Lord of Light is a story of myth and science and man, all wrapped and twisted about each other into an ineffable whole.

This would be an impressive novel if Zelazny had simply managed to craft a narrative of such epic scope which managed to be a grand vision of science fiction world-building; a potent myth tapping into fundamental truths; and a heart-touching character drama – each in turns. But what makes Lord of Light one of the greatest novels ever written is that it routinely succeeds at being all of these things at once.

One person will read a passage and be captivated by the depth of Zelazny’s future history.

Another, reading the exact same passage, will be awed by Zelazny’s uncanny ability to capture moments of mythic perfection upon the page.

And yet another, while reading the same passage as the other two, will be moved to tears or laughter or joy by the sheer, human passion of Zelazny’s characters.

And what’s truly special are those moments where your mind rises to Zelazny’s challenge and expands to encompass all three perspectives at the same time – rendering a passage resonant with myth and marvel and man.

On top of that, Lord of Light is ultimately a narrative of canny subtlety. To even the most casual reader, Zelazny will deliver a rip-roaring tale of unforgettable quality: Men walk as gods; titanic duels and mighty wars are fought with the unimaginable fires of science; and the fate of mankind balances somewhere inbetween. But the more attention you give it, the more rewarding it becomes – revealing layers and hidden depths and wheels within wheels.

Lord of Light appears at #4 on my list of all-time favorite science fiction novels. And it’s a place well-deserved.

GRADE: A+
Roger Zelazny
Published: 1967
Publisher: Eos
Cover Price: $12.95
ISBN: 0-06-056723-6
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Previously I’ve read Cherryh in small dollops – a single novel at a time. This isn’t because she bores me. To the contrary: I’ve found her novels to be such an intense experience that I’ve simply felt the need to take a break after finishing them. Partly to rest; partly to savor.

This time, though, I decided to punch through the chunk of Union-Alliance novels I owned but hadn’t read yet: Merchanter’s Luck, Rimrunners, Tripoint, and Finity’s End. Throwing them into my suitcase, I flew down to Mexico , and read them on the beach at the El Dorado resort while sipping Heather crème.

MERCHANTER’S LUCK

Cherryh is just plain good. There is a grandeur to a simple thing carried out with subtlety and grace. And it’s that grandeur which Cherryh achieves with Merchanter’s Luck.

Cherryh establishes the premise of her novel from the very first sentence: “Their names were Sandor and Allison… Kreja and Reilly respectively. Reilly meant something in the offices and bars of Viking Station: it meant the merchanters of the great ship Dublin Again… Kreja meant nothing.”

Merchanter’s Luck is, at its heart, a character drama – a powerful, poignant character drama. You could call it a Romeo and Juliet for the future, but it would only give you the most grotesque approximation of what this story is about. What you get to see are two characters brought together who fundamentally change each other’s lives. It’s not easy. It’s not simple. But it’s human.

Cherryh has the rare gift of being able to bare a character’s soul to the reader, and she uses that talent to great effect here:  Reading Merchanter’s Luck is like watching two brightly burning stars plunging one into the other, each searing you with the heat of their existence. It’s an intense and primal reality that Cherryh shows you.

And, on that note, let’s talk about…

RIMRUNNERS

Cherryh tells you more about the character’s thought process than the character themselves are probably aware of. At first you think it’s unnatural; “No one thinks like that,” you think. But as you acclimate yourself to it, you are startled to discover a deep and profound truthfulness to the thoughts of Cherryh’s characters. Because she raises the subconscious to the conscious; and it’s a conceit, but it works.

Jo Walton describes Cherryh’s Union-Alliance novels as “historical fiction”. There’s a lot of truth to that. Every novel is set across a small slice of a backdrop that stretches for decades and light years in every direction. With every novel you read in the Union-Alliance sequence, your understanding of that historical backdrop deepens and each individual work becomes ever more faceted as a result the reflections it casts upon the others.

It’s these two factors, in combination, which make Rimrunners purr like a high-performance engine. She takes her main character, pinions her to the decaying days of a vividly invoked civil war, and then plunges into her psyche. After we’re given a chance to get a feel for what it’s like to be inside her skin, Cherryh wrenches her into a completely different situation – something roughly akin to, and with all the paranoia of, a Cold War submarine drama.

What makes Rimrunners compelling reading, from one end to the other, is the experience of living on the razor edge between death and desperation. Cherryh captures the inherent intensity of her character and then pumps it straight into your brain.

Speaking of which…

TRIPOINT

Cherryh excels at capturing utterly diverse points of view with truthfulness and integrity. Cherryh’s characters don’t see things differently because some of them are stupid or naïve or ignorant (although some of them are) – she doesn’t go in for any of those cheats. Cherryh’s character see things differently because they are fundamentally different people. And that’s pretty impressive because there just aren’t that many authors who are capable of that even at their best, yet Cherryh effortlessly accomplishes it with every novel.

Given this unique strength of Cherryh’s, Tripoint is particularly interesting because it’s fundamentally the story of a character caught between two utterly different points of view – one embodied by his mother; the other embodied by his father – and the catalytic events which force him to find his own compromise and synthesis between those dichotomous poles.

