29 July, 2002
The Last Defender of Camelot
Roger Zelazny
2002
416 pp
In what is quite possibly the Stupidest Publisher Trick of the year, iBooks decided to give a new collection of Roger Zelazny's short works exactly the same title as a previous collection[1]. The one I'm discussing here is the new book. It mostly contains stories which were appeared in the previous collections Frost and Fire and the first The Last Defender of Camelot[2], as well as one ("Home is the Hangman") which appeared in Unicorn Variations, and one ("Come Back to the Killing Ground, Alice, My Love") which has not appeared in any previous collection.
As I've mentioned elsewhere, Zelazny is one of my favorite authors, possibly my number-one favorite. He wrote in a wide variety of styles and subgenres, from mythic epic, to hard-boiled detective story, to dark humor, to pure character study. He readily and frequently crossed the fuzzy line between fantasy and science fiction, and he mixed these elements together to produce a wide variety of stories, such as those which comprise this volume. He was able to take common genre tropes, and turn them into something completely original. For example, "24 Views of Mt. Fuji, by Hokusai" contains all the props of a stereotypical cyberpunk story-- direct-to-brain connections to a worldwide computer network, a malevolent "ghost in the machine," a tough, resourceful female character, and an East Asian setting. But "24 Views" is entirely unlike Neuromancer or any of its brethren-- it focuses on beauty, art, and nature, rather than technology and action.
Beyond excelling at story-crafting technique, he was a master the powerful image; over a decade after reading some of his works, and having forgotten many details of the plots, I remember specific images and scenes as if I read them yesterday. For example, prior to rereading "Comes Now the Power" in this book, I couldn't remember a thing about the plot, but I still remembered the final scene. The new story, "Come Back..." is, I feel, going to be another one of these-- it's not much on character, and while the plot is decent, I found the imagery so vivid and so disturbing that it's going to stick with me for a long time.
Zelazny's skill with imagery was more than just a matter of coming up with vivid scenery; it's not just what he described, but how he described it. For example, here is a description of getting up in the morning, from "Home is the Hangman":
"I am what might be called a slow starter. I tend to recapitulate phylogeny every morning. Basic desires inched their ways through my grey matter to close a connection. Slowly, I extended a cold-blooded member and clicked my talons against a couple of numbers. I croaked my desire for food and lots of coffee to the voice that responded. Half an hour later I would only have growled. Then I staggered off to the place of flowing waters to renew my contact with basics."
Zelazny wrote a lot of good novels, but in a lot of ways, he was a short-story writer at heart. Much of his best work is in his shorter works. This collection is an excellent introduction to Zelazny's short fiction. I recommend it to anybody who's read and enjoyed, say, the Amber series or Lord of Light, but none of his other works.
I realize that I sound like a total fangirl in this review, and I can't deny it. However, this book illustrates why I like Zelazny's writing so much. This is a great collection, containing many of Zelazny's very best stories, including the afore-mentioned "24 Views..." and "Home is the Hangman," as well as the Hugo-winning "Permafrost" and the absolutely fabulous "For a Breath I Tarry." All the other stories are good, although if I'd been the editor, I probably would have left out "The Engine at Heartspring's Center" and "Mana from Heaven" in favor of "Unicorn Variations," "The Game of Blood and Dust," "Itself Surprised," and, oh, "The Stainless Steel Leech" or "Night Kings." But, that's simply personal preference. (Also, I'd have given the book a different, unique, title.)
[1] Published by Avon in 1980.
[2] But not the complete contents of those collections.