What do you think?
Rate this book
The Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny #2
Power & Light
The second in a six-volume series, Volume 2: Power & Light covers the mid 1960s, Zelazny's most prolific period, where he continued to incorporate mainstream literary qualities and added a wealth of mythological elements into powerful stories such as "The Furies," "For a Breath I Tarry," "This Moment of the Storm," "Comes Now the Power," "Auto-Da-Fé," and the Hugo-winning novel ...And Call Me Conrad. The stories in this series are enriched by editors' notes and Zelazny's own words, taken from his many essays, describing why he wrote the stories and what he thought about them in retrospect.
576 pages, Hardcover
First published February 14, 2009
9 people are currently reading
284 people want to read
About the author
Roger Zelazny
745 books3,884 followersRoger 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).
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
April 13, 2020
This is volume two of a six-volume set of, as the collection title should say, the collected stories of Roger Zelazny. I started in v.2 because I wanted to catch the original, serialized "... And Call Me Conrad", the 2-part version from 1965 that later became novel This Immortal in 1966.
I wound up reading the whole book, for several reasons, and there a lots of good stories here. There's also several unpublished works and a ton of poetry that only saw light in a submission to the Yale Younger Poets Competition.
Forgot to add, it was a book with magic it it for my URC-50.
I wound up reading the whole book, for several reasons, and there a lots of good stories here. There's also several unpublished works and a ton of poetry that only saw light in a submission to the Yale Younger Poets Competition.
Forgot to add, it was a book with magic it it for my URC-50.
October 28, 2018
2018: I really got this out again to read "Call Me Conrad", the 2 part serial that This Immortal is based on, for a group read. I've lost count of how many times I've read this & it never gets old. While the story seems like a fairly simple trek through a post apocalyptic world, there are so many allusions & references throughout the book that tickle me & lead into interesting research. There is also the question of whether this is straight SF or is a blend of fantasy.
There isn't much in the novel that is left out of this, just a few minor expansions. The original paperback novel is actually lacking a pretty important paragraph or two explaining the Radpol early on. That was added back in about 20 years later & some of the paperbacks around 1990 or 2000 were retyped by drunken monkeys & not proofread. They're just annoying, obvious typos, IIRC.
The best part of reading it in this volume are the explanations by the editors & Zelazny as well as definitions for most of the allusions. Besides, there is a lot of other material about & by Zelazny. Great introductions about him, many short stories, some of his poetry, & some essays. I can't say this is the best book in the 6 book collection simply because they all contain similar items. How could anyone pick between the Shadow Jack, Sandow, Corwin, Conrad, or his host of other memorable characters & settings?
This collection is still available new on NESFA's site:
https://www.nesfa.org/press/Books/Zel...
(Look on the right side for the other books in the series.)
At $29 each, buying all 6 (plus $26 for the pictorial bibliography) will set you back over $200, but it's worth every penny. I've never regretted spending it. The cover art is great & when the books are lined up on a shelf, the dust covers show a portion well. It's gorgeous or prettiful, as my daughter would say. It's also a lot of very pleasant hours of reading. Highly recommended!
2009: It was a fantastic look at Zelazny's work & the editors did a wonderful job of gathering information about his motives, moods & intentions for some of his best pieces. Also included were many unpublished, but wonderful stories. I even liked some of the poetry. A must-read for any Zelazny fan.
There isn't much in the novel that is left out of this, just a few minor expansions. The original paperback novel is actually lacking a pretty important paragraph or two explaining the Radpol early on. That was added back in about 20 years later & some of the paperbacks around 1990 or 2000 were retyped by drunken monkeys & not proofread. They're just annoying, obvious typos, IIRC.
The best part of reading it in this volume are the explanations by the editors & Zelazny as well as definitions for most of the allusions. Besides, there is a lot of other material about & by Zelazny. Great introductions about him, many short stories, some of his poetry, & some essays. I can't say this is the best book in the 6 book collection simply because they all contain similar items. How could anyone pick between the Shadow Jack, Sandow, Corwin, Conrad, or his host of other memorable characters & settings?
This collection is still available new on NESFA's site:
https://www.nesfa.org/press/Books/Zel...
(Look on the right side for the other books in the series.)
At $29 each, buying all 6 (plus $26 for the pictorial bibliography) will set you back over $200, but it's worth every penny. I've never regretted spending it. The cover art is great & when the books are lined up on a shelf, the dust covers show a portion well. It's gorgeous or prettiful, as my daughter would say. It's also a lot of very pleasant hours of reading. Highly recommended!
2009: It was a fantastic look at Zelazny's work & the editors did a wonderful job of gathering information about his motives, moods & intentions for some of his best pieces. Also included were many unpublished, but wonderful stories. I even liked some of the poetry. A must-read for any Zelazny fan.
July 25, 2025
Roger Zelazny at the height of his powers
Power & Light is the second volume of the masterful Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny. For an overview of the collection, see my review of Threshold. It was an artistically immature Zelazny who wrote most of the works in Threshold. Power & Light collects works written from 1965 - 1968. These include some of his greatest stories, and also his first novel ...And Call Me Conrad. (Although the Collected Stories is intended to be a collection of Zelazny's short fiction, the editors sneak ...And Call Me Conrad in through a loophole: before it was published as a book, it was published in two novella-length halves in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.)
