
- In quite a few books (The Chronicles of Amber and Lord of Light among them) people smoke a lot— usually cigarettes, sometimes a pipe. Zelazny was himself a heavy smoker until middle-age when he gave it up for health reasons. Whenever he got stuck as to where to go next, he would have a cigarette to think about things, and would put this activity into the text. When he stopped smoking during the second set of Amber books, he also stopped writing about his characters smoking.
- Immortality and longevity are particularly common themes, with many of his characters having achieved immortality in various way; they commonly ponder the meaning of unending life and life experiences beyond the normal human capacity.
- Following on from the immortality thing, accidentally or unwillingly becoming a god in some way. "Lord of Light" is preoccupied with this idea, for instance.
- He also seems to have had a thing for Faust, as variations of the story appear quite a few times in his writings ("The Salvation of Faust", "If At Faust You Don't Succeed", "For a Breath I Tarry").
- Automated Automobiles: Devil Car, and other stories.
- Balance Between Good and Evil:
- The pantheon Zelazny created for Isle of the Dead and To Die in Italbar balances creative against destructive gods.
- In the Amber mythos, the Balance ostensibly hinges between Chaos and Law (Amber), though the battlelines are often blurred both dramatically and philosophically, especially with the reveal around the middle of the first series that the royal family of Amber descend from the royal family of Chaos, and that the Pattern which imposes order on the multiverse is not the one in Amber but in another reality nearby, which is merely reflected in Amber.
- Beneficial Disease: Mr. H in "To Die in Italbar," as a result of being blessed/cursed by a goddess, has every disease and while largely asymptomatic, is dangerously contagious, but can achieve a kind of balance among his diseases to cure individuals of their sicknesses—at the cost of becoming more contagious to others.
- Creator Backlash: he wrote "To Die in Italbar" to fulfill a contractual obligation for his publisher, who declined to publish it; many years later he polished it and resubmitted it, where it was finally published. He later said it was his worst novel and wished he could erase it from existence.
- Criminal Craves Legitimacy: In Today We Choose Faces, the Mafia has successfully gone legitimate and is now a publicly traded company on Wall Street.
- Disappeared Dad: Zelazny's own father died early.
- Amber series: Oberon to Corwin; Corwin to Merlin.
- Sandow to his son in "The Isle of the Dead."
- Roadmarks: Randy is seeking his long-lost father, Red.
- Died During Production: Donnerjack and several other works were incomplete at his death. Zelazny himself finished off several books of other authors who had died.
- Doomed Moral Victor: In the short story "The Keys to December", the main character's people are terraforming a world to fit them, since the only world they could live on was destroyed. The native lifeforms, under the new evolutionary pressure, evolve sentience and religion (worshiping the main character as he awakes every 250 years and patrols the world to see how the terraforming is going). He realizes that they cannot evolve further and, after failing to convince his people to stop or slow the terraforming, leads his believers in a rebellion. Finally, he and his main rival agree to put the question to a vote of their people—as the main character says, if he loses, "I'll retire and you can be God." He loses, and lives out his life as the God of the presumably now-doomed people.
- Dream Weaver: Charles Render in "He Who Shapes"/The Dream Master is a psychotherapist whose therapy consists of influencing his patients' dreams.
- Friend to All Living Things: Justified for Francis Sandow, on the planets whose ecosystems he designed. It's a plot point in one novel when an animal is frightened of him, since it means he's entering enemy territory, and identifies him in a short story.
- Grey-and-Gray Morality: "The Chronicles of Amber" have a pretty bleak and ambiguous moral landscape... after all, if you can access any arbitrary multiverse and infinite copies of the same people, you begin to look on the lives of "mere mortals" as fairly cheap. Corwin is at least callous enough to human life that, when amnesiac, he apparently fought as a German officer during WWIInote , but grudgingly, he'd put himself in harm's way to save his home and (some of) his family members. His claim to the throne is not necessarily the only or most legitimate one, although his father seemingly endorsed it, and it's just as easy to read him as the Villain Protagonist as to read him as the Anti-Hero.
- Hostile Terraforming: In The Keys to December the homeless protagonists are cooling down a planet too hot for them. This forces the local humanoids to evolve civilization on par with Ice Age humans. The main point of the story is the Catforms' dilemma, if they should doom the intelligent natives. There are multiple hints that Ice Ages on Earth may have been a similar terraforming project, which somehow was reverted.
- Human Popsicle:
- In Permafrost characters are frozen solid and remain... alive.
- In Today We Choose Faces, the protagonist is a mob enforcer who was cryogenically frozen and is thawed out in the distant future when a situation arises that requires his particular set of skills.