A lot of Cherryh’s works seem to have identity as a central theme. Her characters are driven, often compulsively, by the questions of, “Who am I?” and “Who do I want to be?” Unsurprisingly, many of her stories are also tales of adolescence, and that’s the place where Tripoint exists.

Which brings us to…

FINITY’S END

… another tale of adolescence and identity. In many ways, the central character dramas of Tripoint and Finity’s End are very similar to each other. Both take a young protagonist from one environment and thrust them into another, forcing them to adapt and find a new identity for themselves.

But there the similarity essentially ends. Not only are the individual characters so unlike each other as to result in completely different stories, but the plots against which their character arcs are silhouetted are fundamentally different. Tripoint is a space opera of pirates and privateers. Finity’s End is a political drama.

Neither novel is quite as satisfactory as it could have been. The character arc in Tripoint seems rushed and unfinished. In Finity’s End the political drama and the central character drama are not quite tightly knit enough to seem a seamless whole. (And although the lengthy discussions of taxation policy in Finity’s End were interesting to me for their pseudo-historical implications, I rather suspect that most will simply find those passages interminable.)

I will also say that, for whatever reason, midway through Finity’s End I found myself getting sick of every single Cherryh viewpoint character alternating between shaking and numbness. This isn’t fair to Finity’s End, because it just happened to be the novel where Cherryh’s authorial twitch of shaking-numbness caught up with me.

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

As exemplary as any of these novels are on their own rights, I was particularly impressed by the strength they draw from each other. Cherryh never allows her plot to exist without impacting her characters; nor does she allow her characters to exist without affecting her setting. As a result, the more you learn of the Union-Alliance universe, the more depth each novel in the series possesses. It follows that I must, some day soon, come back to these novels (and the others in the series) and read them again. The ever-shifting, ever-growing context of Cherryh’s work gives each novel a fresh perspective and existence when viewed in each others’ light.

Somewhere in the interstice of these four novels lies an understanding of what it means to be a merchanter plying the interstellar lanes. That such an understanding is never spelled out or given a pithy summary makes it all the more meaningful and true. It is an understanding crafted by Cherryh, but wrought in your own imagination.

And that’s the true strength and legacy of these novels.

GRADES:

MERCHANTER’S LUCK: A
RIMRUNNERS: A
TRIPOINT: A
FINITY’S END: A

C.J. Cherryh
1982 / 1989 / 1995 / 1998
DAW / Warner / Aspect / Aspect
Cover Price: Out of Print
ISBNs: Out of Print
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Variety, schmariety. Three more What I’m Reading reviews:

36. The Merchanter Novels – C.J. Cherryh
37. Lord of Light – Roger Zelazny
38. Skylark – E.E. “Doc” Smith

The next What I’m Reading is a review of the Lensmen novels by E.E. “Doc” Smith. I never finished this reaction, for a variety of reasons. For my next update I will most likely be cleaning up and finishing that reaction. That’s right: Completely new, never-before-seen content! Capture the excitement! An event to recount to your grandchildren!

When I was about half-way through The Uplift War, I sat down and wrote the following:

The saying is that familiarity breeds contempt. In the case of David Brin’s Uplift novels, though, I’m finding that familiarity merely breeds a sense of the mundane. The grand brushstrokes of his galactic civilization seem brilliant and bold when you see them for the first time, as if a reality of epic scope were being polished like a jewel before its presentation. But the longer you look and the more you see, the more mundane the creation becomes — as if some magician had used the polishing cloth to shuffle the jewel away and replaced it with a counterfeit of glass.

When someone says, “Look ye upon a galaxy teeming with alien civilizations beyond count.” There is a promise of grandeur there. But when the same guy wraps up by saying, “And pretty much all of t hem are uni-cultures based on biological cliches and my own fascination with trinary thinking.” Well, the promise kind of evaporates like so much smoke.

Having just completed The Uplift War, I find that my opinion has shifted.

The ending is odd… About twenty pages from the end Brin shifts into a strange storytelling mode where he’s suddenly reminding readers of things that happened less than five paragraphs earlier. It gets even weirder when he begins re-stating the basic relationships between characters. “There was XXX, YYY’s lover…” Yeah, David, we know. They’ve been lovers for three hundred pages. And, yes, we know that Megan Oneagle is Robert Oneagle’s mother. Give it a bloody rest already.

I think the reason I find it so hard to precisely put my opinion of Brin’s writing into words is the blatant inconsistency of it. In Startide Rising I watched him shift seamlessly, time and time again, between hack soap opera and brilliant space opera. In The Uplift War we’re spared from hack soap opera, but the inconsistency simply finds its place in a plethora of Achilles’ heels which, while being less easily summarized, are not less frustrating and debilitating.

Some more random thoughts:

– Intriguingly, while I found the hack soap opera of Startide Rising to be one of the major failings of the novel, I found the romantic sub-plots of The Uplift War to be one of its major strengths.

