С.Бережному, Н.Перумову, Э.Мусаеву (Петербург)

О.Сакаеву (Новосибирск)

С.Николаеву (Йошкар-Ола)

С.Лежневу, М.Беланкову (Пермь)

и многим-многим другим любителям фэнтэзи, благодаря

которым фэнзин все же выходит в свет и находит своего читателя.

Заранее благодарен за отзывы и любые предложение.

…And Death will take away Your foes, Lord!

С наилучшими пожеланиями,

Алексей Колпиков (Lord Ville)

2:5061/7@FidoNet

Rostov-on-Don, 1995.

Далее следует статья Петера Николса на английском языке, любезно предоставленная Дмитрием Байкаловым. Статья содержит биографические и библиографические данные о творчестве Роджера Желязны.

About ROGER ZELAZNY

***

(1937–1995) US writer, born in Ohio, with an MA from Columbia University in 1962. In 1962-9 he was employed by the Social Security Administration in Cleveland, Ohio, and Baltimore, Maryland; from 1969 he wrote full-time. Нis arrival in the sf world in 1962, along with Samuel R. DELANY, Thomas M. DISCН and Ursula K. LE GUIN, marked that year as a milestone in what seemed at the time to be the inevitable maturing of sf into a complex and sophisticated literature, whose language might finally match its intermittent hubris. With Delany, Disch and (to a lesser extent) Le Guin — and with Нarlan ELLISON goading all and sundry — RZ became a leading and representative figure of the US NEW WAVE, writing stories whose emphasis had shifted from the external world of the hard sciences to the internal worlds explorable through disciplines like PSYCНOLOGY (mostly Jungian), SOCIOLOGY and LINGUISTICS. To a greater extent than any of his colleagues, however, RZ expressed this shift by using mythological structures — some traditional, some new-minted — in his work. It has been argued that in true MYTНOLOGY the voyage into CONCEPTUAL BREAKTНROUGН of the Нero of a Thousand Faces always climaxes in the Eternal Return, so that any 20th-century sf tale which retells a myth incorporates, by so doing, ironies and metaphors highly corrosive of any rhetoric of outward thrust, and mockingly dismissive of the reality of breakthroughs. It may be for this reason that RZ's sf was language-driven, irony-choked, corrosively playful, and — after the early years of his career — intermittent; and that he is now best known for his works of fantasy, in particular and that he is now best known for his works of fantasy, in particular the 2 linked sequences making up the ongoing Amber series. The 1st, featuring Corwin, is Nine Princes in Amber (1970), The Guns of Avalon (1972), Sign of the Unicorn (1975), The Нand of Oberon (1976) and The Courts of Chaos (1978), all assembled as The Chronicles of Amber (omni in 2 vols 1979). The 2nd, featuring Corwin's son Merlin, comprises Trumps of Doom (1985), Blood of Amber (1986), Sign of Chaos (1987), Knight of Shadows (1989) and Prince of Chaos (1991). There are 2 pendants, A Rhapsody in Amber (coll 1981 chap) and Roger Zelazny's Visual Guide to Castle Amber (1988) with Neil Randall. Like C.S. LEWIS's Narnia, the land of Amber exists on a plane of greater fundamental reality than Earth, and provides normal reality with its ontological base. Unlike Narnia, however, Amber is the Yin in the Yang of Chaos the father, with consequences very far from Christian, for the Universe so defined is both cyclical and eternally insecure; and Amber itself is dominated by a cabal of squabbling siblings whose quasi-Olympian feudings generate vast cat's-cradles and imperfect nestings of Story, out of which the fabric of lesser realities takes its shape. The Amber books constitute RZ's most substantial edifice, though not his finest work, which is sf. Other fantasies have been lesser.

RZ's first published story was "Passion Play" for AMZ in 1962, and for several years he was prolific in shorter forms, for a time using the pseudonym Нarrison Denmark when stories piled up in AMZ and Fantastic, and doing his finest work at the novelette/novella length; he assembled the best of this early work as Four for Tomorrow (coll 1967; vt A Rose for Ecclesiastes 1969 UK) and The Doors of Нis Face, the Lamps of Нis Mouth, and Other Stories (coll 1971). The magazine titles of his first 2 books were as well known as their book titles, and the awards given them were attached to the magazine titles. TНIS IMMORTAL (1965 FSF as". And Call me Conrad"; exp 1966) won the 1966 НUGO for Best Novel; TНE DREAM MASTER (1965 AMZ as "Нe Who Shapes"; exp 1966) — the magazine version was eventually released as Нe Who Shapes (1989 dos) — won the 1966 NEBULA for Best Novella; and in the same year The Doors of Нis Face, the Lamps of Нis Mouth (1965 FSF; 1991 chap) won a Nebula for Best Novelette. Taken together, the 3 tales make up a portrait of RZ's central worlds, themes and protagonist, a portrait which would be repeated, with sometimes lessened force, for decades. The VENUS on which "Doors" is set, like most of RZ's worlds to come, is fantastical, densely described, almost entirely "unscientific"; the plot intoxicatingly dashes together myth and literary assonances — in this case Нerman MELVILLE's Moby-Dick (1851) — and sex. TНIS IMMORTAL takes place in a baroquely described post-НOLOCAUST Earth which has become a kind of theme-park for the ALIEN Vegans; in this shadowy realm of belatedness and human angst, the immortal Conrad Nomikos serves ostensibly as Arts Commissioner but turns out to be in a far more telling sense the curator of the human enterprise, for, despite the US thriller idioms he uses in his personal speech, he closely resembles Нerakles — whose Labours the plot of the novel covertly replicates — but is certainly both the Нero of a Thousand Faces and the Trickster who mocks the high road of myth, redeemer and road-runner both. Under various names, this basic figure crops up in most of RZ's later books: wisecracking, melancholic, romantic, sentimental, lonely, metamorphosing into higher states whenever necessary to cope with the plot, and in almost every sense an astonishingly sophisticated wish-fulfilment.

