The Road to Amber (66 page)

A Night in the Lonesome October
was a finalist for the Nebula Award in 1995, the first Zelazny novel since
Doorways in the Sand
to be so honored.

In September 1991, Zelazny outlined the first novel of a new trilogy. He was disenchanted with cyberpunk but wanted to fully explore the potential of virtual reality. William Sanders explained, “In the last years of his life Roger Zelazny often spoke of the need to rescue the virtual reality concept from the rather scabby literary neighborhood it had come to inhabit. VR, he would say, was (at least potentially) the most wonderful of all human creations; it ought to be more than just a technological background for stories about alienated youth versus vicious megacorporations. I remember talking with him once about how no one had ever really come up to the standard of the very first VR story: Ray Bradbury’s ‘The Veldt,’ published way back in the fifties in the old
Saturday Evening Post
.”
[33]

Zelazny began the novel in 1992, writing to a fan, “I’m about to start work on a trilogy—
Donnerjack
,
The Gods of Virtù
, and
Virtù, Virtù
, as soon as I finish writing ‘The Long Sleep’ for
Wild Cards XIII
. One of these days I’ll get
Deathmask
written…”
[34]
In the same letter he also identified
To Die in Italbar
as “my worst book.”

Prior to the release of
Prince of Chaos
, Zelazny hinted that he’d planted seeds of a future Amber tale in his novels. “I feel very much at home with the Amber universe and there are many more things that I can do. I had what I thought was a very neat idea of writing a history of Chaos, of doing a flashback to when Merlin was only 13 or 14 years old and living in the Courts of Chaos. Something that really wouldn’t have much bearing on the story, but which might be a fun story in itself, and having a kid as a protagonist I would attempt to see it as a juvenile. I’ve only written one before [
A Dark Traveling
], and it’s something I’d like to go back to. It wouldn’t change the action but basically just add to the background. I came to see a point in the story where I suddenly saw something that had happened years ago, and I planted a couple of clues in case I ever did want to go back and write the book, and if I don’t, it won’t hurt anyone.”
[1]
Elsewhere he intimated that the juvenile piece would include Merlin, Glait, Kergma, and the opal vase; in another piece he planned to explain the origin of Merlin’s horse Tiger and Benedict’s horse Glemdenning.
[35]
He also hinted that Corwin’s sword was “something else” before it became a sword, and “the partial image of the Pattern upon the blade Grayswandir was placed there
by
the Pattern, for its own protection.”
[35]

Zelazny envisioned a series of linked Amber short stories to tie up some loose ends from the novels, planning to assemble those stories into a novel or a collection. He wrote five in total, including , (in order), “The Salesman’s Tale,” “Blue Horse, Dancing Mountains,” “The Shroudling and the Guisel,” “Coming to a Cord,” and “Hall of Mirrors.” He never wrote the tale about Merlin and the opal vase or the story about the horses’ origins. However, he did reveal the “something else” about Grayswandir in “The Salesman’s Tale” and “Hall of Mirrors”: Grayswandir and Brand’s sword Werewindle were both originally spikards.

He wrote “The Salesman’s Tale” for the anthology
Ten Tales
while visiting England, where he was guest of honor at Lunicon/Unicon 14 in Leeds from July 30 to August 1, 1993. In 1994 he said, “I don’t have time to do another Amber novel for a while, but I do have a lot of loose ends I want to tie up from the earliest books, which people keep writing me letters about. I thought I would also characterize some of the people I didn’t get to characterize fully and maybe even lay some groundwork for some stuff I want to do later. It will be a series of short stories—I’ll do an Amber short story every now-and-then while I write other stuff, and hopefully some day I’ll have enough to put together a new collection of tales of Amber, and then go on to write a couple more Amber novels.”
[17]
“I’ll eventually collect them into something like
Tales of Amber
, a collection of short stories which would serve as a kind of resting spot.”
[36]
To an interviewer he added, “I know what’s going to happen next, but I can’t tell you. I’d have to kill you afterwards.”
[17]