I particularly want to mention five stories. Start with "Lucifer". This is a brief and almost plotless story about a man who returns to a fallen city, in order to..., well, you'll have to read it. Zelazny's manuscript title for this story was "Power & Light", thus it lends its name to this volume of the collection. The second story I want to mention is "For a Breathe I Tarry". This was one of Zelazny's own favorites, and one I remembered vividly from previous reading. It is longer -- a novella. It got award nominations and appeared on lists of all-time best stories.
To introduce the remaining three, I need to tell you of events in Zelazny's life. On 27-Sep-1964 Zelazny and his new fiancée Sharon Steberl were in a head-on car collision. Zelazny was lightly injured, but Steberl was hospitalized with serious injuries. On 25-Nov, while she was still recuperating, Zelazny's father died unexpectedly.
During these years Zelazny became a novelist. His first novel, ...And Call Me Conrad, published by Ace as This Immortal, almost won the Hugo for best novel in 1966 -- it tied with Frank Herbert's Dune. My first thought was that it is disappointing to not get the outright win, but then, I thought, "tied with Dune for best novel" is perhaps an even more impressive credential to have on ones resume. He also wrote Lord of Light, which would win yet more awards and the experimental Creatures of Light and Darkness, which he didn't intend to publish, but friends (and editors) who saw it wouldn't rest until he did. He also began work on The Chronicles of Amber, eventually to be his most popular works.
If you're familiar with the history of Science Fiction, you'll recognize that these were the years during which the so-called New Wave (Delany, LeGuin, James Tiptree Jr., etc) arose, and Zelazny was held to be one of them by critics. Zelazny himself dismissed the whole idea of the New Wave, unconvincingly to my mind, essentially on the basis that there was no such organization. However, he himself recognized what was going on and convincingly explains it. Golden Age Science Fiction was dominated by the pulp magazines. Because they were sent through the mail (and because it was the first half of the twentieth century), there were severe legal restrictions on what could go into a story. No sex, for instance. But beginning around 1960 it became possible for a Science Fiction writer to make a living by writing paperback books. As Zelazny himself points out, this freed writers to write more and better stuff. Thus in Zelazny's view, there was no New Wave -- just a bunch of writers responding to a common environment. And yes, of course they were friends with each other, and read each other's books, and may even have talked about them. (Delany, for instance, was instrumental in getting some of Zelazny's novels published.) That sounds like a movement to me, even if they didn't have a logo and formal meetings.
I entitled this review "Roger Zelazny at the height of his powers". A critical reader might point out that this is only the second of six volumes -- how can I know that this is the peak? The answer is, I have read these stories. Not all of them -- some of the Collected Stories were previously unpublished. These unpublished works, however, are generally of lower quality. I have already read almost everything Zelazny published during his lifetime. There's lots of good stuff yet to come, but nothing a whole lot better then "Comes Now the Power", in my opinion.
Blog review.
Power & Light is the second volume of the masterful Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny. For an overview of the collection, see my review of Threshold. It was an artistically immature Zelazny who wrote most of the works in Threshold. Power & Light collects works written from 1965 - 1968. These include some of his greatest stories, and also his first novel ...And Call Me Conrad. (Although the Collected Stories is intended to be a collection of Zelazny's short fiction, the editors sneak ...And Call Me Conrad in through a loophole: before it was published as a book, it was published in two novella-length halves in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.)
I particularly want to mention five stories. Start with "Lucifer". This is a brief and almost plotless story about a man who returns to a fallen city, in order to..., well, you'll have to read it. Zelazny's manuscript title for this story was "Power & Light", thus it lends its name to this volume of the collection. The second story I want to mention is "For a Breathe I Tarry". This was one of Zelazny's own favorites, and one I remembered vividly from previous reading. It is longer -- a novella. It got award nominations and appeared on lists of all-time best stories.
To introduce the remaining three, I need to tell you of events in Zelazny's life. On 27-Sep-1964 Zelazny and his new fiancée Sharon Steberl were in a head-on car collision. Zelazny was lightly injured, but Steberl was hospitalized with serious injuries. On 25-Nov, while she was still recuperating, Zelazny's father died unexpectedly.
I wrote [these stories] on one of the blackest days in my memory, a day of extreme wretchedness accompanied by an unusual burst of writing activity, which I encouraged, to keep from thinking about what was bothering me. They were 'Divine Madness', ['Comes Now the Power'], and 'But Not the Herald'.These are extraordinary stories. "Comes Now the Power" is as good a story as I have ever read, anywhere, from any author.
...I suppose that a story written to keep ones mind off nasty realities is yet another variation on the game the creative impulse plays...
During these years Zelazny became a novelist. His first novel, ...And Call Me Conrad, published by Ace as This Immortal, almost won the Hugo for best novel in 1966 -- it tied with Frank Herbert's Dune. My first thought was that it is disappointing to not get the outright win, but then, I thought, "tied with Dune for best novel" is perhaps an even more impressive credential to have on ones resume. He also wrote Lord of Light, which would win yet more awards and the experimental Creatures of Light and Darkness, which he didn't intend to publish, but friends (and editors) who saw it wouldn't rest until he did. He also began work on The Chronicles of Amber, eventually to be his most popular works.
