Having been pleasantly surprised by my recent re-read of a sci-fi/fantasy series I’d loved as a teen, I decided to extend this run of good luck and re-read another series that was influential to my own writing style (when I eventually got one).
I first crossed paths with Roger Zelazny’s works—both short form and long—in high school. It was before I’d read much fiction at all, and thus I did not have a lot of knowledge to bring to the experience. Despite this lack (or perhaps because of it), Zelazny’s stories and novels stuck with me, shaping my appreciation of the written word from then on. Zelazny was one of the triumvirate of authors who influenced my youthful enthusiasm for fiction, along with grandmasters Anne McCaffrey (a major influence, I discovered last week) and, of course, Ray Bradbury.
Each of these authors drew a different type of appreciation from me. McCaffrey’s prose was not what stayed with me, but rather her characters and their relationships, which were crucial to the workings of her plots. In considering Bradbury, I admit that none of his novels stuck with me, but his short fiction! Oh, what magic I found there. The books that collected his short works in a thematic whole—The Illustrated Man or The Martian Chronicles—were treasure boxes to read and re-read.
Roger Zelazny, though, held a special place in my pantheon, and not just because he was the only one of the three I actually met. Back in the ’70s, I didn’t have the breadth of experience to understand what I so enjoyed about his works, but yesterday, as soon as I began his Nine Princes in Amber, I could pinpoint it precisely. Where McCaffrey’s prose was straightforward, and Bradbury’s was as near to poetry as one can get in prose, Zelazny’s writing has a distinctive “voice,” matched to the mind of the character, and integral to the tenor of the storyline. As I began this book, I heard echoes of Hemingway, of Chandler and Hammett, along with the flow and descriptive power that was Zelazny’s own. That “voice,” that touch of the hard-boiled detective, was a crucial element of the character in that opening chapter—Corwin, a man out of space and time, without memories, must navigate a dangerous world filled with people bent on his demise. It was all fedoras and noir on silver nitrate and razor-sharp repartee and chiaroscuro lighting until, amazingly, subtly, color crept into the world along with Corwin’s recovered memories, and the “voice” shifted as well, matching again the mindset of the Corwin’s evolution.
I was lucky enough to meet Mr. Zelazny in the early ’90s, after I’d made my first professional-level short story sale. It was at a sci-fi convention here in Seattle, and I was trying to learn as much as I could about the craft, and meet as many “pros” as I could (a terribly difficult task for an introvert like me), but I’d been met with nothing but condescension and rudeness from nearly every established writer I approached. But I put that aside as I’d come primarily because Zelazny was a featured guest. I’d heard him read from his forthcoming book (A Night in the Lonesome October), and I’d brought my limit of three books for him to autograph (my beat-up vintage copies of the two-volume Amber omnibus and a dog-eared paperback copy of Four for Tomorrow).
Having been scorched by other authors at the convention, I expected a perfunctory meeting at the signing table, but I was determined to let Mr. Zelazny know how influential his works had been on my own nascent attempts as a writer. Instead of just signing my old books and moving on with a nod, he asked if I was submitting my work; I said yes, and that I’d been in a recent issue of a small professional magazine. He knew the magazine, actually had back issues, and wrote down my name so he could look up my story. After all the bristles and cold-shoulders I’d received that weekend, a kind word from a writer so important to me was a gift dearer than rubies. Did he really have back issues of a small-run magazine? Was he really going to read my story? I don’t know; he might have merely been encouraging me, a gentlemanly gesture to a budding young man who had kept three of his books safe and secure for a score of years. Still, I like to think he might have.
Reading these old favorites again, though, now with my older, wiser eyes, I feel the old desire to craft words renewed. I want to finish reading all of these titles I’ve pulled from the stacks, but after that . . . after that, I think I have work to do.
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If I were to have followed the standard advice of “write what you know” (meaning only write from personal experience), then none of my books would ever have come into being. I would never have written about anything historical (how could I, if I was born in 19-hrmahrm?), or about anything set in Brittany, or certainly I could never ever have written anything to do with dinosaurs (who could?).
For decades now, a ginger-haired girl has lived near us. Not the same girl, mind you. We’ve lived in three places in the past thirty years and, at each address, a ginger-haired girl has lived a few houses down, across the street, or around the corner. There has only been one such girl living near us at any particular time, as if there is some sort of limit on how many redheads a neighborhood can sustain.
As a writer, I’ve always been fascinated by so-called “famous last words,” but not the pronouncements made heading into battle or climbing the gallows steps. In those situations the speaker has prepared, is aware of what is likely to come, and has given their words some forethought as “famous last words.” Lines spoken at times like these are spoken for posterity, and are likely to contain not a small amount of “spin” for the history books.
Kurt R.A. Giambastiani 