– As with Startide Rising, Brin gives us a plot of epic scope with a mythic core. To his credit, he manages to resist the urge to have one of his characters explain to us just how amazingly cool the epic scope and mythic core of his novel is. (Something which, in Startide Rising, dulls the luster of the accomplishment. Unfortunately, because he did it in Startide Rising, some of the luster is still lost.)

– The Uplift War is a far more satisfying novel than Startide Rising, in no small part because Brin chose both the right beginning and the right ending.

I wish I could put my thoughts on The Uplift War into some kind of order, but I’ve spent several weeks trying to write this reaction and that order just isn’t emerging. In retrospect, I can say that I liked as much as I disliked. And what I liked, I liked a lot. And what I disliked, I disliked a lot.

In the end, I’d say that The Uplift War is worth reading. But I won’t give it a high recommendation.

GRADE: B

This is, quite simply, a superb collection of short fiction. Within its pages Zelazny ranges freely from science fiction to fantasy; from irreverence to painful truth; from the merely good to the truly excellent and every point in-between.

The collection includes “Walpurgisnacht”, “Recital”, “The Night Has 999 Eyes”, “My Lady of the Diodes”, “The Last of the Wild Ones”, “The Horses of Lir”, “A Hand Across the Galaxy”, “The George Business”, “Home is the Hangman”, “The Force That Through the Circuit Drives the Current”, “Fire and/or Ice”, “Exeunt Omnes”, “Dismal Light”, “Angel, Dark Angel”, “And I Only Am Escaped to Tell Thee”, “A Very Good Year”, “The Naked Matador”, “Go Starless in the Night”, “But Not the Herald”, and the titular “Unicorn Variations”, as well as three short essays and introductory commentary to each story by Zelazny.

The one weakness of the collection, in my opinion, is the number of short-short stories that Zelazny includes: Some are mood pieces. Some are clever ideas. Some are sensawunda. And, in fact, essentially all of them are good little pieces of fiction. But, ultimately, the short-short form is a one-punch fight (or, as Zelazny says himself, a single-panel cartoon). While each stands by itself, the effect of so many short-shorts in close proximity to one another is a pervading sense of gimmickry.

But, that minor flaw aside, Unicorn Variations is peppered with memorable stories providing a tour de force of what speculative fiction is capable of. Particularly notable in my memory are:

“The Last of the Wild Ones”. This is the sequel to another Zelazy short story, “Devil Car”, which I have never read. Despite that, I found this to be a beautiful, emotional sojourn of a warrior at the end of a long and personal journey.

“The George Business”. This is a rather clever twist on the old dragon-slaying chestnut. It’s so clever, in fact, that Hollywood just couldn’t resist lifting it for Dragonheart a few years back. The distinction is that Zelazny spices the story with his unique wit and verve, whereas the Hollywood vehicle choked on its re-treading of fantasy stock pieces.

“Dismal Light”. This story is a prequel of sorts to Zelazny’s Isle of the Dead. I say “of sorts” because it was apparently written as a character study for the novel. I haven’t read the novel, but, like “The Last of the Wild Ones”, I found “Dismal Light” to stand admirably on its own. The bifurcated vision of the first paragraph really drew me into the story: “Right there on his right shoulder, like a general, Orion wears a star. (He wears another in his left armpit; but, for the sake of wholesome similes, forget it.) Magnitude 0.7 as seen from the Earth, with an absolute magnitude 4.1; it was red and variable and a supergiant of an insignia; a class M job approximately 270 light-years removed from Earth, with a surface temperature of around 5,500 degrees Fahrenheit; and if you’d looked closely, through one of those little glass tents, you’d have seen that there was some titanium oxide present. It must have been with a certain pride that General Orion wore the thing, because it had left the main sequence so long ago and because it was such a very, very big star, and because the military mind is like that.” And the extended metaphor of Orion throughout the story lent a metaphorical skeleton to a subtle character drama writ large across a backdrop of star death.

“Unicorn Variation”. The story from which the collection draws its title is a simply delightful little piece of whimsy. It made me laugh and ponder and wonder and, most importantly, turn the page.

But, ultimately, it’s the collection’s centerpiece – the novella “Home is the Hangman” – which makes it shine. This is, quite simply, one of the best robot stories I’ve ever read, summoning up a queer mixture of pre-cyberpunk and noir with an Asimovian sensibility to deliver a poignant and powerful drama on the cusp of revolution. This story deserves every accolade it’s been given (which includes the Hugo and the Nebula).

All of which has led me to a very important question:

Why the hell haven’t I read more Roger Zelazny?

I enjoy every piece of his short fiction that I stumble across. I loved the First Chronicles of Amber. I rave about Lord of Light.

But this collection really brought home to me the fact that, for whatever reason, I’ve never really made an effort to read Zelazny – I’ve kinda just let his work fall into my lap. (Even this collection was a random purchase that I only plucked off the shelf because of a coincidental comment here in the newsgroup about one of the essays.) I think that’s something that’s going to have to change.

GRADE: A-

(I’d rank this as a B+ collection without the lengthy “Home is the Hangman”, which is an A+ story.)