If you're familiar with the history of Science Fiction, you'll recognize that these were the years during which the so-called New Wave (Delany, LeGuin, James Tiptree Jr., etc) arose, and Zelazny was held to be one of them by critics. Zelazny himself dismissed the whole idea of the New Wave, unconvincingly to my mind, essentially on the basis that there was no such organization. However, he himself recognized what was going on and convincingly explains it. Golden Age Science Fiction was dominated by the pulp magazines. Because they were sent through the mail (and because it was the first half of the twentieth century), there were severe legal restrictions on what could go into a story. No sex, for instance. But beginning around 1960 it became possible for a Science Fiction writer to make a living by writing paperback books. As Zelazny himself points out, this freed writers to write more and better stuff. Thus in Zelazny's view, there was no New Wave -- just a bunch of writers responding to a common environment. And yes, of course they were friends with each other, and read each other's books, and may even have talked about them. (Delany, for instance, was instrumental in getting some of Zelazny's novels published.) That sounds like a movement to me, even if they didn't have a logo and formal meetings.
I entitled this review "Roger Zelazny at the height of his powers". A critical reader might point out that this is only the second of six volumes -- how can I know that this is the peak? The answer is, I have read these stories. Not all of them -- some of the Collected Stories were previously unpublished. These unpublished works, however, are generally of lower quality. I have already read almost everything Zelazny published during his lifetime. There's lots of good stuff yet to come, but nothing a whole lot better then "Comes Now the Power", in my opinion.
Blog review.
February 26, 2019
This volume was mostly misses for me - e.g. I am so bored by the Dilvish stories. On the other hand, it contains "...And Call Me Conrad", my favorite Zelazny story, and I loved it again upon rereading. I also quite liked "For a Breath I Tarry" and "This Moment of the Storm".
Read
November 7, 2023Two glowing essays about what a wonderful writer and man Roger Zelazny was. Explanatory notes for every story, essay and poem in the collection. "And Call Me Roger," a chronicle of Zelazny's literary life.
Roger Zelazny will always have a special place in my heart. Part of me is glad that fourteen years after his death someone cared enough to collect his complete short works into six fat hardcover volumes to preserve them for posterity. Another part of me thinks it's a bit of overkill. Maybe it's just that I prefer to read Zelazny in the form of paperbacks with cool psychedelic covers from the 1960's.
Anyway, this volume contains "For A Breath I Tarry," a sff mashup of Genesis and Job set on an impossibly distant future Earth. It holds up to repeated re-readings and remains my favorite Zelazny novella. I believe it was his favorite too.
Roger Zelazny will always have a special place in my heart. Part of me is glad that fourteen years after his death someone cared enough to collect his complete short works into six fat hardcover volumes to preserve them for posterity. Another part of me thinks it's a bit of overkill. Maybe it's just that I prefer to read Zelazny in the form of paperbacks with cool psychedelic covers from the 1960's.
Anyway, this volume contains "For A Breath I Tarry," a sff mashup of Genesis and Job set on an impossibly distant future Earth. It holds up to repeated re-readings and remains my favorite Zelazny novella. I believe it was his favorite too.
April 5, 2022
By the mid to late sixties, the prevailing feeling from Roger Zelazny seemed to be "Now that I'm warmed up, its time to stop playing around." Given in the first volume of his collected stories we encountered two stories that won Nebula awards in two different categories ("He Who Shapes" tied for the novellas and "The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth" won in the novelette category) and another that still ranks as one of the most beloved SF short stories of all time its terrifying to consider just how new he was at this. Most writers don't knock out tales like those their entire careers and he just . . . showed up with them the same the way wedding crashers appear at weddings . . . casually, like they were supposed to have been there the whole time.
That's probably part of the reason some critics and fans became disappointed in Zelazny later, because he started out of the gate so insanely gifted that people were probably expected masterpieces to fall from his typewriter the way that leaves drop in the autumn. I mean, there' generally a learning curve with writing, right? So what would it look like when he really knew what he was doing?
This volume basically covers the "Everything I do works" period of Zelazny's career, during those early times when he just moved from strength to strength and didn't even seem to pause to catch his breath. You've got not only one, but two stories that are often cited among the greatest SF stories ever, here given to us in abridged form but still remarkably potent.
Normally I'm not a fan of given truncated forms of novels in what are supposed to be short story collections but if I'm going to make an exception it'll be for any part of "Lord of Light", which makes an appearance here as "Death and the Executioner" (which became chapter three of the novel itself). Apparently his early plan was to write the chapters as separate stories to sell them for serialization first, but only two chapters appeared before the magazine they were appearing in folded and then the novel got published anyway. And even this sliver of the novel reminds you how impossibly good it is, just this blend of fantasy and SF and folklore that could be read in a variety of ways, all shot through with this lyrical sensibility that makes it feel intimately epic. Its the story of people who think they're gods, if gods acted like terrible selfish people and the one god that tries to make them all human again.
