Островът на мъртвите

Francis Sandow #1

by Roger Zelazny

Човек може да се превърне в бог, стига да е наистина изключителен. Не в земен бог, защото човекът си е просто човек… Но сега насреща е Франсис Сандоу, мъж, забележителен във всяко едно отношение. Негов покровител е Шимбо, Гръмовержецът на Кулата, чиято свръхестествена сила е част от пантеона на пей’анската религия. Сандоу открива, че настоящата му личност се е сляла с едно древно съзнание. Че може да борави с гръмотевицата като с оръжие и да разцепи небето… И твърде скоро бива въвлечен във верига от събития, които го довеждат до жестока конфронтация. Не всички богове на пей’анската религия са благосклонни. Отново е тук Белион, негов враг от незапомнени времена. Белион и Шимбо трябва да се срещнат в опустошителен сблъсък.

Но човек не може да оцелее в конфликта си с бог.

Genres: Science Fiction, Fantasy, Fiction, Science Fiction Fantasy, Speculative Fiction, Religion, Classics

240 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1969

About the author

Roger Joseph Zelazny was an American fantasy and science fiction writer known for his short stories and novels, best known for The Chronicles of Amber. He won the Nebula Award three times (out of 14 nominations) and the Hugo Award six times (also out of 14 nominations), including two Hugos for novels: the serialized novel ...And Call Me Conrad (1965), subsequently published under the title This Immortal (1966), and the novel Lord of Light (1967).

Reviews

[Craig · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of Zelazny's mythic best, but it's frequently forgotten as it's overshadowed by Creatures of Light and Darkness, Lord of Light, and Amber. This one may be one of his sf best, and I believe it may have been influenced by Heinlein. It's a rather short work, and is definitely worth a read.

[Анастасія ꒰⁠⑅⁠ᵕ⁠༚⁠ᵕ⁠꒱⁠˖⁠♡ · Rating 3 out of 5]

Я не знаю як описати те, що я прочитала. У нас тут Сендоу, який а-ля чи то гуманоїд, чи то ще щось, бо якщо були згадки, то пройшли повз мене(але точно не людина). Він міг носити різні подоби. Здебільшого книжка це помста якогось зеленого чувака, який потім виявляється ще і пошкодує що попер до нього і вкрав ті стрічки, через які він ожив одного з ворогів Сендоу.

Тут були присутні боги, і якщо чесно, я очікувала куди більшого, а так, я навіть не дуже і запам'ятала їхню битву, хоча ні, інший бог наче вмер, або зникнув, фіг пам'ятаю.

Книжка нібито маленька (в електронці 150 сторінок), але відчуття, що всі 300, ніби читаю, а воно якось і не читається.

Тут є ще друге оповідання, це про сина Сендоу(його якось по іншому ще звати), і по суті, вона розповідає як планета в'язнів (його син один з них) евакуюються, і цей син вирішив провести експеримент (бля), який говорить, що за останньою персоною повинен прийти творець??? ну словом ким був там батько його(а батько в нас Сендоу) і він прийшов (як не дивно) і вони разом пішли, на цьому все. ЩО БЛЯТЬ ТАКЕ ЦЕ БУЛО? Воно десь 20 сторінок це оповідання, і до кінця не зрозуміло, А ЩО ДАЛІ? Хуйня якась.

[Skallagrimsen]

Isle of the Dead is fast paced, solidly premised, filled with imaginative imagery and understated wit. Yet a rather pale shadow next to Roger Zelazny's best work: e.g. Lord of Light, A Night in the Lonesome October, Doorways in the Sand, or his many brilliant short stories and novellas.

Mysterious, quasi-immortal, and ultra-wealthy Francis Sandow is the last survivor of the Twentieth Century and master of the esoteric art of "worldscaping" (terraforming): a prototypical protagonist for Zelazny.

I suppose Sandow symbolizes the creative process of the science fiction author. His agon supplies a kind of meta-commentary on the creative type who also subsists by building worlds with the power of his imagination.

These days, however, Sandow might still better represent the megalomaniacal mega-billionaire class, and their open secret dreams of remaking our world in their own image. With perhaps just a bit of thoughtful tweaking, Isle of the Dead might make a pretty good movie, even a socially relevant one. Still, middling Zelazny, at best.

[Ian · Rating 4 out of 5]

* Updated. Reread as part of lsle of the Dead/Cat's Eye double edition*
4.4 ⭐

A little more accessible perhaps than Zelazny's more mystical stuff (Lord of the Light) this novel still touches on some of his favorite themes: man as God; immortality (relatively speaking) through technology; religion as a form of power.

