The Road to Amber (4 page)

After a string of weak SF books in the ’70s, the critics, whose darling he had always been, turned sharply on Zelazny, although he remained popular with the readership. By the end of the ’70s, although his critical acceptance as an important science fiction writer had dimmed, his series of novels about the enchanted land of Amber—beginning with
Nine Princes in Amber
—had made him one of the most popular and best-selling fantasy writers of our time, inspiring the founding of fan clubs and fanzines world-wide. And it is as a fantasy writer that posterity will probably judge him.

Zelazny’s approach to fantasy was similar to the brisk, wisecracking, anachronistic slant of the de Camp & Pratt “Harold Shea” stories such as
The Incomplete Enchanter
, but in a somewhat different key, with less emphasis on whimsy (very few authors with the exception of de Camp & Pratt, T. H. White, and Lewis Carroll were ever really able to use whimsy successfully) and more emphasis on action and on dramatic and often quite theatrical showdowns between immensely powerful adversaries. The Zelazny hero (often fundamentally the same person, whether he was called Corwin or Conrad or Sam) faces his supernatural foes with genial good sense, unperturbed calm, and self-deprecating humor, always quick with a quip or a wry witticism. Although the Zelazny hero almost always possesses immense power and resources (which must help to maintain your
sang-froid
when confronting fearsome demons and monsters), he frequently defeats his enemies by outwitting them rather than by using physical might or magical potency. In fact, the typical Zelazny hero, in both fantasy and science fiction, is a benign and genial version of the Trickster, a wry, pipe-smoking Coyote, who, although sometimes scared or bewildered, is usually several moves ahead of his opponents all the way to the end of the game.

The Amber series, of course, is probably Zelazny’s most important sustained contribution to fantasy. It’s worth noticing that the first few volumes of the series were published as science fiction novels by an established science fiction line, but by the time of Zelazny’s death, the Amber books were categorized as fantasy. Amber’s storyline would occasionally touch bases with our modern-day Earth or employ some high-tech gadget, as though Zelazny was deliberately trying to muddy the waters. Perhaps he was, as there are fantasy elements in almost all of his “science fiction” books and science fictional elements in almost all of his “fantasy” books. It’s difficult to believe that these weren’t deliberate aesthetic choices. Zelazny’s other fan¬tasy series, launched before the Amber books, the adventures of Dilvish, the Damned (collected in
Dilvish, the Damned
and a novel
The Changing Land
), is unambiguously Swords & Sorcery. Perhaps as a result, the Dilvish sequence is considerably less interesting and successful. Zelazny himself seemed to lose interest in it for long stretches of time, producing only a few stories in the sequence throughout the ’60s, ’70s, and early ’80s. Zelazny’s most popular, successful, and influential singleton novel,
Lord of Light
, although also ostensibly science fiction, functions as well as fantasy as it does as SF; in fact, the book probably makes more logical sense as a fantasy than it does as a plausible science fiction scenario. I can’t help but wonder if it is an example of an author disguising a fantasy book as science fiction to make it saleable under the market conditions of the time. Again, this may be just another example of Zelazny with his Trickster hat on, deliberately blurring the borderlines between the two genres, perhaps smiling at the thought of some future critic trying to sort things out.
[1]

Zelazny won another Nebula and another Hugo Award in 1976 for his novella “Home Is the Hangman,” another Hugo in 1982 for “Unicorn Variation,” another Hugo in 1986 for his novella “24 Views of Mt. Fuji, by Hokusai,” and a final Hugo in 1987 for his story “Permafrost.” In addition to the multi-volume Amber series, and the titles already mentioned, his other books include the novels
The Dream Master
,
Creatures of Light and Darkness
,
Isle of the Dead
,
Jack of Shadows
,
Damnation Alley
,
Eye of Cat
,
Doorways in the Sand
,
Today We Choose Faces
,
Bridge of Ashes
,
To Die in Italbar
, and
Roadmarks
, and the collections
Four for Tomorrow
,
The Doors of His Face
,
the Lamps of His Mouth and Other Stories
,
The Last Defender of Camelot
,
Unicorn Variations
, and
Frost & Fire
. Among his last works are his last solo novel, the Nebula-nominated
A Night in the Lonesome October
, and three collaborative novels,
Psychoshop
, With the late Alfred Bester,
A Farce to Be Reckoned With
, with the late Robert Sheckley, and
Wilderness
, a mainstream “Western” with Gerald Hausman, and, as editor, four anthologies,
Wheel of Fortune
,
Warriors of Blood and Dream
,
Forever After
, and
The Williamson Effect
. Zelazny died in 1995. A noir mystery,
The Dead Man’s Brother
, was published posthumously in 2009.

Unlike many of the people who wrote essays for these volumes, I can’t claim to have been a close personal friend of Roger’s. We didn’t see each other often even when he lived in Baltimore, and once he moved to New Mexico, on the other side of the continent, we saw each other even less. We said hello and exchanged a few words at convention room parties, occasionally had drinks at a convention bar along with other writers and fans, once or twice had dinner together, and that was largely it. A few images observed at a little closer range stick in my mind, though, and may give you the flavor of the man. One was the infamous Knob Dinner already described by Kristine Kathryn Rusch in volume 2 of this series. Another was during the early mid-’70s, during a week-long writer’s workshop we called the Guilford Gafia (on the model of the Milford Mafia,
bête noire
of conservative SF writers and critics), held by Jack C. (“Jay”) Haldeman in his big, rambling, somewhat rundown wooden house in the Guilford section of Baltimore. Jay’s brother Joe Haldeman, Jack Dann, George Alec Effinger, myself, and others came in for these marathon critique sessions. Roger was never part of the formal workshop itself, but in those days he still lived in Baltimore, only a few blocks away, and every once in a while, when the manuscripts were put away and the wine came out, he’d come over and party with us.