His other great novel of the period, "This Immortal", appears here under its original title ". . . And Call Me Conrad" (the novel version tied with "Dune" for the Hugo for Best Novel) and in its shortened magazine form. Even here its still potent, retaining the vibrancy of its hero, a dude who might be immortal and also might be the incarnation of the god Pan. He's living on an Earth mostly abandoned and wrecked by nuclear war, now overrun with mutated animals. Oh, and some aliens now own all the real estate. One of them is making Conrad tour them around the place and a lot of the narrative drive comes from Conrad's ongoing commentary, which is both confident and self-effacing. In time he'd turn out to be the model for the quintessential Zelazny hero but here it was all still pretty new (though Sam from "Lord of Light" is also cut from the same mold) and again, almost everything Zelazny was trying during this time was being hit out of the park.
One that received more mixed opinions was "The Furies" (Theodore Sturgeon liked it, Frederick Pohl was less enamored . . . unfortunately for Zelazny, the latter was the one who made the decision on which stories to buy) . . . even without being award winning, its still packed, featuring three guys with near superhero powers teaming up to remotely take out a feared pirate. It might be too long to sustain its pace, because the shorter tales that follow feel a bit more concentrated ("Lucifer", "The Salvation of Faust") and keep with Zelazny's tendency around this time to invoke whatever literary material was on hand or rattling around in his brain.
One that works better is "For Each Breath I Tarry", which has a weird concept that barely involves people at all (two big computers maintain the earth, and hate each other) and turns it into a surprisingly moving piece about what it means to be a person and thinking for yourself.
We also get Zelazny's first major foray into straight-up fantasy, the Dilvish series. Sort of like Conan with less racism, a protagonist with zero sense of humor and weird magic, it features Dilvish, who was once a famous general a long time before an evil sorcerer stuck him in Hell. He got out, but at the cost of coming down with a case of terminal seriousness, but also gained a big metal horse named Black who seems to think all this is pretty ridiculous. The early ones included here are relatively short which I think is to their detriment . . . the later stories come off better once Zelazny has some room to stretch and let the scenario play out, here they're almost over too fast before they can settle in. Only the last one, "A Knight for Merytha" had any real impact on me.
People also seemed to like "Devil Car", which seems to ask "What if the car from 'Knight Rider' was a lady and jacked up with weaponry?" . . . in some future earth intelligent cars have gone rogue (one more round of beta testing would have been nice, Tesla!) and roam the landscape like homicidal bison. One man and his car hunts them down. If you're going to dive into that concept you either have to go all out bonkers or make it extraordinarily surreal . . . Zelazny's good enough to keep it from being boring but it does feel like his heart is more in the stuff influenced by mythology.
Or maybe he just needed characters strong enough to carry the story further than you'd think the concept would warrant. "This Moment of the Storm" doesn't have much in the way of the folklore/mythology influences but it does have a strong central character and, more importantly for me, a real existential ache beating in the center of it (the whole story for me gets encapsulated in the way his "I don't know. Anything, really." lines land in the moment immediately after a tragedy, the way they circle around a gaping hole without explicitly marking out the perimeter). But in terms of impact that story, as good as it is, is eclipsed by a trilogy of short stories ("Comes Now the Power", "Divine Madness", and "But Not the Herald") that are doses of concentrated despair, almost uncomfortably personal for a writer who rarely wrote about his inner life in his stories. The closest I can compare them to is a mid-1970s run of "Peanuts" that are just striking for how . . . raw they feel. In Schulz's case he had a lot of personal upheaval, in Zelazny's the death of his father and a car accident that seriously injured his then-fiancee. I don't think they counted as his best but it was striking to me how close to the bone they felt.
Then there's just outright weirdness like "The Keys to December". A story about a Catform that is bred to live in fairly hostile environments and how he goes about a prepping an entire planet as a good place to live, only for it to fall apart in violent fashion, I like how it feels so sideways to everything else, conveying just an utterly alien point of view while also throwing in a little romance to boot.
The rest are just fun, either serious fun (the "Dangerous Visions" contribution "Auto Da Fe") or a more pleasingly goofy kind ("The Juan's Thousandth") . . . if nothing else it’s a deceptive collection because the quality of the top-notch stuff is so high that it takes away from just how consistently inventive Zelazny was in this period. It seemed like he could try anything and he could make any genre read like a Zelazny story and more often than not, he pulled it off.
For that reason this collection is going to be slanted toward ". . . And Call Me Conrad" and the "Lord of Light" excerpt and make everything else seem second-rate or at least second tier. But any collection that manages to encompass "The Keys to December", "This Moment of the Storm" AND "For Each Breath I Tarry" isn't something you can just outright dismiss and only when read in isolation from the heavy hitters is it clear just how strong they are.
Still, for a number of people this volume may be the jumping off point in the series for them as Zelazny's work entering the 70s leaned more toward "highly entertaining" than "mind-blowing" and having already set a fairly high bar for himself he seemed to set himself up to disappoint the people who wanted that bar hit again and again and again. He would keep doing so, probably more often than people at the time assumed, but this will probably feel like Zelazny was not only capable of doing anything but wanted to prove it over and over, while later he retained the capability but didn't quite seem to feel the urge to demonstrate it as often.