The first part of the Francis Sandow saga of two novels and one short story ( that's all that I'm aware of, anyway). Sandow is a "worldscaper" who uses the powers imparted by to him by his mastery of an ancient, alien religion to terraform planets.
He's pretty successful at it, being stinking rich, with his own private world to live on (Home-free) and his own space yacht (The Model T). He's also the last living person born in the Twentieth century, having survived through a combination of choice, luck and technology. During his long life he's made his share of powerful enemies, some of whom have been collected and revived by an unknown enemy with a long-range and intricate plan of revenge.

Not a long novel but the characters are still well drawn and Zelazny's own efforts at worldscaping are detailed and believable.
An enjoyable, not-too-demanding, story.

[Alazzar · Rating 4 out of 5]

I feel like I’ve heard a lot of people talk about how much they love Francis Sandow in Zelazny discussions online. As such, I was excited to dive into this book, and had very high expectations.

To put things simply, it was great. But there was something about Isle that I felt kept it from being on the level of stuff like the Amber series, Lord of Light, This Immortal, A Night in the Lonesome October . . . you get the idea. I’m not sure what it was. I think it may have just been that the book felt like it started a little slow to me. Once things really started taking off, it was great, but I wasn’t immediately sucked in like I was with some of the aforementioned titles.

The thing I probably liked most was the mythology Zelazny created here. In a lot of his books he used pre-existing mythology and adapted it to a real-world (or, rather, future-real-world) setting (like with Lord of Light and Creatures of Light and Darkness). And I love those books. But in Isle, Zelazny created his own religion (which, as far as I know, wasn’t based on any real mythology) and melded it with the scientific process of “worldscaping.” The idea was that, in order to create a new world, you have to have a sort of God-complex, and that means invoking the power of a deity during the creation process. The question is: are the gods invoked by worldscapers real, or are they just a belief that gives the worldscapers the confidence they need to make their creations?

As I write this, I respect Zelazny’s creativity in this book more and more. A part of me wants to give Isle 5 stars, but I’m going to stick with 4 just because it’s becoming too much of a habit to just immediately give Zelazny books 5. (It sorta cheapens things for the rest of the books!)

Overall, Isle of the Dead was fantastic, and I’ll be happy to read it again some day.

[Brendon Lowe · Rating 3 out of 5]

Took me a half the book to get into this, was very hard to follow initally but wrapped up nicely at the end. It is definately half sci fi and fantasy mixed together. Nothing special really.

[Oleksandr Zholud · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a New Wave mix of SF and fantasy from the late 60s. the book was nominated for Nebula in 1969 and therefore is a part of monthly reading for January 2021 at Hugo & Nebula Awards: Best Novels group.

This is a story of the oldest man alive, surviving from the 20th to 32nd Francis Sandow. Now he is one of the richest men in the galaxy and some strange items arrive in his mail (paper one!), namely recent (?) photos of people he knew and loved but who are long dead. As he investigates what happens, his internal monologue infodumps his back story and we become aware that now he is much more than a man, namely, he was trained as a god by a representative of a very old alien race, Pei’an. A god actually means that he learnt to create habitable planets, a kind of terraforming. As he puts it We spoke for a time of the worlds we had made, of the places we had built and seen populated, of all the sciences that are involved in the feat of transforming rubble into a habitation and, ultimately, we spoke of the art. The ecology game is more complicated than any chess game, goes beyond the best formulations of any computer. This is because, finally, the problems are esthetic rather than scientific ones.

This is a strange story: it may look dated but actually the author uses old stuff even for the 60s, starting from the fact that his space-baggy is named Model T, or that his orgies and costumes have a whiff of the 1920s. It is an intentionally not hi-tech story, and while there is a futuristic tech, like memory recording and cloning or faster than light travel it is more like a background. There are grumblings that ought to sound poetic but which don’t work for me.

I was a fan of Roger Zelazny since my teens. Some of his works, like Lord of Light, I appreciate now more than when I’ve first read them. however, this is not the case for this story (yet). It feels poorly written.

[Иван Величков · Rating 5 out of 5]

При този автор няма как да не съм пристрастен, но книгата е една от неговите, които съм направил парцал от препрочитане. Също така е предистория на може би най-любимата ми книга на Зелазни – Да умреш в Италбар.

Франсис Сандоу е един от най-богатите хора в галактиката. Случайно станал адепт на древна религия, приличаща доста на индуизма, следвана от умираща извънземна раса. Харесан от един от нейните богове, той получава безсмъртие и умението да изгражда цели светове.
Уморен от живота и затънал в безсмислен разкош, героят започва да получава анонимни фотографии на отдавна починали негови приятели. Докато търси подателя се забърква в игра, която е по-голяма и от двамата и осъзнава, че да си съсъд на божественото не е само цветя и рози. Оказва се забъркан в битка много по-стара от човечеството.

