★★★★★ Roger Zelazny at the height of his powers

Power and Light

Roger Zelazny

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'.
...I suppose that a story written to keep ones mind off nasty realities is yet another variation on the game the creative impulse plays...

These are extraordinary stories. "Comes Now the Power" is as good a story as I have ever read, anywhere, from any author.

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.

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