Roger Zelazny

• 1. Introduction

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  Roger Zelazny spent his evenings writing science fiction while working a day job at the U.S. Social Security Administration. For seven years, from 1962 to 1969, he clocked in at government offices in Cleveland and Baltimore, then came home and built worlds. He was disciplined about it, moving deliberately from short-shorts to novelettes to novellas and finally to novel-length works. On the 1st of May 1969, he quit his job. He never looked back.

  By the time he died in Santa Fe in 1995, Zelazny had won six Hugo Awards and three Nebulas. His Chronicles of Amber series had become one of the most beloved fantasy sequences in American letters. Neil Gaiman would call him the author who influenced him most. Andrzej Sapkowski would call him a spiritual teacher.

  But who was the man behind all those mythologies? Where did his obsession with Egyptian gods and Hindu cosmology and absent fathers come from? And why did his fiction change the moment he quit smoking?

• 2. The Making of a Writer

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  Roger Joseph Zelazny was born on the 13th of May 1937 in Euclid, Ohio, the only child of a Polish immigrant father, Joseph Frank Zelazny, and an Irish American mother, Josephine Flora Sweet. That particular mix of European roots would later show up in his fiction, which drew freely from Celtic myth and Slavic tradition alongside Hindu and Norse sources.

  In high school, he edited the school newspaper and joined the Creative Writing Club. In the fall of 1955 he enrolled at Western Reserve University, graduating with a B.A. in English in 1959. He then moved to Columbia University in New York, where he specialized in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. His master's dissertation examined morality and humor comedy conventions in The Revenger's Tragedy. He graduated in 1962.

  His very first appearance in print came years before that, in a fanzine called Thurban 1, where the first part of his story "Conditional Benefit" ran in 1953. His first professional sale followed in 1954, a fantasy short story called "Mr. Fuller's Revolt" published in Literary Calvalcade. As a professional debut, his first two stories ran simultaneously in August 1962: "Passion Play" in Amazing and "Horseman!" in Fantastic, though "Passion Play" was written and sold first.

  The story that first drew serious attention was "A Rose for Ecclesiastes," published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction with cover art by Hannes Bok. That story would eventually travel further than any of his others: it was included on a DVD aboard the Phoenix Mars lander in 2008, as part of Visions of Mars: First Library on Mars.

• 3. Mythology as Method

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  Zelazny had a recurring technique. He would take a figure from myth or religious tradition and drop that figure into the modern world, or a future one, and then watch what happened. Egyptian gods appear as characters in Creatures of Light and Darkness. Hindu cosmology structures Lord of Light, which reads on the surface like mythic fantasy but is set, as the book makes clear early on, on a colonized planet. Greek mythology runs through And Call Me Conrad. Navajo mythology gives shape to Eye of Cat. Chinese mythology frames Lord Demon, which he co-wrote with Jane Lindskold.

  Creatures of Light and Darkness is formally unusual even by Zelazny's standards. Its narrative voice runs entirely in the present tense, its final chapter is structured as a play, and several of its chapters take the form of long poems.

  The Chronicles of Amber wove together elements from Norse, Japanese and Irish mythology alongside Arthurian legend and real history. The novel A Night in the Lonesome October works within the Cthulhu Mythos, the shared fictional universe built around the work of H. P. Lovecraft.

  Zelazny was also a card-carrying member of the Swordsmen and Sorcerers' Guild of America, a loose-knit group of heroic fantasy authors founded in the 1960s. Some of its members' works appeared in Lin Carter's Flashing Swords! anthologies.

• 4. The Absent Father

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  Joseph Zelazny died unexpectedly in 1962 and never knew of his son's successes as a writer. That loss left a mark that ran through nearly every novel Roger wrote afterward.

  The recurring motif critics and readers noticed is what might be called the absent father. In the first Amber series, the protagonist Corwin spends much of the narrative searching for his lost, god-like father Oberon. In the second Amber series, which follows Corwin's son Merlin, it is Corwin himself who goes strangely missing. The father-figure problem migrates from generation to generation.

  The pattern shows up far beyond Amber. The novels Roadmarks, Doorways in the Sand, Changeling, Madwand and A Dark Traveling all feature main characters who are either searching for lost fathers or have been separated from them. The short stories "Dismal Light", "Godson" and "The Keys to December" touch the same nerve. So does the Alien Speedway series.