От тази книга съм научил за писането, така както го разбирам, много повече отколкото от всички наръчници, които са ми попадали:
- Есето с което започва сигурно ми е най-любимото парченце литература, а плавното му преминаване в историята на романа е висш пилотаж.
- Циментирането на образа на героя със случайни срещи с хора от миналото и неангажиращите разговори с тях е запазена марка на Зелазни. Показва, че героят не е тапет пляснат върху историята, а живее собствен живот.
- Хватката с няколкото малки(по 3-4 изречения) ретроспективни историйки, които показват как са се изградили моралът и мотивацията на Франсис също е гениален.
- Философията вкарана непряко в неангажиращ разговор с духовният му учител също си заслужава да се препрочита.
- Щриховането на света наречен „Острова на мъртвите”, където неизказаното показва много повече от написаното...
- Експериме��тите с текста като цяло ги надминават само тези в „Окото на котката”.
- Типичното за автора смесване на фантастика и фантазия, омесвайки допуските на двата жанра в хомогенна маса ги бие само „Мост от пепел”.
Горещо препоръчвам!
P.S. Въпросната картина на Арнолд Бьоклин, която според мен трябваше да е на корицата, вместо това зелено извращение.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

Almost any other author would have made this 300 pages longer and volume one of a five-part series. Zelazny, as always, resists the urge to add inessential content, and the book is the better for it. Embedded in the narrative, along with a fairly snappy plot, are musings on mortality, the legitimacy of use of violence in self-defense, the extent to which people change over time, the influence of societal culture on individual character, and probably a few other things too. I think this may be my favorite of Zelazny's standalone novels from the late 1960s, despite some of the others being much better known.

[Jamie · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wanted to like this, I really did. But I really didn't. It took half the book to even start to get into it and it was just too bizarre and not enough explainations for things. Maybe it is too dated for me for a sci-fi. I also found it quite sexist. Even for when it was written. I saw potential but a lot of things needed to be done differently, more information given. I could not visualize this. In many ways I felt like it took place in the 1920s-1940s. Not much of a sci-fi feel very often. A few moments but they never last.

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is followed by "To Die in Italbar". It's an interesting blend of SF & Fantasy. A human studies to make worlds, honing his psyche & psi powers to host an alien god. Another human tries to do the same & picks up a god who is enemies with the first & lays a trap for him. Humans are the pawns, the galaxy is the chess board. An interesting look in how power is handled.

[Al "Tank" · Rating 2 out of 5]

The story is okay, but the author inserted a LOT of "fluff" to get it up to 50,000 words. This should have been a novella.

The story is more about a problem the main character (told in first person) has than his development from an "ordinary" person to a worldscaper who seems to be immortal (or the next thing to it).

Like most fictional immortals, he has a lot of mortals who've crossed his path in his lifetime. Lovers, enemies, friends, etc. Some of these have been revived via growing a new body and implanting memories from the old (read the book to find out how -- it's not germane to the main plot other than the author had to come up with a method). These people are used as bait to lure him to the "Isle of the Dead" for the purpose of murdering him.

That's the bare bones of the story. The conflict and the ending are all there and fairly well laid out.

I've read this in the past and completely forgot it. Having read it again, I'm going to put the book into my trading bag (used book stores). I don't want to read it again. It doesn't live up to "modern" novels which have more meat and less fluff. People who like fluff may enjoy it more than I did.

[Caroline · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book was just meh all the way through - I didn't find anything I really liked about it. The world building wasn't detailed enough for me. At the beginning there were a lot of things I was excited to learn more about. What is worldscaping? How does bearing a Name work? But by the end, the book hadn't deliveRed. I didn't care much about any of the characters, and the main character was a bit annoying. I also didn't get wrapped up in the plot.

[Floriane · Rating 5 out of 5]

Je ne suis pas objective, Zelazny est mon héros :)

[George · Rating 5 out of 5]

I derived a Samhain ritual from this one.

[John Folk-Williams · Rating 5 out of 5]

I decided to delve for the first time into the work of Roger Zelazny. It’s just as brilliant as everyone says, and the first book of his I read, Isle of the Dead, is the one I picked for this review. It may not be as famous as the Lords of Amber series, but it is a classic, and left me wishing for far more books featuring the central character of Francis Sandow. There is one more that I know of in which he plays a minor role – To Die in Italbar, and one short story, but Isle of the Dead is the major work with Sandow as the central character, and it’s a gem.