That's probably part of the reason some critics and fans became disappointed in Zelazny later, because he started out of the gate so insanely gifted that people were probably expected masterpieces to fall from his typewriter the way that leaves drop in the autumn. I mean, there' generally a learning curve with writing, right? So what would it look like when he really knew what he was doing?
This volume basically covers the "Everything I do works" period of Zelazny's career, during those early times when he just moved from strength to strength and didn't even seem to pause to catch his breath. You've got not only one, but two stories that are often cited among the greatest SF stories ever, here given to us in abridged form but still remarkably potent.
Normally I'm not a fan of given truncated forms of novels in what are supposed to be short story collections but if I'm going to make an exception it'll be for any part of "Lord of Light", which makes an appearance here as "Death and the Executioner" (which became chapter three of the novel itself). Apparently his early plan was to write the chapters as separate stories to sell them for serialization first, but only two chapters appeared before the magazine they were appearing in folded and then the novel got published anyway. And even this sliver of the novel reminds you how impossibly good it is, just this blend of fantasy and SF and folklore that could be read in a variety of ways, all shot through with this lyrical sensibility that makes it feel intimately epic. Its the story of people who think they're gods, if gods acted like terrible selfish people and the one god that tries to make them all human again.
His other great novel of the period, "This Immortal", appears here under its original title ". . . And Call Me Conrad" (the novel version tied with "Dune" for the Hugo for Best Novel) and in its shortened magazine form. Even here its still potent, retaining the vibrancy of its hero, a dude who might be immortal and also might be the incarnation of the god Pan. He's living on an Earth mostly abandoned and wrecked by nuclear war, now overrun with mutated animals. Oh, and some aliens now own all the real estate. One of them is making Conrad tour them around the place and a lot of the narrative drive comes from Conrad's ongoing commentary, which is both confident and self-effacing. In time he'd turn out to be the model for the quintessential Zelazny hero but here it was all still pretty new (though Sam from "Lord of Light" is also cut from the same mold) and again, almost everything Zelazny was trying during this time was being hit out of the park.
One that received more mixed opinions was "The Furies" (Theodore Sturgeon liked it, Frederick Pohl was less enamored . . . unfortunately for Zelazny, the latter was the one who made the decision on which stories to buy) . . . even without being award winning, its still packed, featuring three guys with near superhero powers teaming up to remotely take out a feared pirate. It might be too long to sustain its pace, because the shorter tales that follow feel a bit more concentrated ("Lucifer", "The Salvation of Faust") and keep with Zelazny's tendency around this time to invoke whatever literary material was on hand or rattling around in his brain.
One that works better is "For Each Breath I Tarry", which has a weird concept that barely involves people at all (two big computers maintain the earth, and hate each other) and turns it into a surprisingly moving piece about what it means to be a person and thinking for yourself.
We also get Zelazny's first major foray into straight-up fantasy, the Dilvish series. Sort of like Conan with less racism, a protagonist with zero sense of humor and weird magic, it features Dilvish, who was once a famous general a long time before an evil sorcerer stuck him in Hell. He got out, but at the cost of coming down with a case of terminal seriousness, but also gained a big metal horse named Black who seems to think all this is pretty ridiculous. The early ones included here are relatively short which I think is to their detriment . . . the later stories come off better once Zelazny has some room to stretch and let the scenario play out, here they're almost over too fast before they can settle in. Only the last one, "A Knight for Merytha" had any real impact on me.
People also seemed to like "Devil Car", which seems to ask "What if the car from 'Knight Rider' was a lady and jacked up with weaponry?" . . . in some future earth intelligent cars have gone rogue (one more round of beta testing would have been nice, Tesla!) and roam the landscape like homicidal bison. One man and his car hunts them down. If you're going to dive into that concept you either have to go all out bonkers or make it extraordinarily surreal . . . Zelazny's good enough to keep it from being boring but it does feel like his heart is more in the stuff influenced by mythology.
Or maybe he just needed characters strong enough to carry the story further than you'd think the concept would warrant. "This Moment of the Storm" doesn't have much in the way of the folklore/mythology influences but it does have a strong central character and, more importantly for me, a real existential ache beating in the center of it (the whole story for me gets encapsulated in the way his "I don't know. Anything, really." lines land in the moment immediately after a tragedy, the way they circle around a gaping hole without explicitly marking out the perimeter). But in terms of impact that story, as good as it is, is eclipsed by a trilogy of short stories ("Comes Now the Power", "Divine Madness", and "But Not the Herald") that are doses of concentrated despair, almost uncomfortably personal for a writer who rarely wrote about his inner life in his stories. The closest I can compare them to is a mid-1970s run of "Peanuts" that are just striking for how . . . raw they feel. In Schulz's case he had a lot of personal upheaval, in Zelazny's the death of his father and a car accident that seriously injured his then-fiancee. I don't think they counted as his best but it was striking to me how close to the bone they felt.
Then there's just outright weirdness like "The Keys to December". A story about a Catform that is bred to live in fairly hostile environments and how he goes about a prepping an entire planet as a good place to live, only for it to fall apart in violent fashion, I like how it feels so sideways to everything else, conveying just an utterly alien point of view while also throwing in a little romance to boot.
