★★★★★ An impressive collection

The Road to Amber

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

The Road to Amber is the final volume of the Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny. This volume covers his final years from 1990 - his death from colorectal cancer in 1995.

I'm going to do something a bit different for this review than for the previous five. For those my review and evaluation were based mostly on the stories they contained. But that's not really fair to the Zelazny Editor Dream Team of David G. Grubbs, Christopher S. Kovacs, and Ann Crimmins (whom I will henceforth call GKC), who put this massive collection together, and NESFA Press, which published it in six beautifully produced hardback volumes, not to mention A Pictorial Bibliography, which I will review presently. (NESFA is New England Science Fiction Association.) I can't help but feel that I've been unfair to GKC by not giving them a five-star rating of their own, so that's what I'm going to do here.

Roger Zelazny (1937-1995) is one of the all-time greats of science fiction. His work has been 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 GKC have done. It is especially valuable because Zelazny's 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. GKC did yeoman's work in collecting even formerly unpublished fragments.)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 until his death.

Many of the stories are followed by "A Word from Zelazny", containing text that Zelazny himself wrote about the story. And almost all are followed by "Notes" written by GKC that explain things in the story that may need explaining. These range from a sentence or two to nine pages (for "He Who Shapes"). The series includes a six-part biography of Zelazny ...And Call Me Roger, written by Kovacs. The volumes contain Zelazny's short fiction in chronological order, and the biography in each volume describes what was going on in Zelazny's life while the works in that volume were being produced.

The cover art is a beautiful painting by famed F&SF illustrator Michael Whelan called Z-World. (For the story behind this see my review of Nine Black Doves.) Here is that painting, as it appears on the spines of the books of the series:

photo of the series dust covers

Whelan includes an essay called "Z-World" in which he describes how he made this painting and explains some of what's in it.

This is a spectacular resource for any hard-core Zelazny fan. My one complaint about The Collected Stories is that it's available only in hardback. This may put it beyond the reach of many fans and even libraries.

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