Zelazny begins the story with Sandow’s strong narrative voice that reminded me of one of Dashiel Hammet’s hardboiled detectives. But that voice works through a complicated opening picture, as well as a punchy verbal style. He describes a version of Tokyo Bay as an image of the ebb and flow of life. The bay collects all the flotsam and wreckage of the world, but also beautiful things that sweep in on the tides. Then the tides recede, and good and bad alike are swept out to sea. He is at once cynical, world-weary and sensitive to the good things life can bring you amid the trash – even if they are washed away again by time, or the tides of Tokyo Bay.

Frank Sandow is an ultra-wealthy worldscaper, someone who developed the ability after long apprenticeship, to fashion planets to order. This has not only made him one of the richest men in the galaxy but also the possessor of a dozen or so worlds of his own. Homefree is the one he lives on most of the time, and it is there, amid his perfectly tailored sunsets, meals prepared by a great Rigelian chef, his intimacy needs answered by a highly paid courtesan, that he receives a series of disturbing messages. These come in the form of pictures of people he once knew who are long dead, in some cases centuries dead. That is possible because Sandow, thanks to having been in cryo-sleep for hundreds of years during interstellar voyages before the advent of faster than light travel, is the last survivor of the twentieth century in the third millenium. He has also preserved a younger body through special medications.

A different message arrives from one of the most important people in his life, a Pei’an, who mentored him through a thirty-year training that not only instilled the power of telepathy but also confirmed him in the name of one of the Pei’an gods. That god is Shimbo, shrugger of thunder, the only Pei’an god to have a human form. The Pei’ans are described as green, seven feet tall with funnel shaped heads, flat on top with a narrow neck. His mentor, Marling, is dying and promises to reveal who is sending him the cryptic messages if he will accompany him in the ritual of death. This involves the two of them entering a journey into a dreamworld from which only one returns to the land of the living. Sandow agrees and learns that another Pei’an, named Gringrin, has been preparing an elaborate revenge for years simply because Sandow had been able to complete the ritual of Naming, and the Pei’an had not.

........

Isle of the Dead is carefully constructed and, despite the sometimes lush language, moves toward its climax with no wasted motion. Zelazny evokes characters, landscape and complex fight scenes in swift strokes that always hit the mark. He’s quickly become one of my favorite writers – too bad I didn’t get to him sooner.

Read the full review at SciFi Mind.

[Jerry · Rating 4 out of 5]

“How many miles to Acheron?”

This was not just yet another great Zelazny story. It has to be a source for Douglas Adams’s Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. Zelazny’s worldscapers are extraordinarily close to Adams’s Magratheans. They are the guardians of a secret craft, that of building planets to order. They even sneak in personal quirks. And of course they become immensely wealthy.

They’re exactly like serious versions of Slartibartfast. Unless there is a genre of immensely wealthy world-builders that has escaped my attention (not even close to impossible) there is almost no chance that Adams wasn’t influenced by this book.

Frank Sandow is one of those immensely wealth world-builders, an earthling who worked his way into the community of Megapei worldscapers and is now among the top 100 richest people in the known worlds.

Now, someone keeps sending him photos of long-dead friends, and he has no idea who; and an ex-wife writes him for help. He asks his old mentor on Megapei for help, and receives a cryptic “come at once”. Are they related? Of course.

Also related, every worldscaper is enrolled in the ancient Megapei religion, and receives a patron deity. It’s all very pro-forma and yet… it also gives the worldscaper the ability to tap into power sources on planets they build, and when they walk into any temple on any world, their patron’s eyes light up…

Is there something to this ancient religion after all?

This is, as to be expected from Zelazny, a very unique book. It doesn’t completely transcend the science fiction of its age, however; it’s firmly stuck with the “rich protagonist who acts like a normal person” trope. For no particular reason—it has no reasonable bearing whatsoever on the rest of the book—Sandow mentions in passing about his youth in the twentieth century that “Malthus was right”.

Technically, this is one of the reasons that Sandow and others took the opportunity to join one of the first manned flights to another star system. But of course there is no reason to invoke such a tired idea to convince people to visit other stars.

Also very typical of the era, Zelazny, in this 1969 book, has the first manned flights to the stars happen in 1991. Like most science fiction authors, Zelazny was a very optimistic Malthusian.

Because of his space travels, Sandow is centuries beyond his youth, so this also has no bearing on the story; Zelazny does not, for example, fall prey to the other trope often used by science fiction authors of his era in having his far-future world nostalgic for the twentieth century. Sandow does have an archaic system of record-keeping, but there’s no sense given that it’s superior to modern record-keeping; in everything else Sandow revels in a life of modern wealth in the most modern of crafts, building entire worlds.