The rest are just fun, either serious fun (the "Dangerous Visions" contribution "Auto Da Fe") or a more pleasingly goofy kind ("The Juan's Thousandth") . . . if nothing else it’s a deceptive collection because the quality of the top-notch stuff is so high that it takes away from just how consistently inventive Zelazny was in this period. It seemed like he could try anything and he could make any genre read like a Zelazny story and more often than not, he pulled it off.
For that reason this collection is going to be slanted toward ". . . And Call Me Conrad" and the "Lord of Light" excerpt and make everything else seem second-rate or at least second tier. But any collection that manages to encompass "The Keys to December", "This Moment of the Storm" AND "For Each Breath I Tarry" isn't something you can just outright dismiss and only when read in isolation from the heavy hitters is it clear just how strong they are.
Still, for a number of people this volume may be the jumping off point in the series for them as Zelazny's work entering the 70s leaned more toward "highly entertaining" than "mind-blowing" and having already set a fairly high bar for himself he seemed to set himself up to disappoint the people who wanted that bar hit again and again and again. He would keep doing so, probably more often than people at the time assumed, but this will probably feel like Zelazny was not only capable of doing anything but wanted to prove it over and over, while later he retained the capability but didn't quite seem to feel the urge to demonstrate it as often.
January 30, 2012
Awesome, amazing. If you know me, you wouldn't expect me to say much else about anything Zelazny (although I still have not read Lord Demon, and I'm not sure about other collaborations, either). I'm going to try to be level-headed while I write about this book, but it's going to get effusive.
I'll start with what I can say is less than perfect. Some of the stories did not wow me a whole lot. They are still fun, but Zelazny often goes past just amusement for me. His stories often resonate, they strike a chord; or I sense deeper meanings. At the least, I often find that upon later reflection, I can suss out more things that were implied in the story. Roger liked to reveal only a minimum, and leave the rest as implications. However, not the case with all the stories, and that's really the only thing I can say about some of them. There were merely good, fun diversions.
Others, though, moved me - and deeply. Overall, I think this volume beats vol 1, and I loved that one. This Moment of the Storm was amazing. I'd read it before, and enjoyed it, but this time it struck me more - not sure why. Divine Madness brings me to tears whenever I read it. Comes Now the Power is haunting. The atmosphere in Lucifer so spooky and melancholy (and is the story from which the volume derives its name: Power & Light). I always wonder what thoughts and feelings are going on when he lights everything up.
For A Breath I Tarry is one of my all-time favorite stories. I love, love it. The Dilvish stories I had not read before and they were great fun. Honorable Mention: The Furies, Auto-da-fe, OK, this is just going to turn into a list of everything in the volume. You get the idea.
Again I loved the biographical and the essays. I think I'd have paid the price of the book just to have those parts alone. Add the commentaries and notes at the end of most of the stories, and it's a no-brainer.
In these first two volumes I've read many of my favorite stories. I have to wonder (and be worried) if he's peaked at this point, and is it going to turn more mediocre now? (Note that I consider mediocre Zelazny head and shoulders above the best of what other authors can do). I know there's more that I've liked still to come: Unicorn Variation was great fun. The Amber shorts await, and more Dilvish. But my very favorites I think are all in these first two. Of course I'm going to love the rest of the essays and the biography. And there is lots of new stuff that I've never read, and any new Zelazny is going to be fun to read, even if it's not quite up to the caliber of these early ones.
If a book could "go to eleven", I'd rate this one there. I'll settle for six stars out of five, though.
I'll start with what I can say is less than perfect. Some of the stories did not wow me a whole lot. They are still fun, but Zelazny often goes past just amusement for me. His stories often resonate, they strike a chord; or I sense deeper meanings. At the least, I often find that upon later reflection, I can suss out more things that were implied in the story. Roger liked to reveal only a minimum, and leave the rest as implications. However, not the case with all the stories, and that's really the only thing I can say about some of them. There were merely good, fun diversions.
Others, though, moved me - and deeply. Overall, I think this volume beats vol 1, and I loved that one. This Moment of the Storm was amazing. I'd read it before, and enjoyed it, but this time it struck me more - not sure why. Divine Madness brings me to tears whenever I read it. Comes Now the Power is haunting. The atmosphere in Lucifer so spooky and melancholy (and is the story from which the volume derives its name: Power & Light). I always wonder what thoughts and feelings are going on when he lights everything up.
For A Breath I Tarry is one of my all-time favorite stories. I love, love it. The Dilvish stories I had not read before and they were great fun. Honorable Mention: The Furies, Auto-da-fe, OK, this is just going to turn into a list of everything in the volume. You get the idea.
Again I loved the biographical and the essays. I think I'd have paid the price of the book just to have those parts alone. Add the commentaries and notes at the end of most of the stories, and it's a no-brainer.
In these first two volumes I've read many of my favorite stories. I have to wonder (and be worried) if he's peaked at this point, and is it going to turn more mediocre now? (Note that I consider mediocre Zelazny head and shoulders above the best of what other authors can do). I know there's more that I've liked still to come: Unicorn Variation was great fun. The Amber shorts await, and more Dilvish. But my very favorites I think are all in these first two. Of course I'm going to love the rest of the essays and the biography. And there is lots of new stuff that I've never read, and any new Zelazny is going to be fun to read, even if it's not quite up to the caliber of these early ones.
