★★★★☆ Head and Heart

Last Exit to Babylon

Roger Zelazny

Last Exit to Babylon is volume four of the masterful Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny. (For an overview of the series, see my review of the first volume, Threshold.) This volume, covering the years 1978-1981 maintains the high standards of scholarship of the series. Also, Zelazny pulls out of the slump of the years 1967-1977, which provided the source material for Volume 3, This Mortal Mountain.

This is no longer the financially insecure Zelazny who worked for the Social Security Administration and wrote nights until 1969. In 1969 he quit his day job to become a full-time writer. It was a good decision, although of course it took time for him to be comfortable with it.

He is now. His career as a novelist has taken off. In particular, the Chronicles of Amber, which were to become his main financial success, were making money. In 1975, realizing that as a writer he could live anywhere he wanted to, he and his wife Judith moved to a home near Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he lived until his death. They had three children. In an essay on the effect of the marketplace on literary output, he writes,

There comes a point -- and I don't know precisely where it occurs -- when you've been around long enough and are sufficiently well-known that you sell everything you write. If I want to try something experimental, I do it in confidence that it will appear somewhere. I no longer even think of something not selling. So, to this extent, the question concerns something which no longer seems to apply to me.

The hypothetical "If I want to try something experimental" was a very real thing. Zelazny liked literary experiments. If you want consistency, Zelazny is not the author for you. His fans often complained about this, wishing he would go back to the early themes and styles that, in their view, made him great. But of course, what made Zelazny great was this continual movement. Zelazny during this period is a perfect example of what Gustave Flaubert wrote

Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.

And Zelazny was that.

In my review of This Mortal Mountain, I wrote, "[the stories] grab me by the head rather than the heart." In the best stories of this volume, that defect has been remedied. They are still clever, but my emotions are as engaged as my intellect. Not all of the stories here hit the sweet spot for me -- that is of course inevitable for any individual reader, given what I have said about Zelazny's experimentation. In particular, the stories of My Name is Legion and the Dilvish stories are not my favorites. (As always, YMMV.)

Which are my favorites? It is difficult to choose, but I really liked "The Last Defender of Camelot", "The Horses of Lir", and "Unicorn Variation". Many of the stories of this period are more light-hearted than the powerful stories of Zelazny's past and future. Indeed, most of "Unicorn Variation" anticipates what we now call "cozy" literature. One could almost imagine Travis Baldree writing it, but for the introduction of the Unicorn

A bizarrerie of fires, cunabulum of light, it moved with a deft, almost dainty deliberation, phasing into and out of existence like a storm-shot piece of evening; or perhaps the darkness between the flares was more akin to its truest nature...

If you can imagine Baldree writing that, your imagination is better than mine. Zelazny continues in this vein for a page before coming down to Earth.

The best of the stories in Last Exit to Babylon are very good. Not Zelazny's best, in my opinion -- there are better stories in his past and his future. But still very good.

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