[Hanna Kyrychenko · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mood: Ragapop - Gordosti

Мені сподобалося читати між рядків. Ось що вирізняє класичну фантастику від сучасної. Менше невимовних слів і незрозумілих технологій, більше філософії і ідей. Я б хотіла почитати більше про життя Френка Ландау. Оповідь відчувається наче притча але не грузить, подій, як на таку коротку книжку, багато але в них не губишся. Це одна з тих книжок які не шкода лишити на полиці щоб через певний час перечитати.

[PostMortem · Rating 3 out of 5]

Краткият разказ ("Роза на Еклисиаста") поместен в книгата ми хареса в пъти повече от едноименното произведение. Не знам дали очаквах повече от второто или самият му обем предполагаше в съзнанието ми нещо по-изящно и интересно, но...

В крайна сметка, "Островът на мъртвите" не ме впечатли много. Беше интересна новела, четивна и стилно написана, но някак не е от любимата ми бира.

[Igor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Zelazny dealing with immortality, gods, passage of time and human nature in way only he could :)

[Tess · Rating 5 out of 5]

Обидві новели такі потужні і цікаві
А ще робота перекладача — титанічна.

[NovaLiS · Rating 4 out of 5]

7

[Doug · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars. Better than Eye of Cat, which it was paired with. I was intrigued by the "worldscapers" and the alien gods.

[Rog Petersen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Like all Zelazny this book is a sprawling, likable, galaxy-spanning fable, long on ideas and short on details.
Action, history, settings, mysticism and technology are implied and hinted at, but through a fuzzy lens, and his mixture of science, religion and magic results in scenes that read more like metaphor than reportage.
Not that I see that as a flaw. A modern SF writer would have fleshed out and scienced up every throwaway idea in this short book and made a career out of a quintilogy of five hundred page volumes, and lost all Zelazny's poetry and word-shapes.

[Fredegar Bolger · Rating 4 out of 5]

Incredible Pacing!

This is the first Zelazny I have read, and I do not think it will be my last. Searched "terraforming" in Google.. obscurely, this is what I ended up buying second hand off amazon for three dollars, gaping hole in cover included. I read to halfway, and was rather bored so I put it down for a little bit. But I wish I hadn’t because little did I know the shit was about to get reeaaal! and would only grow from there.

As an aspiring writer, I am eager to learn from the masters. Here, Zelazny gives a perfect example of how to do backstory and pacing. The climax of this book is incredible, the denouement profound.

Blend of Sci Fi and Fantasy. Highly recommended! And it is short – you can read it in a day.

4.5 stars.

[spikeINflorida · Rating 2 out of 5]

Another Roger Zelazny acid trip:

Just before blasting off in his super cool spaceship, the main protagonist encounters a gray cat rubbing his leg, a large blue bird landing on his shoulder, a small black bear licking his face, another bird on his shoulder, then stumbling over a green rabbit and slithering glass snake, and being seized by a winking blonde monkey...before passing through the hatch, while simultaneously hearing the purple parrots calling his name and the glass snake trying to come aboard.

And that was just the beginning! Ugh

[Ludmila Kovaříková · Rating 4 out of 5]

Česky Ostrov mrtvých. Příběh o muži, který prošel zasvěcením bohu a který tvořil světy.
Humorná byla vsuvka o byrokracii Země. Jako vždy má Zelazny okamžiky, které pročítáte znovu a znovu ("Když pohádka exploduje a prach po snech se usadí a vy tam jen stojíte a víte, že poslední větu už nikdy nikdo nenapíše, proč si neodepřít vše, co je zbytečné?"). A bohužel i pasáže napsané jen proto, že tam musí být.

Výpisky: Víří kolem vás přátelé, nepřátelé..., jako na nějakém maškarním plese, a čas od času si ty masky vyměňují.

[Eloise Sunshine · Rating 3 out of 5]

It took me a while to get into this story, the quality of the audio tape recording wasn't very good, but once I was in, it was rather speedily flowing story (as all of Zelazny's books, come to think of that...).
So if you like him, you'll like this one too. It's old, but nonetheless interestingly developing story spiced with witty comments ;)

[Gary Butler · Rating 4 out of 5]

49th book read in 2012.

Number 180 out of 281 on my all time book list.

Follow the link below to see my video review:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgzTuz...

[Johnny Mayall · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another great Zelazny book that draws you in and leaves you wanting more.