If a book could "go to eleven", I'd rate this one there. I'll settle for six stars out of five, though.
March 4, 2018
This volume covers a lot of Zelazny’s work from the mid- to late-sixties. Some think this was his most creative time. I don’t know about that, but I know it’s a creative time. He draws on Western literature and myth (Greek mythology and Faust are common sources) and Hinduism and Buddhism (leading to his short stories that would help lay the foundation for his exceptional novel Lord of Light).
Much like the first volume, this will be a gift to anyone who is a Zelazny fan. His focus on short stories gives a new appreciation for his vast capacity to invent. It’s all good stuff and this volume culminates with the best story in the book. His Greek and Joseph Conrad inspired “Gilgamesh”-like abbreviated epic: … And Call me Conrad. Those kind of mash-ups are just too good to pass by.
Much like the first volume, this will be a gift to anyone who is a Zelazny fan. His focus on short stories gives a new appreciation for his vast capacity to invent. It’s all good stuff and this volume culminates with the best story in the book. His Greek and Joseph Conrad inspired “Gilgamesh”-like abbreviated epic: … And Call me Conrad. Those kind of mash-ups are just too good to pass by.
January 1, 2015
reviews.metaphorosis.com
4 stars
Roger Zelazny deserves every bit of his status as a legendary SFF author. At his best (which he often was - see Lord of Light), his prose verged on poetry without ever losing its readability. His short fiction (gathered in several partial collections over the years) was as good, if not better. So, running across a complete collection of his short works is as exciting to an SF fan as finding that a (more) affordable version of the [Jack] Vance Integral Edition is being published. Zelazny and Vance were not only among the top SF writers, but were two of the absolute best for those who love good writing for its own sake.
Which is why the editorial policy behind this collection (published by NESFA) is so puzzling. Curious decisions include: - stories are not in chronological order, nor in series groups, nor in topical order. Yes, there's a general chronological sequence here, but stories are often presented out of order, for no evident reason. - Zelazny aspired to be a poet, and there's a lot of his poetry here. Ironically, for a writer whose prose was so beautifully poetic, his actual poetry is pretty poor. The poems are scattered throughout the volumes of the collection - often topically linked with the following story. It's a little hard to argue with the editors on this - several hundred pages of poetry in one place would have seriously weakened one of the volumes in the set. And if the poetry had just been left out entirely, you'd wonder about it, and how good it must have been. - Several excerpts from novels. Frankly, I just resent this. I have the novels - they're mostly available for purchase. I bought this set for the short stories. - One little quibble. One the inside back jacket, Michael Whelan gets as much space as Zelazny himself. Yes, he's a famous (if overrated) artist, but hey, he just did the one cover, not the six volumes of content.
Strange sequencing, etc. aside, the collection is well done. There is excellent information on publication dates and how the stories fit the various series. There are many previously unpublished (or underpublished) pieces. There are carefully collated comments from Zelazny about each story, and there are (over-) copious interpretive notes about the allusions in each story. Also, there's a nicely written biographical piece included in each volume. While they're all respectful of Zelazny's talent, they're not sycophantic in tone. There are also introductions by guest notables for each volume - some good, some that lead you to question why the editors selected people who clearly did not know Zelazny well.
Finally - the stories themselves. If you're a Zelazny fan, this collection is well worth your time. Otherwise, it's not your best introduction. Some of the underpublished (e.g. in a fanzine) stuff just isn't that good. And the strange sequencing ends up undercutting the effect of the really great stories that are also here. I'm a long time, committed Zelazny enthusiast, and I'm confident that this is not the collection I'd give my spouse in order to share my burning enthusiasm for Zelazny's work. If you're already a fan, though, this will satisfy your completist desires, and give you access to a lot of new work, uneven though it may be.
January 27, 2011
As I said in my recap of the first volume of this series, everything is awesome, especially the notes after each story that give some insight into Zelazny’s writing. Also, the biographical stuff and the speeches and essays at the end are great.
With that out of the way, here’s a list of all the stories in the book (not including poetry/articles/whatever). I’ve bolded the ones I felt stood out.
The Furies
Lucifer
The Salvation of Faust
The New Pleasure
The Monster and the Maiden
For a Breath I Tarry
Passage to Dilfar (series: Dilvish 1 of 11)
Thelinde's Song (series: Dilvish 2 of 11)
The Bells of Shoredan (series: Dilvish 3 of 11)
A Knight for Merytha (series: Dilvish 4 of 11)
The Injured
Devil Car(series: Jenny/Murdoch)
Of Time and the Yan
The Drawing
This Moment of the Storm
Comes Now the Power
Divine Madness
But Not the Herald
Late, Late Show
Love is an Imaginary Number
The Keys to December
The House of the Hanged Man
Death and the Executioner
Auto-Da-Fé
The Juan's Thousandth
There Shall Be No Moon!
Through a Glass, Greenly
Time of Night in the 7th Room
...And Call Me Conrad
Overall, I’d say I liked book 1 much more, though this book did have “. . . And Call Me Conrad,” which is enough to make it better than most mortal books.
