> have an easy rest.
Мы пpиносим соболезнование близким писателя и вместе с поклонниками,
со всем огpомным миpом читателей скоpбим об утpате... И посвящаем
этот выпуск Ему, Роджеpу Желязны...
И еще. Мы помещаем в нашем выпуске цветную фотогpафию писателя. Пусть память
о нем и его твоpениях живет вечно...
За помощь в подготовке фэнзина и за поддержку хочу выразить благодарность
А.Качанову, В.Васильеву (Москва)
С.Бережному, H.Перумову, Э.Мусаеву (Петербург)
О.Сакаеву (Hовосибирск)
С.Hиколаеву (Йошкар-Ола)
С.Лежневу, М.Беланкову (Пермь)
и многим-многим другим любителям фэнтэзи, благодаря
которым фэнзин все же выходит в свет и находит своего читателя.
Заранее благодарен за отзывы и любые предложение.
...And Death will take away Your foes, Lord!
С наилучшими пожеланиями,
Алексей Колпиков (Lord Ville)
2:5061/7@FidoNet
Rostov-on-Don, 1995.
3. БИОГРАФИЯ
ДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДДД
Далее следует статья Петера Hиколса на английском языке, любезно
предоставленная Дмитрием Байкаловым. Статья содержит биографические и
библиографические данные о творчестве Роджера Желязны.
About ROGER ZELAZNY
------------------------------------------------------------------------
(1937-1995) US writer, born in Ohio, with an MA from Columbia University
in 1962. In 1962-9 he was employed by the Social Security Administration
in Cleveland, Ohio, and Baltimore, Maryland; from 1969 he wrote full-time.
His arrival in the sf world in 1962, along with Samuel R. DELANY, Thomas
M. DISCH and Ursula K. LE GUIN, marked that year as a milestone in what
seemed at the time to be the inevitable maturing of sf into a complex
and sophisticated literature, whose language might finally match its
intermittent hubris. With Delany, Disch and (to a lesser extent) Le
Guin -- and with Harlan ELLISON goading all and sundry -- RZ became
a leading and representative figure of the US NEW WAVE, writing stories
whose emphasis had shifted from the external world of the hard sciences
to the internal worlds explorable through disciplines like PSYCHOLOGY
(mostly Jungian), SOCIOLOGY and LINGUISTICS. To a greater extent than
any of his colleagues, however, RZ expressed this shift by using mythological
structures -- some traditional, some new-minted -- in his work. It has
been argued that in true MYTHOLOGY the voyage into CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGH
of the Hero of a Thousand Faces always climaxes in the Eternal Return,
so that any 20th-century sf tale which retells a myth incorporates,
by so doing, ironies and metaphors highly corrosive of any rhetoric
of outward thrust, and mockingly dismissive of the reality of breakthroughs.
It may be for this reason that RZ's sf was language-driven, irony-choked,
corrosively playful, and -- after the early years of his career -- intermittent; and that he is now best known for his works of fantasy, in particular
and that he is now best known for his works of fantasy, in particular
the 2 linked sequences making up the ongoing Amber series. The 1st,
featuring Corwin, is Nine Princes in Amber (1970), The Guns of Avalon
(1972), Sign of the Unicorn (1975), The Hand of Oberon (1976) and The
Courts of Chaos (1978), all assembled as The Chronicles of Amber (omni
in 2 vols 1979). The 2nd, featuring Corwin's son Merlin, comprises Trumps
of Doom (1985), Blood of Amber (1986), Sign of Chaos (1987), Knight
of Shadows (1989) and Prince of Chaos (1991). There are 2 pendants,
A Rhapsody in Amber (coll 1981 chap) and Roger Zelazny's Visual Guide
to Castle Amber (1988) with Neil Randall. Like C.S. LEWIS's Narnia,
the land of Amber exists on a plane of greater fundamental reality than
Earth, and provides normal reality with its ontological base. Unlike
Narnia, however, Amber is the Yin in the Yang of Chaos the father, with
consequences very far from Christian, for the Universe so defined is
both cyclical and eternally insecure; and Amber itself is dominated
by a cabal of squabbling siblings whose quasi-Olympian feudings generate
vast cat's-cradles and imperfect nestings of Story, out of which the
fabric of lesser realities takes its shape. The Amber books constitute
RZ's most substantial edifice, though not his finest work, which is
sf. Other fantasies have been lesser.
RZ's first published story was "Passion Play" for AMZ in 1962, and for
several years he was prolific in shorter forms, for a time using the
pseudonym Harrison Denmark when stories piled up in AMZ and Fantastic,
and doing his finest work at the novelette/novella length; he assembled
the best of this early work as Four for Tomorrow (coll 1967; vt A Rose
for Ecclesiastes 1969 UK) and The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His
Mouth, and Other Stories (coll 1971). The magazine titles of his first
2 books were as well known as their book titles, and the awards given
them were attached to the magazine titles. THIS IMMORTAL (1965 FSF as
". . . And Call me Conrad"; exp 1966) won the 1966 HUGO for Best Novel;
THE DREAM MASTER (1965 AMZ as "He Who Shapes"; exp 1966) -- the magazine
version was eventually released as He Who Shapes (1989 dos) -- won the
1966 NEBULA for Best Novella; and in the same year The Doors of His
Face, the Lamps of His Mouth (1965 FSF; 1991 chap) won a Nebula for
Best Novelette. Taken together, the 3 tales make up a portrait of RZ's
central worlds, themes and protagonist, a portrait which would be repeated,
with sometimes lessened force, for decades. The VENUS on which "Doors"
is set, like most of RZ's worlds to come, is fantastical, densely described,
almost entirely "unscientific"; the plot intoxicatingly dashes together
myth and literary assonances -- in this case Herman MELVILLE's Moby-Dick
(1851) -- and sex. THIS IMMORTAL takes place in a baroquely described
post-HOLOCAUST Earth which has become a kind of theme-park for the ALIEN
Vegans; in this shadowy realm of belatedness and human angst, the immortal
Conrad Nomikos serves ostensibly as Arts Commissioner but turns out
to be in a far more telling sense the curator of the human enterprise,
for, despite the US thriller idioms he uses in his personal speech,
he closely resembles Herakles -- whose Labours the plot of the novel
covertly replicates -- but is certainly both the Hero of a Thousand
Faces and the Trickster who mocks the high road of myth, redeemer and
road-runner both. Under various names, this basic figure crops up in
most of RZ's later books: wisecracking, melancholic, romantic, sentimental,
lonely, metamorphosing into higher states whenever necessary to cope
with the plot, and in almost every sense an astonishingly sophisticated
wish-fulfilment.
