First, go read my review of the first volume in this series, Threshold: Volume One of The Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny, before continuing any further into this review. While you’re reading that review, I’ll pop down to our Pub and have a pint of winter ale while you read it.
Leading off this volume are two essays, Neil Gaiman’s ‘Of Meetings and Partings’ and David G. Hartwell’s ‘On Roger Zelazny’. As always, these short essays add a bit to my appreciation of Zelazny as a writer and a person that I’d have really liked to have known. Roger was, by all accounts, one of the nicest writers one could know. George R.R. Martin said in an eulogy for him shortly after he passed on in 1995 after battling cancer that ‘Roger was a giant, not only one of the finest writers that the genre has ever seen, but the kindest, gentlest, sweetest man I have ever been fortunate enough to know. We have lost a good one.’ Fortunately NESFA has given us the very great gift of collecting (I believe) everything he ever wrote no matter if it was published in a major ‘zine like Worlds of If where ‘The Steel General’ first saw light, or an obscure fanzine such as Granfalloon where ‘My Lady of the Diodes’ was first published, or even as in some cases, not published at all.
This Mortal Mountain has not only a collaboration with Harlan Ellison, ‘Come to Me Not in Winter’s White’, but also a Francis Sandow story, ‘Dismal Light’ and one of my favorite tales of his, ‘The Engine at Heartspring’s Center’. Francis Sandow is that rare Zelazny character outside of The Chronicles of Amber that appears in more than one tale — he also appears as a character in two novels, Isle of the Dead (1969) and To Die in Italbar (1973). Read ‘Dismal Light’ for a look at how a worldscaper can have a very mean streak in him and why all deals with such beings are Faustian in nature.
For the really good stuff here, make sure to read the the title piece and another tale, ‘Here There Be Dragons’, for ideas that could have been novels. I can’t find the quote now but Roger says somewhere that most of his best short stories were the last chapters of novels that he never wrote the rest of. And of course, his best novels were often not much longer than most novellas are. (To Die in Italbar is a very compact 183 pages.) Roger was brilliant at packing a lot of story into not a whole lot of writing space.
The various kibbles and bits included in each volume are a fascinating look at how a writer thinks. Here we get, to elect my favorites, ‘Musings on Lord of Light’, ‘Family Tree from Creatures of Light and Darkness’, and a deleted sex scene from an Amber novel, Guns of Avalon, which was mild by the standards of the time and seems positively boring by current standards of such things.
Needless to say the third part of ‘…And Call Me Roger’ — The Literary Life of Roger Zelazny’ is here. I hope that this essay is released as a separate volume someday so it’s more widely available as anyone interested in Roger should read this.
There is, as Roger rather obviously very much liked writing it, lots and lots of poetry here. I am not a fan of poetry outside of that written by the likes of William Butler Yeats and Dylan Thomas so much of it simply didn’t appeal to me, but I really liked ‘Lamentations of the Venusian Pensioner’ and ‘What Is Left When the Soul is Sold’. I suspect that the Science Fiction Poetry Association will consider picking this entire series for a special Rhysling Award as it certainly deserves it!
Based on the three volumes I’ve looked at so far, The Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny is an extremely strong contender for both Hugo and LOCUS awards. Once gain, kudos to editors David G. Grubbs, Christopher S. Kovacs and Ann Crimmins, cover artist Michael Whelan, and dust jacket designer Alice Lewis for a well crafted book in all aspects that matches the quality of the text it contains.
(NESFA, 2009)