Several years’ intermittent exchanges between Zelazny and author Ed Greenwood (creator of Forgotten Realms Dungeons & Dragons campaign setting and novels) generated a unique Corwin and Fiona tale.
[37,38]
In 1977 Greenwood idly wrote six sentences of dialogue on a bookmark and placed it in his father’s copy of
Nine Princes in Amber
. He met Zelazny at the Urcon 1 convention in Rochester in March 1979 and asked him to sign
Nine Princes
. Zelazny discovered the bookmark, read Greenwood’s words, identified that Fiona and Corwin were speaking, and promptly wrote eight lines to continue the story. Delighted, Greenwood wrote the next section immediately after returning home—and in so doing, noticed that Zelazny had forgotten to sign the book! Seven years elapsed before they met again. Zelazny contributed a second section in June 1986 at the Ad Astra VI Convention in Toronto and a third section in May 1992 at Marcon 27 in Columbus, Ohio. Over time, Greenwood progressed from fan to author to Guest of Honor at conventions that Zelazny attended, and the bookmark acquired a second sheet of paper. “I planned to bring the ‘bookmark collaboration’ to GenCon in 1995…to pass it back and forth with Roger at a worldbuilding panel planned for that con (where we were both scheduled to be GoHs), but Roger died before the convention.”
[38]
This fragment is the only known Amber fiction that Zelazny wrote collaboratively. Together with interstitial biography describing the exchanges with Zelazny, the story ultimately appeared in the last issue of
Amberzine
(March 2005).

The Mask of Loki
was judged successful, so Zelazny and Thomas T. Thomas initiated their second novel,
Flare
. Editor and publisher Jim Baen again proposed a story in the
Wizard World
sequence, but they rejected that idea. Baen also required the senior author to provide an outline to the junior author, but Zelazny agreed to let Thomas write his own outline.
Flare
was hard science fiction. “I suggested we do a tribute to George Stewart, who wrote about natural disasters in
Storm
and
Earth Abides
. This novel would be set in the next couple of hundred years, when humans have spread throughout the solar system and deal with a massive solar flare. Roger and I actually got to talk together and shared some thoughts on structure and timing for a book whose main event passes through the system at just under light speed.”
[39]

Zelazny commented, critiqued, and suggested scientific articles that Thomas should read. A science editor double-checked the plausibility of the science. Zelazny was inspired to write the lengthy poem, “Ikhnaton’s Hymn to the Sun,” excerpts of which functioned as section breaks. “I felt it might be interesting to go way back to the early days (Egypt, 14
^th
century, BC) and try a contemporary version of Ikhnaton’s ‘Hymn to the Sun’—that earliest expression of monotheism, appropriated some seven hundred years later when the need for Psalm CIV occurred [Psalm CIV in the Bible is based on the ancient Egyptian poem]… That done, we used excerpts from my rendition in
Flare
‘s section breaks.”
[40]

Overall, Zelazny was less involved in this second collaboration. While hard science is not prominent in most other Zelazny novels, it is entirely in keeping with the Hugo and Nebula Award-winning “Home Is the Hangman” and other novellas from
My Name Is Legion
. Some readers have argued that the quark-like aliens in the sun and the alien tourists at the end of
Flare
must have been Zelazny’s ideas. When asked, Thomas dimly remembered creating both himself but freely acknowledged that Zelazny could have suggested them early in their collaboration. “To me, they were that strange, separate, non-human dimension that makes a Zelazny book, like the demons and fire elementals in
Lord of Light
.”
[39]

After many years’ work, Amber Diceless Role-Playing Game finally came out in 1991. Although Wujcik created the bulk of the game, Zelazny provided input into character and setting in response to Wujcik’s questions. The Zelazny Archives at Syracuse University contains their considerable correspondence. The book became especially popular in France upon release of a French translation, and this led to such spin-offs as an official set of Amber Trumps (Tarot d’Ambre).

It had taken a couple of decades, but in 1992 Donald M. Grant finally published these two children’s books in a signed, slipcased limited edition, illustrated by Vaughn Bodé. They both (minus the illustrations) appear in this collection, and the afterwords detail the struggle to publish them. Paperback editions were planned but never appeared, possibly because Zelazny’s death complicated matters.

