Renewal is an abiding concern of Roger Zelazny's writing, especially his early work. In fact, this theme is so deeply engrained in his thinking that most of his significant fiction uses it in one way or another. "A Rose for Ecclesiastes" treats the restoration of fertility to a barren Mars and the salvation of the natives from racial suicide. This Immortal treats the restoration of an irradiated Earth. Lord of Light treats the renewal of a society. The five "Amber" novels ...

Recently, writers and publishers in the book field seem to be discovering the serial all over again. No, not the series of novels, in which each story has some kind of an ending…. I mean a serial—a single story published in several books. That's a matter of turning one into many, making each book only an installment of the whole. That strikes me as being completely unfair to the reader, who purchases a book in the expectation that he's getting a story—only to find out that...

Roger Zelazny infuriates me. I am not speaking as a reader. As a science fiction reader for seventeen years, I am impressed almost to the point of reverence by Zelazny. Nor am I speaking in personal terms. I've met Roger, and he is at the very opposite end of the spectrum from infuriating. But in my capacity as a reviewer, I am infuriated by Roger Zelazny. He does things, magic things, with words, things that cannot be neatly marked, catalogued and described. He employs concepts and symbolism that sh...

In describing his own works of fiction, Graham Greene takes care to distinguish between two kinds of books: his serious novels, like "The Power and the Glory" and "The Heart of the Matter," and what he calls his entertainments, like "Stamboul Train" and "The Confidential Agent." By signaling his intentions so clearly, Greene has saved readers and critics a lot of trouble. Serious literature may be entertaining, but that is hardly its primary function; ...

If there's one thing Roger Zelazny has always had it's a sense of style. Often that's all he's had, but there's no doubt he made his mark early in the sixties … partly on the basis of it. The Doors of His Face is a collection of short stories from 1963 to 1968, but it's a strange collection to say the least. Oh, a few of the big ones are here: the now famous title story and the equally famous "A Rose for Ecclesiastes" especially…. Other g...

[Zelazny is perhaps as skillful as any other SF writer (with the obvious exception of Ursula Le Guin) and far more skillful than most.] [Zelazny] would surely be a great success as a scriptwriter for soap operas, who found the theme best suited to his talents and inclinations in one of the stories in Four For Tomorrow, "A Rose for Ecclesiastes," perhaps the best story ever on Mars as a dying world, but who went quite overboard in another, "The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth,&...

Roger Zelazny is a genial writer who sometimes manages to give old themes new twists to accomplish something bordering on the extraordinary. He does this in four instances in this collection of fifteen stories [The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth]—"Devil Car" in which the autos are self-mobile; "The Mortal Mountain" a long climb to the highest mountain in the near universe and well worth the struggle; "A Museum Piece" in which failed artists and cyn...

The time [of Deus Irae, written by Zelazny and Philip K. Dick] is post-World War III; the place a wasteland America, peopled with mutant races and presided over by a God of Wrath, one Carleton Lufteufel, who had been instrumental in bringing about World War III in the first place. Tibor McMasters, an incomplete (born without arms or legs, fitted with bionic counterparts), is commissioned to seek out the God of Wrath and to paint his portrait. It is the search for Lufteufel, and its implications, which the b...

There is no set "Roger Zelazny" story. He can take the reader on tour across a radiation-scarred America in one story and show him/her a wizards' duel in the next, swinging easily from hard science to dark fantasy. What his stories do have in common is a strong sense of background. He works as hard at making his settings three-dimensional as he does with his characters. (Or should I say "as he does with his other characters?") Setting, however, doesn't speak, and on...

Philip Dick and Roger Zelazny's co-production, Deus Irae, lavishly strews wheezes, rather than ideas. Post-atomic, fragmented, monster-laden world; sardonic religion, the Servants of Wrath, idolizes Carl Lufteuful, the man who pressed the ultimate button; limbless painter sent on pilgrimage on cow-powered cart to find the Holy Face; various encounters with weird philosophical beasts, machines, mutants and metaphysics. Much irony about the relativism of religion and morality, somewhat in the style of ...