Science Fiction Studies

In the history of modern sf, few authors have had as meteoric a debut as Roger Zelazny. His first sf story was published in 1962, and by the end of the decade he had won two Nebula Awards, for his novella "He Who Shapes" and his novelette "The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth" (both 1965), and two Hugo Awards, for his novels This Immortal(1965; aka …And Call Me Conrad) and Lord of Light(1967). Eight other stories received nominations, including "A Rose for Eccelesiastes" (1963), one of the most widely anthologized tales in modern sf. "Eccelesiastes" was voted the third best novelette of the twentieth century in a 2012 poll conducted by Locusmagazine, one of nine Zelazny stories and novels to make the overall list. As befits the author's complex generic positioning, Lord of Lightwas voted both the twenty-third best sf novel and the sixty-fifth best fantasy novel, and probably the author's most popular work was his A mberseries of quest fantasies, kicked off by Nine Princes in Amberin 1970—the fifth best fantasy novel of the twentieth century, according to Locus, out-polled by only four novels: Tolkien's The Hobbit(1937) and The Lord of the Rings(1955), Le Guin's A Wizard of Earthsea(1968), and George R.R. Martin's A Game of Thrones(1996). Zelazny won one more Nebula and three more Hugos, all for short fiction, prior to his death in 1995 at the relatively young age of 58, although his reputation in the field, especially the reception of his novels, underwent a steady decline after 1970.

As F. Brett Cox observes in his new critical study of the author, this decline coincided with Zelazny's decision in 1969 to quit his day job as a claims specialist for the Social Security Administration and devote himself full-time to writing. Not long after, reviewers began complaining about "a reduction in the quality of his work" (88) as commercial considerations seemed to take precedence over aesthetic ones, with the author "more intent on writing quickly, prolifically, and profitably than on blazing new and interesting literary trails" (101). Cox quotes a number of such verdicts by the likes of Norman Spinrad and other genre luminaries, perhaps the most poignant being the lament, in a review of Zelazny's To Die in Italbar(1973) by Sidney Coleman in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction(August 1974), that sf readers "once had something unique and wonderful, and it is gone, and what we have in its place is only a superior writer of preposterous adventures" (qtd. 90). As Cox points out, Zelazny produced almost three dozen novels, several in collaboration, between 1970 and 1995, and only three were nominated for major awards, none winning. Cox also shows, in fine detail, how commercial pressures impinged on the author's production, compelling him to focus on the crowd-pleasing A mberseries and to scale back his experimental ambitions—for example, making his 1973 novel Today We Choose Facesmore of a linear narrative, since his editor was worried that readers might be baffled by its fragmented form. Cox also makes clear that [End Page 382]Zelazny himself was sometimes his own worst enemy, due to his tremendous facility at producing what he frankly called "copy," which led to usually stylish but often superficial work.

Cox does such a good job reinforcing the conventional wisdom about Zelazny's aesthetic decline that he rather undermines his own stated goal of contesting its "oversimplification" of a complex career (5). Indeed, Cox's modification of the prevailing view is ultimately slight, as he himself seems to acknowledge:

There is no denying the commercial impulses that steered Zelazny's career, especially in his later years. But there is also no question that, even as in those later years he hurriedly fulfilled one contract so that...