★★★★☆ Early days of Science Fiction's Intellectual

Threshold

Roger Zelazny, David G. Grubbs (Editor), Christopher S. Kovacs (Editor), Ann Crimmins (Editor)

Roger Zelazny (1937-1995) is one of my favorite, and perhaps my all-time favorite science fiction author. And it's not just me. His work is widely praised, won all the awards, and is still popular. The Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny is an extraordinary resource for Zelazny scholars. I would not dare call myself a Zelazny scholar, but I am a scholar of other fields, and recognize what the compilers have done.

This is especially valuable because Zelazny greatest gift was writing short stories. (The Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny is slightly misnamed, however, because it includes almost all Zelazny's short works -- that includes poetry and essays as well as stories. Editors Grubbs, Kovacs, and Crimmins did yeoman's work in collecting even formerly unpublished fragments.) Zelazny wanted to write, and did, almost from the moment he learned to read. His first love was poetry. In college, however, he recognized that if he wanted to earn a living as a writer, poetry was not a real option. (As he wrote, Robert Frost and Carl Sandburg were the only Americans doing it.) Thus he switched to stories. Later he recognized that, word-for-word, novels pay better than stories, and directed most of his effort in that direction. But he still loved stories best and never ceased to write them.

The Collected Stories are chronologically organized. Thus the first, Threshold, covers his earliest years, before he began writing novels. (The authors even managed to dig up some stories he wrote in high school. Some of these are to cringe, but honestly much less so than I expected.) It is thus a great book that shows where Zelazny came from, literarily speaking.

I called him "Science Fiction's Intellectual" because I cannot think of another writer who better deserves that title. By that I mean two things. First, he was eclectically educated and his writings sometimes, but not always, make great demands on his readers. (The editors of Threshold conclude each story with comprehensive notes, explaining all the names and myths to which the story alludes. One of these notes (for "He Who Shapes") is nine pages long.

Second, Zelazny explicitly intellectualized the craft of writing and had a fair amount to say about it. For instance, he wrote this

Reflecting on my own experience, for whatever it may be worth, out of the thirty or so stories I have written three with which I've been somewhat pleased. In all three I now note that I spent more time on the first page than on any three subsequent pages, and more on the first sentence than on any normal page. In these (all of them over ten thousand words) I had a reasonably decent set of characters worked out before I wrote a word, and had only a sketchy plotline; this, I think, left the characters with room enough to move around on their own and develop accordingly. I feel that the momentum from a strong beginning can carry the reader past those early dead spots which are necessary for stating the problem and stuffing in the background. I now attempt to conceptualize my stories via character rather than gimmicks.

This shows Zelazny's characteristic humility and tact, "I'm not telling you what you should do, but this is what works for me."

The stories in Threshold are not, in my personal opinion, Zelazny's best, even though they include some of the best known. "A Rose for Ecclesiastes", for instance, regularly features in lists of all-time best SF stories. And it's a good story! But I feel that the mature Zelazny did better. I intend to continue the series.

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