Also, there are certain stories which I may have normally given the coveted bold text, but I didn’t because they’re not very fresh in my mind (I skipped over pretty much everything that I’d already read in The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth). So, maybe if I read “Devil Car” or “The Furies” again, they’ll be better.
An interesting thing I noticed was that I wasn’t a huge fan of Dilvish (at least, not for his first few stories). Part of it is because I like my fantasy not to be full of “thy” and “thine”—I prefer a more modern dialogue, like what you might see in Zelazny’s Amber series or any urban fantasy. As such, some of the Dilvish stories were a little more difficult to get through than others.
Still, this is easily a five-star book, ‘cause duh.
With that out of the way, here’s a list of all the stories in the book (not including poetry/articles/whatever). I’ve bolded the ones I felt stood out.
The Furies
Lucifer
The Salvation of Faust
The New Pleasure
The Monster and the Maiden
For a Breath I Tarry
Passage to Dilfar (series: Dilvish 1 of 11)
Thelinde's Song (series: Dilvish 2 of 11)
The Bells of Shoredan (series: Dilvish 3 of 11)
A Knight for Merytha (series: Dilvish 4 of 11)
The Injured
Devil Car(series: Jenny/Murdoch)
Of Time and the Yan
The Drawing
This Moment of the Storm
Comes Now the Power
Divine Madness
But Not the Herald
Late, Late Show
Love is an Imaginary Number
The Keys to December
The House of the Hanged Man
Death and the Executioner
Auto-Da-Fé
The Juan's Thousandth
There Shall Be No Moon!
Through a Glass, Greenly
Time of Night in the 7th Room
...And Call Me Conrad
Overall, I’d say I liked book 1 much more, though this book did have “. . . And Call Me Conrad,” which is enough to make it better than most mortal books.
Also, there are certain stories which I may have normally given the coveted bold text, but I didn’t because they’re not very fresh in my mind (I skipped over pretty much everything that I’d already read in The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth). So, maybe if I read “Devil Car” or “The Furies” again, they’ll be better.
An interesting thing I noticed was that I wasn’t a huge fan of Dilvish (at least, not for his first few stories). Part of it is because I like my fantasy not to be full of “thy” and “thine”—I prefer a more modern dialogue, like what you might see in Zelazny’s Amber series or any urban fantasy. As such, some of the Dilvish stories were a little more difficult to get through than others.
Still, this is easily a five-star book, ‘cause duh.
Read
April 8, 2009http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1317873.html[return][return]This is the second volume in the NESFA series collecting Zelazny's writings, again edited by David G. Grubbs, Christopher S. Kovacs and Ann Crimmins. I had high praise for the first of these; the second didn't grab me quite as much. Almost half of it is occupied by the original "...And Call Me Conrad" text of This Immortal, a separately published chapter of Lord of Light, and the first few Dilvish stories, which is I suppose necessary for completeness, but most readers will already have Zelazny's preferred final texts of those works. (Though it is fascinating to learn that Lord of Light was inspired by a train of thought started when Zelazny cut himself shaving at a science fiction convention.)[return][return]Anyway, I won't complain too much. As well as some excellent short stories (including the three wrenching pieces written the day Zelazny's father died), there are two speeches and a short essay, forewords by Kristine Kathryn Rusch and Walter Jon Williams (who tried, unsuccessfully, to get Zelazny to try the Amber roleplaying game), and Christopher Kovacs continues his fascinating bio-bibliography. I shall be getting the next two volumes which are apparently already out from NESFA.
August 11, 2011
Rather than going into analytical discussions into the "where & how" of me getting switched off while reading these stories, I would like to state that I am deeply regretting the whimsical decision taken about purchasing the first couple of volumes of collected shorter works of this very-very highly regarded author without sampling some of it first. In American coloquolism, it is the absence of this "rain check" that forced me to try to read some highly literate, and yet exquisitely boring (and in case of the fantasies, much-much worse than the masters like Leiber and even Moorcock) stuff, because after paying good money I had no option other than trying to read them.
If you prefer your science-fiction or fantasy to be action-oriented and plot-driven, rather than being ratiocinations about religion & philosophy in high language of the exalted, DO NOT GO FOR THESE BOOKS. If you wish to establish yourself as a "cool dude" who reads "real heavy stuff", the pleasure is all yours!
If you prefer your science-fiction or fantasy to be action-oriented and plot-driven, rather than being ratiocinations about religion & philosophy in high language of the exalted, DO NOT GO FOR THESE BOOKS. If you wish to establish yourself as a "cool dude" who reads "real heavy stuff", the pleasure is all yours!
May 13, 2010
This is a really great read, don't pass it by if you're a Zelazny fan. It contains previously unpublished stories, and lots of short pieces by the author about writing, things he enjoyed reading, how his writing process worked, a definite must read for Zelazny fans, or for people who want to write sf.
March 22, 2015
Pretty much the same opinion as when I read Volume 1, although this volume had the book, "And Call Me Conrad", as originally serialized, which was interesting and gave me the chance to get more of an sense of the characters, as opposed to his short stories. Nice for a novice like me, but maybe not so interesting for fans who have read all his work already.
Enjoyed Volume 4 the best so far
Enjoyed Volume 4 the best so far
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews