★★★★☆ Permafrost and Fuji

Nine Black Doves

Roger Zelazny

Nine Black Doves is volume five 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 1981-1990 maintains the high standards of scholarship of the series. By this time Zelazny's output was mostly in the form of novels, which pay better, word for word, than short stories. However, he never stopped writing stories until his death, thus this six-volume collection. During these years Zelazny and his wife June grew apart and he and Jane Lindskold fell in love.

This one is a mixed bag -- that's par for the course with Zelazny, who never stopped experimenting, especially with his short stories. Many of these stories are collaborations with other authors, if only in the sense of using ideas from others at their request, and these, in my opinion, are not quite so good. Undiluted Zelazny is the best Zelazny! Still it contains some excellent stories, "Permafrost", which won multiple awards, and my personal favorite, the novella 24 Views of Mt. Fuji, by Hokusai. When I wrote in my review of Volume 4, Last Exit to Babylon, "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," 24 Views of Mt. Fuji, by Hokusai was one I had in mind.

It surprises me a little that I like this novella so much. I ought to hate it. It's slow and contemplative. While it has a rather nice plot, the essence of the plot could be summarized in two paragraphs. Instead of that we get 70 pages of the protagonist, Mari, wandering around Japan and thinking about stuff. It's a slow, contemplative story that rewards patience. Patience is a thing I never have enough of. But still, I love this story. I think it's that I love Mari. She feels to me as if Zelazny put a bit of himself into her -- something he rarely did. She's skilled in martial arts (as was Zelazny), and she's widely read and imaginative -- connecting the Buddhist deity Kokuzo who is supposed to protect people born in the Year of the Tiger (as she was) with Shere Khan from Kipling's The Jungle Books. This reprint of the novella includes black and white copies of Hokusai's prints -- I don't think the version I read before had those.

The dust covers of this series bear a gorgeous painting by famed F&SF artist Michael Whelan. In the installment of "...And Call Me Roger" (as Christopher Kovacs' multipart biography of Zelazny is called), he explains how that came about. Zelazny's publisher, Arbor House, commissioned cover art for the new Amber novel Trumps of Doom from an artist just out of art school. This guy, being pressed for time, lightly modified a cover Whelan had created for a Fred Saberhagen novel. Unfortunately for him, Zelazny and his son both recognized it. They contacted the publishers, who settled with Whelan. Then realizing they already had a lot of copies printed with the plagiarized cover, they asked Whelan what it would take to allow them to continue to use it as the cover of Trumps of Doom. And this thing was done.

On the occasion of presenting an award to Whelan at San Diego ComicCon, Zelazny said, "So that was my only Michael Whelan cover... I wish I could get a real Michael Whelan cover for the proper story. That would be something and a half." Kovacs continues the story

The editors of this collection shared Zelazny's remarks with Michael Whelan, and to their delight, he agreed to paint the dust jacket for this six-volume collection. Thus Zelazny's "something and a half" wish for a genuine Michael Whelan cover has come true at last.

The book ends with a section called "curiosities", which consists mainly of outlines, e.g. three outlines for films that were never made. I did not read these, so I guess you could say that, strictly speaking I did not finish the book. But I read 94% of it.

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