- Humanity's Wake: For a Breath I Tarry is set in a post-human world inhabited by our robotic servants. They regard mankind as godlike figures from a golden age.
- Inn Between the Worlds: Psychoshop (written with Alfred Bester) has a similar nature, but instead of a bar, it's a sort of pawnshop, "where you can dump any unwanted aspect of your spirit as long as you exchange it for something else".
- Journey to the Center of the Mind: He Who Shapes, see the main text.
- Lightspeed Leapfrog: The backstory of Francis Sandow from Isle of the Dead. He couldn't find his place on Earth and joined the first interstellar expedition on a sleeper ship. Then he found the hard way he wasn't fit to be a colonist, thus he joined the first passing ship that had a vacancy. And then he kept joining new expeditions to run to the farthest border. After over 6 centuries he found that borders outran him:I made one more trip to get away, and it was already too late. People were suddenly all over the place, intelligent aliens were contacted, interstellar trips were matters of weeks and months, not centuries.
- The Little Shop That Wasn't There Yesterday: Psychoshop, a remarkably mobile shop where you pawn elements of your mind!
- Mechanical Horse: Bronze from Creatures of Light and Darkness. Also, more distantly, the Brass Baboon in Donnerjack.
- Mistaken for Exhibit: In A Museum Piece a failed artist decides to leave the world that doesn't understand him and moves to a museum where he pretends to be a Beaten Gladiator, post-Hellenic, "a monument to himself". Then he discovers he's not alone. First he meets Hecuba Lamenting — a girl, who ran away from parents who drove away her artist boyfriend. Then Roman Senators turn out to be retired art critics who wish to kill them to keep the masquerade. Then a mobile Xena ex Machina turns out to be a friendly shipwrecked alien ("somewhat narcissistic" and enjoying being admired). In short: critics smell "of dust and yellow newsprint and bile and time" and modern art is weird.
- Mugging the Monster: "The Last Defender of Camelot" begins with a trio of muggers picking on a harmless-looking old man who turns out to be the last surviving Knight of the Round Table — and not just any knight, but Sir Launcelot du Lac, who never lost a fight in his entire life.
- Non-Mammal Mammaries: Averted in Psychoshop. When the protagonist makes love to his uplifted snake Love Interest, it is noted she has neither breasts nor a navel, although the parts necessary for lovemaking cause no compatibility problems.
- Noodle Incident: In "Isle of the Dead", the final test for worldscaping, which Green-Green failed. It is not described, but Sandow considered it only a formality, while Marling assures him it was not.
- Plot Coupon: Inverted in Forever After.
- Psychic Powers: Coils (1980), by Zelazny and Fred Saberhagen, features a whole team of psychics selected by a Corrupt Corporate Executive because of their mental powers. These include a female telepath, a bio-PK (a former faith-healer who can heal or kill with his mind), a female telekinetic, and the protagonist, a machine empath who can control machines and "dive" into the global computer network.
- Public Domain Character: Merlin, Sir Launcelot and Morgan Le Fay in "The Last Defender of Camelot"
- Really 700 Years Old: Many characters.
- Very few major characters in the Amber series are less than a few thousand years old.
- In "Lord of Light," the main characters are all so old that a whole society worships them as if they actually were the Hindu gods and goddesses they styled themselves after.
- Sophisticated as Hell: Zelazny liked to employ this. In Lord Demon, for example, the title character Kai Wren meets an Irish Sidhe. After exchanging the appropriately formal official greetings, Kai Wren tells the Sidhe his name. The response? "Lord Demon? Holy shit!"
- Talking Your Way Out: Characters are often very chatty — a feature that saves the skin of more than one of them.
- Venus Is Wet: The Doors Of His Face, The Lamps Of His Mouth is one of the last straight examples of Venus being depicted as an ocean world. By the time of writing (it published in 1965), science was beginning to discover the harsh conditions on the real Venus, but the story is meant to hearken back to earlier depictions, and the tone of the work is akin to 40's and 50's pulp sci-fi but with a whiff of irony.
- Walking Wasteland: in "To Die in Italbar," the protagonist, Mr. H, has every human disease, but they keep each other in perfect check most of the time. He can cure people of disease with a touch, but in order to use this power he upsets the balance and becomes contagious. He travels from planet to planet trying to do more good than harm, but leaves a trail of sickness in his wake, especially as people begin to revere him as a holy figure.
- We Can Rule Together: Subverted in "The Last Defender of Camelot"; the villain admits that he never expected to have Launcelot join him, and was only saying it out of spite.