In THE DREAM MASTER -- for one of the few times in his career -- RZ
presented the counter-myth, the story of the metamorphosis which fails,
the transcendence which collapses back into the mortal world. In THIS
IMMORTAL, RS had already evinced a tendency to side, perhaps a little
too openly, with complexly gifted, vain, dominating, immortal protagonists,
and, as THE DREAM MASTER begins, his treatment of psychiatrist Charles
Render seems no different. Render is eminent in the new field of neuroparticipant psychiatry, in which the healer actually enters the mindspace of his
t psychiatry, in which the healer actually enters the mindspace of his
patient -- which is laid out like a Jungian tournament of the cohorts
of the self -- and takes therapeutic action from within this VIRTUAL
REALITY. But Render becomes hubristic, and when he enters the mind of
a congenitally blind woman, who is both extremely intelligent and insane,
his attempts to cope with her intricate madness from within gradually
expose his own deficiencies as a person, and he becomes subtly and terrifyingly
trapped in a highly plausible psychic cul-de-sac. All the sf apparatus
of the story, and its sometimes overly baroque manner, were integrated
into RZ's once-only unveiling of the nature of a human hero who could
not perform the moult into immortality.
After these triumphs, LORD OF LIGHT (1967), which won a 1968 Hugo, could
have seemed anticlimactic, but it is in fact his most sustained single
tale, richly conceived and plotted, exhilarating throughout its considerable
length. Some of the crew of a human colony ship, which has deposited
its settlers on a livable world, have made use of advanced technology
to ensconce themselves in the role of gods, selecting those of the Hindu
pantheon as models. But where there is Hinduism, the Buddha -- in the
shape of the protagonist Sam -- must follow; and his liberation of the
humans of the planet, who are mortal descendants of the original settlers,
takes on aspects of both Prometheus and Coyote the Trickster. At points,
Sam may seem just another of RZ's stable of slangy, raunchy, over-loved
immortals; but the end effect of the book is liberating, wise, lucid.
None of RZ's subsequent sf quite achieved the metaphorical aptness of
his first 3 novels, but Isle of the Dead (1969) and Creatures of Light
and Darkness (1969) both embody complex plots, mythic resonance and
a fluent intensity of language. Damnation Alley (1969), a darker and
coarser tale, depicts a post-holocaust motor-cycle-trek across a vicious
USA; it was filmed with many changes as DAMNATION ALLEY (1977). Jack
of Shadows (1971), though set on a planet which keeps one face always
to its sun, has all the tonality and dream-like plotting of a fantasy:
a fine one.
From the mid-1970s on, RZ's work maintained a certain consistency, and
always threatened to explode in the mind's eye; but did not quite do
so. Deus Irae (1976), with Philip K. DICK, is uneasy. Doorways in the
Sand (1976) is a delightfully complicated chase tale, involving a MCGUFFIN
and an entire galactic community. My Name is Legion (fixup 1976) --
which included the Hugo- and Nebula-winning Home is the Hangman (1975
ASF; 1990 chap dos) -- puts into definitive form the Chandleresque version
of the RZ HERO. Roadmarks (1979) engrossingly fleshes out the notion
that the turnings off a metaphysical freeway might constitute turnings
in time not space. The Last Defender of Camelot (1980 chap), which became
the title story of The Last Defender of Camelot (coll 1980; with 4 stories
added, exp 1981), Unicorn Variations (coll 1983), which included the
Hugo-winning "Unicorn Variation" (1981), and Frost and Fire (coll 1989)
-- which contained "24 Views of Mount Fuji" (1985) and "Permafrost"
(1986), both Hugo-winners -- represent competent later short stories.
Eye of Cat (1982) is a proficient sf thriller with a striking alien
and some effective Navajo venues. Had it not been for the romantic sublimities
of his first years, RZ's career might have been seen as triumphant.
He is not, however, regarded as a writer whose later works have fulfilled
his promise, and it may be that he has suffered the inevitable price
of writing at the peak of intensity and conviction when young: that
he may already have put into definitive form the heart of what exercises
him as a man and as a writer. The plummets into INNER SPACE, the sensitized
baroque intricacy of his rendering of the immortal longings of men who
all too easily slip into secret-guardian routines, the rush into metamorphosis:
all have had their cost. Though his Amber books and some other fantasies
(see listing below) exhibit a sustained freshness, RZ's sf readership
has been left with the inspired facility of an extremely intelligent
writer who does not desperately need to utter another word. [JC]
Other works: Today We Choose Faces (1973); To Die in Italbar (1973),
featuring Francis Sandow, the protagonist of Isle of the Dead; Poems
