★★★★★ An experimental novel

Creatures of Light and Darkness

Roger Zelazny

I remember my first encounter with Creatures of Light and Darkness vividly. I was browsing the Science Fiction shelves in a bookstore. I had already by that time acquired the habit of heading to the far end where the Z's were shelved to see what was new from Roger Zelazny. I opened Creatures of Light and Darkness to a random page in the middle to see what it was like. I saw lines of something resembling poetry about characters called Set and the Steel General, spoken by someone called "The Prince Who Was A Thousand". As story, it did not make a lot of sense. I shuddered a bit and put it back on the shelf. It was not what I wanted at that moment -- a simple story, simply told. But I did later read it -- it's a wonderful book, and more narratively straightforward than my brief dip into the middle of it had suggested.

Zelazny did not initially intend to publish Creatures of Light and Darkness. He wrote it as an experiment for his own satisfaction. Some of his author friends, among them Samuel R. Delany, became aware that this manuscript was lying on his desk. Delany told his editors at Doubleday about this unpublished Zelazny MS. Zelazny was, at that point, becoming a hot author in Science Fiction (after his first novel This Immortal in 1966 and his second Lord of Light in 1967), so Doubleday contacted him to say, "We hear you've been holding out on us." Thus Creatures of Light and Darkness was published by Doubleday.

Zelazny learned his lesson. He later wrote

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

Effectively he had already reached the point of complete marketability by 1969.

It reads like what it is -- an experiment, or a series of experiments. But that framing makes it seems more organized than it really is. It's a bunch of throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks. That doesn't sound appealing, but this is Roger Zelazny! When he throws stuff at the wall to see what sticks, most of it does! There's actually a plot of sorts, based on the conflicts of ancient Egyptian mythology.

Creatures of Light and Darkness is mainly a book for Zelazny-lovers. If you are not already one of those, it's not the place to start.

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