After myriad exchanges between Zelazny and Gerald Hausman, their collaboration
Colterglass
neared completion. “I’m just about finished with a western historical novel that I’ve done in collaboration with Gerry Hausman, another fellow here in Santa Fe…it’s something different that I’ve always wanted to try. He started telling me about his idea and got me interested in it, so we started working together. I’m very happy with it.”
[41]

Hausman recalled, “It took us one school year to complete the novel [after the first several chapters], and when it was done, we were really close friends, and the novel’s completion was a little sad because our working methods had been so smooth and so well-integrated, and we’d had so much fun writing it together. Roger left the Colter chapters exactly as written except he asked if I wouldn’t mind letting him write Colter Chapter 15: ‘The hawk soared.’ It’s a one-line chapter, brilliant in its spare poetry. He also added the litany of Colter’s final assets at the close of Chapter 19. Once again, he made it into a poem: a Whitmanic list of the things that Colter left behind him when he died. [This is the poem “Walking, of Course.”] I love these two wonderful embellishments to the novel—Roger was an inventor, and he used poetry inventively with prose.”
[21]

They completed the novel in 1992 and sold it to Tor the following year, changing the title to
Wilderness
at the editor’s request. Hausman’s daughter Mariah Fox created pen and ink illustrations for the book.
[42]

Zelazny’s fascination with myths and religions extended into mysticism and spiritualism. He believed that consciousness could escape and survive the physical body.
[43]
He told Carl Yoke that he could project astrally
[43]
and told his friend Gerald Hausman that “the spirit lives on before, during and after death, and it is no more confined to our definitions of existence than we are bound by our limitations in not being able to see it with our eyes.”
[44]

Several unusual incidents convinced Hausman. “Roger was clairvoyant. If you were thinking something, he felt it and sometimes commented on it.”
[45]
On one occasion, Hausman was having a conversation with Trent Zelazny, who “asked me what my favorite movie was, and I had told him, without hesitation,
Black Orpheus
. No sooner had I said this than I looked up, and, about one hundred yards away, we both saw Roger’s van pull into the parking lot…I said to Trent, ‘One would probably think, even at this distance, that Roger could hear us talking.’ Trent laughed, ‘He probably can.’ We walked to where Roger was, and he greeted us warmly. Then he whispered two words into my ear.
‘Black Orpheus,’
he said, his face lit with a grin that quickly faded as he got [back] into the van.”

Hausman felt this exemplified Zelazny’s “mystical side. Not as a writer but perhaps as a telepath and as a person who saw many dimensions at the same time. He saw what I was doing months and even years before I did it.”
[46]

Zelazny and Sheckley finished their second collaboration in late 1991 or early 1992, but it did not go smoothly. The original plan for this trilogy placed Zelazny in the senior role, guiding Sheckley. For
Bring Me the Head of Prince Charming
, Sheckley wrote a quick draft based on Zelazny’s outline, and Zelazny wrote the final version. For
Faust
they took turns, writing sections and mailing the manuscript back and forth. Zelazny was shocked to discover that Sheckley was rewriting what he’d sent to him.
[15]
Zelazny’s stated policy was not to rewrite a collaborator’s words, and he called Sheckley to tell him to stop. But Sheckley continued to rewrite Zelazny, causing him to become increasingly disenchanted with the project. After
If at Faust You Don’t Succeed
appeared, he told Carl Yoke that he would never collaborate on a novel again.
[15]

The pair began the contracted third volume almost immediately, but Zelazny’s dissatisfaction with Sheckley’s rewrites affected its quality. It was panned for not being funny, for having annoying and tiresome characters, and for incoherent plotting. A letter from Sheckley to Zelazny reveals that only with the third book was Sheckley starting to consider it a trilogy with an inherent structure. “I didn’t think about it so much as a trilogy as a book and a sequel and a final book before we get everybody tired of the characters. Now it looks as though there’s an actual tripartite structure here that has been building. The second book was a lot heavier in terms of ideas than the first. I think maybe we ought to go this way. I think we’re on to something now…”
[47]
The critical reaction indicated that everybody was tired of the characters before A
Farce to Be Reckoned With
; Zelazny was relieved to fulfill the contractual obligation.