I reviewed some time ago the first three volumes of the six total volumes in this set. So I figured that I was overdue to finish off my reviews of this exemplary collection of everything that this writer did save his novels. (And in a few cases, the genesis of his novels are in these volumes as well.)
This volume leads off with two superb introductions, one by Joe Haldeman and the other by Steven Brust, the first fondly remembering when he met Zelazny and how the anti-hero of Damnation Alley was originally to be named after his brother; the latter on what Zelazny meant to him as a newly minted writer.
This volume starts off strong with the previously unpublished précis for the stories referred to as My Name Is Legion. He does a crack job of setting up the series and explaining the key players. These stories, all three, are were collected into My Name is Legion, which is long out of print, and as an audiobook which came on cassette tapes a very long time ago. Don’t bother looking for it online — until someone like Audible cleans it up, it’s a piss poor sound.
If you bought it just for the stories, it’d be a lot of reading pleasure including “The Last Defender of Camelot,” bits and pieces of what will become the fix-up novel named Dilvish, “Walpurgisnacht,” and lots more. All pieces in this volume, as in the other volumes, generally have a comment on it by Zelazny and notes from the editors.
We get more articles by Zelazny. You get his thoughts on sf, the Amber princes, balancing art and commerce, and the birth and life of black holes, to name my favs here.
And we get part four of the literary life of Roger, “…And Call Me Roger.” I’m hoping that someday NESFA actually releases this as a single publication. This part has a neat look at why he’s sanguine about the Damnation Alley film, why he loved to read and write sf, his thoughts about critics (mixed at best), on the popularity of Amber, and much more than I’ll mention here.
Oh, and this section has a nice look at why the unnamed narrator in the My Name is Legion stories is one of his favorite characters. It doesn’t say why only three stories featuring him were written, given how prolific this writer was.
And we get more poetry by him. Now I’m not the best person to judge this section as most poetry since that of T.S. Elliot leaves me really not excited by the prospect of reading it. That some of this is pastiches of other poems doesn’t help. If you like poetry that’s based on a lot of literary memes, you’ll most likely will appreciate this. Ann Crimmins, who’s responsible for the poetry sections of each volume, claims that you get a clearer view of him as a writer in his poetry as opposed to his prose, a view I don’t agree with.
OK, it’s really not likely that you’d buy this volume without purchasing the entire set. If you’re a serious fan, the one hundred and eighty dollar cost for the full set isn’t that much for well over three thousand pages of text. I paid over two hundred dollars for Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere: The Author’s Preferred Text, a single volume of fiction.
I’m certainly keeping my set!
PS: The separately sold book, The Ides of Octember: A Pictorial Biblography of Roger Zelazny has the index to the set, as there’s no comprehensive index included in this set. I’ve reviewed that work separately and you can find that review here.
(NESFA, 2009)
See also the reviews of the previous volumes:
Threshold, Volume One of The Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny
Power & Light, Volume 2 of The Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny
This Mortal Mountain — Volume 3 of The Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny
