The Magic (October 1961–October 1967). Roger Zelazny
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illuminate truths, donate to the reader tools (and sometimes weapons) with which he was not equipped before, and for which he can find daily uses, quite outside the limits of his story.
Second, there is, as one reads more and more of this extraordinary writer’s work, a growing sense of excitement, a gradual recognition of something which (in me, anyway) engenders an increasing awe. It comes, strangely enough, not from any of his many excellences, but from his flaws. For he has flaws—plenty of them. One feels at times that a few (a very few, I hasten to add) of his more vivid turns of phrase would benefit by an application of Dulcote (an artists’ material, a transparent spray which uniformly pulls down brightness and gloss where applied). Not because they aren’t beautiful—because most of them are, God knows—but because even so deft a wordsmith as Zelazny can forget from time to time that such a creation can keep a reader from his speedy progress from here to there, and that his furniture should be placed out of the traffic pattern. If I bang my shin on a coffee table it becomes a little beside the point that it is the most exquisitely crafted artifact this side of the Sun King. Especially since it was the author himself who put me in a dead run. And there is the matter of exotic references—the injection of one of those absolutely precise and therefore untranslatable German philosophic terms, or a citation from classical mythology. This is a difficult thing to criticize without being misunderstood. A really good writer has the right, if not the duty, of arrogance, and should feel free to say anything he damn pleases in any way he likes. On the other hand, writing, like elections, copulation, sonatas, or a punch in the mouth, is communication, an absolute necessity to the very existence of human beings in every area, concrete or abstract, which may be defined as that performed by human beings which evokes response in kind from other human beings. Communication is a double-ended, transmitter-receiver phenomenon or it doesn’t exist. And if it evokes a response not in kind (“what the hell does that mean?” instead of “well of course!”) it exists but it is crippled. There is a fine line, and hazy, between following the use of an exotic intrusion with a definition, which can be damned insulting to a reader who does understand it, and throwing him something knobby and hard to hold without warning or subsequent explanation. Yes, a reader should do part of the work; the more he does the more he participates, and the more he is led to participate the better the story (and writer). On the other hand, he shouldn’t be stopped, thrown out of the current in which the author has placed him, by such menaces to navigation, however apt. It comes down to an awareness of who’s listening—to whom the communication is addressed—and what he deserves. He deserves a great deal, because he’s at the other end of something which could not exist without him. Those of him (for he is many) who need pampering do not deserve it. Those who can take anything a really good author can throw at him are an author’s joy—but always a small part of that multifaceted and very human entity. The Reader. There is always, for a resourceful writer, a way to maximize communication by means acceptable to a writer’s arrogance; all he has to do is to think of it. In a writer less resourceful than Zelazny we readily forgive his inability to think of it, but this writer doesn’t have that excuse. Which brings this comment down to its point: Roger Zelazny is a writer of such merit that one judges him by higher standards than those one uses on others—a cross he will bear for all his writing life. Happily the shoulders that bear it are demonstrably well-muscled.
The larger point, derived from this consideration of flaws, has to do with the kind of flaws they are. For in none of the things I have mentioned, nor in the ones I could, is a single one stemming from inability. Every single one is the product of growth, expansion, trial, passage, flux. There is nothing so frightening to be said about a writer (although some writers are not frightened by it) as the laudatory comment “finish.” A perfectly faceted diamond is beautiful to behold, and is by its very existence proof of high skill and hard work; but it has nowhere to go, intrinsically, from there. A great tree reaches its ultimate “finish” when it is killed; and it may then become toothpicks or temples, but as a tree it is dead and gone. Only that which is in constant, day-by-day, cell-by-cell change is alive. And it is in this area that I have detected and increasingly feel a sense of awe in Zelazny’s work, for he is young and already a giant; he has the habit of hard work and of learning, and shows no slightest sign of slowing down or of being diverted. I do not know him personally, but if I did, if I ever do, I would want more than anything else to convey to him the fact that he can and has evoked this awe—that the curve he has drawn with his early work can be extended into true greatness, and that if he follows his star as a writer all other things will come to him. If ever anything seems more important to him—he must know that it isn’t. If ever anything diverts him from writing, he must know to the marrow that whatever it is or appears to be, it is a lesser thing than his gift. He gives no evidence to date that he has stopped growing or that he ever will.
Do you know how rare this is?
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The four stories in this book, listed here by my own intensely personal (and therefore, to you, perhaps fallible) system of ascending excellence, are all of that wondrous species which makes me envy anyone who has not read them and is about to.
“The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth” is all size and speed, which would be a good story if told purely in a write-what-happens, this-is-the-plot style, and which would also be a good story if it confined itself to what went on in the heads and in the hearts of its people, and which is a good story on both counts.
“The Furies” is a tour de force, the easy accomplishment of what most writers would consider impossible, and a few very good ones insuperably difficult. Seemingly with the back of his hand, he has created milieu, characters and a narrative goal as far out as anyone need go; he makes you believe it all the way, and walks off breathing easily leaving you gasping with a fable in your hands.
“The Graveyard Heart” is in that wonderful category which is, probably, science fiction’s greatest gift to literature and to human beings: the “feedback” story, the “if this goes on” story; an extension of some facet of the current scene which carries you out and away to times and places you’ve never imagined because you can’t; and when it’s finished, you turn about and look at the thing he extended for you, in its here-and-now reality, sharing this very day and planet with you; and you know he’s told you something, given you something you didn’t have before, and that you will never look at this aspect of your world with quite the same eyes again.
“A Rose for Ecclesiastes” is one of the most important stories I have read—perhaps I should say it is one of the most memorable experiences I have ever had. It happens (well, I told you this was an intensely personal assignment of rank!) that this particular fable, with all its truly astonishing twists and turns, up to and most painfully including its wrenching denouement, is an agonizing analogy of my own experience; and this astronomically unlikely happenstance may well make it what it is to me and may not reach you quite as poignantly. If it does it will chop you up into dog meat. But as objective as I can be, which isn’t very, I still feel safe in stating that it is one of the most beautifully written, skillfully composed and passionately expressed works of art to appear anywhere, ever.
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Briefly, let me commend to your attention two novels by Roger Zelazny, This Immortal and The Dream Master, and sum up everything I have said here, and a good many things I have not said; sum up all the thoughts and feelings I hold concerning the works of Roger Zelazny, past and to come; sum up what has struck me at each of the peaks of all of his narratives, and without fail, so far, at that regretful moment when I have turned down the last page of any and all of them; sum up all this in one word, which is:
Grateful.
Theodore Sturgeon
Sherman Oaks, California. 1967
When Zelazny was Magic
by Darrell Schweitzer
I remember when Roger Zelazny was magic. This is not to say that he was ever anything but an accomplished, fine writer or that he ever lacked an audience, but there was a period, around 1964–1970, when he was magic, and every new story of his was an event. He was a tremendously variable writer too, so that each event was not like the past