  Zelazny's personal characteristics left equally direct traces. He became an expert with the epee in college and spent the rest of his life studying martial arts, including judo, aikido (at which he earned a black belt and later taught), tai chi and baguazhang. Characters in his fiction regularly dispatch opponents with exactly those skills. He quit smoking in the early 1980s to improve his cardiovascular fitness for the martial arts, and the moment he quit, the heavy smokers who had populated his protagonists stopped lighting up too.

• 5. Form and Experimentation

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  Doorways in the Sand uses a flashback structure in which most chapters open with a scene of peril that the end of the previous chapter did not anticipate. The narrator then backtracks to explain how the scene came to be, follows through to its conclusion, and then the next chapter jumps forward again to another dramatic non sequitur. The reader is always catching up.

  Roadmarks, a novel built around a road that connects all possible times, places and histories, carries this structural thinking even further. Chapters featuring the protagonist are all titled "One". All other chapters, titled "Two", feature secondary characters drawn from original invention, pulp heroes and real historical figures. The "One" storyline moves fairly linearly. The "Two" storyline jumps around in time and sequence. After finishing the manuscript, Zelazny shuffled the "Two" chapters randomly among the "One" chapters to press home their non-linear nature.

  The novel Jack of Shadows and the novel Changeling each revolve around the friction between worlds of magic and technology. Zelazny used mixed genres not as a gimmick but as a structural principle: elements of each genre move freely and interchangeably within the same book.

  His personal life during the early years was equally in motion. He was engaged to the folk singer Hedy West for six months in 1961-1962. He married Sharon Steberl in 1964; they divorced with no children. He then married Judith Alene Callahan in 1966. Together they had two sons, Devin and Trent (1976-2024), who became an author of crime fiction, and a daughter, Shannon.

• 6. Awards and Recognition

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  Zelazny's first Hugo came in 1966, when And Call Me Conrad, later republished as This Immortal, tied with Dune by Frank Herbert for the Hugo Award for novel. That same year, his novelette "The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth" won the Nebula Award, and his novella "He Who Shapes" tied for the Nebula in its category. Three major awards in a single year was a remarkable start.

  Lord of Light won the Hugo Award for novel in 1968. His novella "Home Is the Hangman" won both the Hugo and the Nebula in 1976. The novelette "Unicorn Variation" won the Hugo in 1982 and the Seiun Award for foreign short fiction in 1984. His novella "24 Views of Mt. Fuji, by Hokusai" won the Hugo in 1986, followed by the novelette "Permafrost" winning the Hugo in 1987.

  At least 16 specific works earned awards over the course of his career, spanning six Hugos, three Nebulas, two Locus Awards, one Prix Tour-Apollo, two Seiun Awards and two Balrog Awards. He was the Guest of Honor at the Worldcon convention in Washington, D.C., in 1974, the event known as Discon II. He received an Inkpot Award for lifetime achievement at the San Diego Comic-Con in 1993.

  Raised Catholic, Zelazny later described himself as a lapsed Catholic and stayed that way. He said directly: "I did have a strong Catholic background, but I am not a Catholic. I am not a member of any organized religion." He died of kidney failure secondary to colorectal cancer in Santa Fe on the 16th of June 1995, at age 58, having lived in that city for twenty years.

• 7. A Lasting Wake

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  Samuel R. Delany wrote that his novel Nova and many of his short stories were written "partly in response to Zelazny's eruption into the field." In 1967, the critic Algis Budrys placed Zelazny alongside Delany, J. G. Ballard and Brian Aldiss as "an earthshaking new kind of" writer and a leader of the New Wave.

  Neil Gaiman named Zelazny as the author who influenced him most, an influence Gaiman traced specifically to his own literary style and the subjects he chose to write about. Andrzej Sapkowski, whose Witcher books became a global publishing event, said Zelazny was his spiritual teacher and that Zelazny's work inspired him to write his first novel.

  Two anthologies collected tributes after his death. Lord of the Fantastic: Stories in Honor of Roger Zelazny, edited by Martin H. Greenberg, appeared in 1998 with contributions from Walter Jon Williams, Jack Williamson, John Varley, Neil Gaiman and Gregory Benford, among others. The second, Shadows and Reflections: A Roger Zelazny Tribute Anthology, edited by his son Trent Zelazny and Warren Lapine, came out in 2017. It contained two essays and fifteen stories set in universes Zelazny created; George R. R. Martin and Jane Lindskold were among the contributors.

  A species of ostracod, a class of crustaceans, was named Sclerocypris zelaznyi in his honor. And the story he wrote in the early 1960s that first attracted serious attention, "A Rose for Ecclesiastes," traveled to Mars aboard the Phoenix lander in 2008.