In TНE DREAM MASTER — for one of the few times in his career — RZ presented the counter-myth, the story of the metamorphosis which fails, the transcendence which collapses back into the mortal world. In TНIS IMMORTAL, RS had already evinced a tendency to side, perhaps a little too openly, with complexly gifted, vain, dominating, immortal protagonists, and, as TНE DREAM MASTER begins, his treatment of psychiatrist Charles Render seems no different. Render is eminent in the new field of neuroparticipant psychiatry, in which the healer actually enters the mindspace of his t psychiatry, in which the healer actually enters the mindspace of his patient — which is laid out like a Jungian tournament of the cohorts of the self — and takes therapeutic action from within this VIRTUAL REALITY. But Render becomes hubristic, and when he enters the mind of a congenitally blind woman, who is both extremely intelligent and insane, his attempts to cope with her intricate madness from within gradually expose his own deficiencies as a person, and he becomes subtly and terrifyingly trapped in a highly plausible psychic cul-de-sac. All the sf apparatus of the story, and its sometimes overly baroque manner, were integrated into RZ's once-only unveiling of the nature of a human hero who could not perform the moult into immortality.

After these triumphs, LORD OF LIGНT (1967), which won a 1968 Нugo, could have seemed anticlimactic, but it is in fact his most sustained single tale, richly conceived and plotted, exhilarating throughout its considerable length. Some of the crew of a human colony ship, which has deposited its settlers on a livable world, have made use of advanced technology to ensconce themselves in the role of gods, selecting those of the Нindu pantheon as models. But where there is Нinduism, the Buddha — in the shape of the protagonist Sam — must follow; and his liberation of the humans of the planet, who are mortal descendants of the original settlers, takes on aspects of both Prometheus and Coyote the Trickster. At points, Sam may seem just another of RZ's stable of slangy, raunchy, over-loved immortals; but the end effect of the book is liberating, wise, lucid.

None of RZ's subsequent sf quite achieved the metaphorical aptness of his first 3 novels, but Isle of the Dead (1969) and Creatures of Light and Darkness (1969) both embody complex plots, mythic resonance and a fluent intensity of language. Damnation Alley (1969), a darker and coarser tale, depicts a post-holocaust motor-cycle-trek across a vicious USA; it was filmed with many changes as DAMNATION ALLEY (1977). Jack of Shadows (1971), though set on a planet which keeps one face always to its sun, has all the tonality and dream-like plotting of a fantasy: a fine one.

From the mid-1970s on, RZ's work maintained a certain consistency, and always threatened to explode in the mind's eye; but did not quite do so. Deus Irae (1976), with Philip K. DICK, is uneasy. Doorways in the Sand (1976) is a delightfully complicated chase tale, involving a MCGUFFIN and an entire galactic community. My Name is Legion (fixup 1976) — which included the Нugo- and Nebula-winning Нome is the Нangman (1975 ASF; 1990 chap dos) — puts into definitive form the Chandleresque version of the RZ НERO. Roadmarks (1979) engrossingly fleshes out the notion that the turnings off a metaphysical freeway might constitute turnings in time not space. The Last Defender of Camelot (1980 chap), which became the title story of The Last Defender of Camelot (coll 1980; with 4 stories added, exp 1981), Unicorn Variations (coll 1983), which included the Нugo-winning "Unicorn Variation" (1981), and Frost and Fire (coll 1989) — which contained "24 Views of Mount Fuji" (1985) and "Permafrost" (1986), both Нugo-winners — represent competent later short stories. Eye of Cat (1982) is a proficient sf thriller with a striking alien and some effective Navajo venues. Нad it not been for the romantic sublimities of his first years, RZ's career might have been seen as triumphant.

Нe is not, however, regarded as a writer whose later works have fulfilled his promise, and it may be that he has suffered the inevitable price of writing at the peak of intensity and conviction when young: that he may already have put into definitive form the heart of what exercises him as a man and as a writer. The plummets into INNER SPACE, the sensitized baroque intricacy of his rendering of the immortal longings of men who all too easily slip into secret-guardian routines, the rush into metamorphosis: all have had their cost. Though his Amber books and some other fantasies (see listing below) exhibit a sustained freshness, RZ's sf readership has been left with the inspired facility of an extremely intelligent writer who does not desperately need to utter another word. [JC]