One night we hit the wine bottles particularly hard and began to play an all-night game of poker with a pornographic deck of cards that Ron Bounds had brought back from Germany. They featured a busty blond lady having sex with a rather bemused-looking German Shepherd. Somebody (possibly me) mentioned how the Futurians probably would have taken this opportunity to write a novel during the all-night poker game, using the “hot typewriter” method pioneered by Fred Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth, where one author would write until he got tired, and another would jump in to spell him and keep writing. Of course, we had to do the same thing. A typewriter was broken out, and, taking turns during the poker game, we began to write a pornographic novel to be called either
The Trouble With Smegma
or
Naked Came the Android
(there was some argument on this point), following the model of the then-bestselling round-robin novel
Naked Came the Stranger
. Ultimately, we produced only twenty or thirty pages, and, perhaps fortunately for all concerned, the manuscript has long since been lost. Interestingly, considering the talking dog in
The Dream Master
, Roger’s section concerned a woman having sex with just such a dog, perhaps unsurprisingly considering the cards we were playing with, a German Shepherd. The two lovers throw themselves suicidally from a window, only to be rescued on the following page by the next writer to sit down at the typewriter. I don’t think I ever saw Roger happier than while writing this piffle. Roger’s usual grin was a shy, almost sly one, flashing out for only a second, but he wore his grin for most of that night and kept collapsing in laughter at silly things that he himself or other people wrote. There could be no doubt that he was having
fun
. The next day, a bit hung over, he told us sheepishly that his wife had given him hell for wasting all that time writing crap that he was never going to be able to sell—but I think that he found doing so something of a relief, writing for once without worrying about the salability of what he was producing.

One of the last times I ever saw Roger for any extended period of time was after the 1981 Worldcon in Denver, Colorado. My wife, young son and I and a few friends traveled by car from Denver to Santa Fe for a few days of post-convention vacation. A group of us, including George R. R. Martin, went to visit Roger in his house in Santa Fe (where he gave us a tour of his office and told us slyly that he’d like to win a Gandalf Award
and
a Balrog Award, so that he could have them fighting each other on an office shelf). Afterward, we went with the Zelaznys and their young children to watch the Zozobra Festival, a totally artificial “folk” ritual, thought up by cultural anthropologists, where a giant puppet of Old Man Gloom is set on fire and burns to ash, taking all the troubles and misfortune of the old year with it.

Roger sat on the ground, arms wrapped around his long legs, watching all thls intently. There came that delighted, childlike grin again, the grin of a man who saw the essential absurdity of the world and celebrated it because it
was
absurd, a benign Trickster who, like Corwin or Sam, showed only those cards to the others in the game that he cared to show, but who played the game with elan and panache and enjoyed it thoroughly until the very moment when the time came to cash in his chips.

—Gardner Dozois

1. Zelazny deliberately blurred the line between sf and fantasy, especially in
   Lord of Light
   . See “…And Call Me Roger” part 2 (in volume 2 of this collection). He also talked about mixing sf and fantasy in the Amber series (see “…And Call Me Roger” in volumes 2 and 3).
   

T
he first time I saw Morris Leatham, at the baptismal font where he became my godfather, I was too small for the memory to stick. Thereafter he visited me every year on my birthday, and this year was no exception.

“Morrie,” I said, knuckling my right eye and then my left. I opened them and stared through the predawn light of my bedroom to the chair beside the window with the dead geranium on the sill, where he sat, tall and thin, almost anorectic-looking.

He rose, smiling, and crossed to the side of the bed. He extended a hand, drew me to my feet, and passed me my robe. “Put it on,” he said, as he led me out of the room. My Aunt Rose and Uncle Matt were still asleep. Moments later, it seemed, Morrie and I were walking inside the local mall. It was dimly lit, and there was no one about.

“What are we doing here?” I asked.

“I’d like you to walk through, look around, and tell me what you’d like for a birthday present.”

“I know right where it is,” I said. “Come on.”

I led him past the bench where the night watchman lay unmoving, a wet spot at the crotch of his uniform trousers. I stopped before a store window and pointed.

“Which one?” Morrie asked.

“The black one,” I said.

He chuckled.

“One black bicycle for David,” he said. ”I’ll get you one like that, onIy better. It’ll be delivered later today.”

“Thank you,” I said, turning and hugging him. Then, “Don’t you think we ought to wake that guard up? His boss might come by.”

“He’s been dead for some time, David. Myocardial infarct. Died in his sleep.”

“Oh.”

“That’s how most people say they’d like to go, so he had it good,” Morrie told me. “Just turned seventy-three last month. His boss thought he was younger. Name’s William Strayleigh—‘Bill,’ to his friends.”

“Gee, you know a lot of people.”

“You meet everybody in my line of work.”

I wasn’t sure what Morrie’s line of work was, exactly, but I nodded as if I were.

I woke up again later and cleaned up and dressed and went downstairs for breakfast. There was a birthday card beside my plate, and I opened it and read it and said, “Thanks, Aunt Rose.”

“Just wanted you to know we hadn’t forgotten,” she said.

“My godfather Morrie remembered, too. He was by earlier, and he took me to the mall to pick out a present and—”

She glanced at the clock.

“The mall doesn’t open for another half hour.”

“I know,” I said. “But he got me in anyway. Too bad about the night watchman, though. Died in his sleep on a bench. I’m getting a black ten-speed that’ll be sent over this afternoon.”

“Don’t start on that business again, David. You know it bothers Uncle Matt.”

“Just wanted you to know the bike was coming.”