Authors Zelazny, Roger SFE Science Fiction Encyclopedia1. US author, born in Ohio, with an MA from Columbia University in 1. In 1. 96. 2 1. 96. Social Security Administration in Cleveland, Ohio, and Baltimore, Maryland from 1. His arrival in the sf world in 1. 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. Though unlike Delany and Disch he was not significantly connected to the British New Wave, Zelazny became a leading and representative figure of the American New Wave, with Harlan Ellison conspicuously goading all and sundry, where he became instantly well known for publishing 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, Zelazny 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 an Eternal Return, so that any twentieth 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 if this was a conscious insight on his part, which seems highly likely, his career as a whole, with its shifts and longueurs and startling epiphanies, makes more sense for he was a visitor though a highly honoured visitor to sf. Unsurprisingly, therefore, Zelaznys sf was language driven, irony choked, corrosively playful, and after the early years of his career intermittent by the 1. Amber series. The first and finer, the Amber Corwin sequence comprises Nine Princes in Amber 1. The Guns of Avalon 1. Sign of the Unicorn 1. The Hand of Oberon 1. The Courts of Chaos 1. The Chronicles of Amber omni in 1. The second, the Amber Merlin sequence featuring Corwins son Merlin, comprises Trumps of Doom 1. Blood of Amber 1. Sign of Chaos 1. Knight of Shadows 1. Prince of Chaos 1. Hroniki-Ambera-Robert-Zhelyazny.jpg' alt='Roger Zelazny' title='Roger Zelazny' />Greetings and welcome to my home for Roger Zelazny trivia. I hope youll find what youre looking for. If you dont, let me know. Im always interested in knowing how. Summary Bibliography Roger Zelazny You are not logged in. If you create a free account and sign in, you will be able to customize what is displayed. Find great deals on eBay for roger zelazny and roger zelazny signed. Shop with confidence. There is one legitimate pendant, the nonfiction Roger Zelaznys Visual Guide to Castle Amber 1. Neil Randall the title of the unrelated A Rhapsody in Amber coll 1. Like C S Lewiss 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 cats cradles and imperfect nestings of Story, out of which fabric lesser realities takes their shape. The Amber books constitute Zelaznys most substantial edifice, though not his finest work, for his early sf was more taxing, more radical, and more fun. His later fantasies and fantasy sequences were never anything but intelligent nor were they ever much more than that. Zelaznys first published story in an sf market was Passion Play for Amazing in August 1. Roger Zelazny' title='Roger Zelazny' />Mister Fullers Revolt October 1. Literary Cavalcade. For several years he was prolific in shorter forms, for a time using the pseudonym Harrison Denmark when stories piled up in Amazing and Fantastic, and doing his finest work at the novelettenovella length he assembled the best of this early work as Four for Tomorrow coll 1. A Rose for Ecclesiastes. The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth, and Other Stories coll 1. My Name Is Legion coll 1. The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth March 1. F SF 1. 99. Nebula for Best Novelette. The Venus on which Doors is set, like most of Zelaznys worlds to come, is fantastical, densely described, almost entirely unscientific the plot intoxicatingly dashes together myth and literary assonances in this case Herman Melvilles Moby Dick 1. Sex. The introductions and essays attached to individual volumes of the Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny beginning with The Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny 1 Threshold coll 2. The Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny 6 The Road to Amber coll 2. The magazine titles of his first two books were as well known as their book titles, and the awards given them were attached to the magazine titles. This Immortal October November 1. F SF as. And Call Me Conrad exp 1. Hugo for Best Novel The Dream Master January February 1. Amazing as He Who Shapes exp 1. He Who Shapes 1. Nebula for Best Novella. Taken together, they make up a portrait of Zelaznys central worlds, themes and protagonist, that would be repeated, with sometimes lessened force, for decades. This Immortal takes place in a baroquely described Ruined 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 or Zoo keeper of the human enterprise, for he closely resembles Herakles, whose Labours the plot of the novel covertly replicates, despite the US thriller idioms he uses in his personal speech. But over and beyond that identification, Nomikos is clearly both the Hero of a Thousand Faces and the Trickster who mocks the high road of myth he is redeemer and road runner and magus and Superman and Secret Master. Under various names, this basic figure crops up in most of Zelaznys 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 Zelazny presented the counter myth, the story of the metamorphosis which fails, the Transcendence which collapses back into the mortal world. In This Immortal, he 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 see Dream Hacking, in which the healer actually enters the mindspace of his patient which is laid out like a Jungian tournament, a Role Playing Game in which the cohorts of the self are the prime players 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 Zelaznys once only unveiling of the nature of a human hero who could not perform the moult into Secret Master of the world. After these triumphs, Lord of Light 1. Roger Zelazny. Roger Zelazny. AKA Roger Joseph Zelazny. Born 1. 3 May 1. Birthplace Euclid, OHDied 1. Jun 1. 99. 5Location of death Santa Fe, NMCause of death Cancer Colon. Remains Cremated ashes scatteredGender Male. Race or Ethnicity White. Sexual orientation Straight. Occupation Novelist. Nationality United States. Executive summary Damnation Alley. Military service Ohio National Guard. One of the most influential writers of science fictions New Wave era, author Roger Zelazny is best known for such works as Creatures of Light and Darkness 1. Lord of Light 1. Damnation Alley translated to film in 1. Amber Chronicles. Like his peers Samuel R. Delany, Brian Aldiss, J. G. Ballard, and Thomas Disch, Zelazny brought a profoundly psychological twist to the characters and dramas of his fiction, but his unique gift was a powerful infusion of mythology. Together these two elements created not only a higher literary standard within science fiction, but they also helped Zelazny build worlds of remarkable believability, subtlety, and brilliance. Marrying as he did classic mythologies with technologically produced magics, Zelazny often referred to his works as Science Fantasy. His favorite character was the self mocking, immortal jokester. Zelaznys introduction to science fiction came at an early age, and by the time he was a young teen he had written and sold his first science fiction story. But despite this success he decided to set such things aside for a time, deeming himself too immature to produce characters or stories with any depth. After high school he enrolled at Western Reserve University, intending to study poetry and other subjects that would broaden his perspective. But it was not until 1. Anno 1602 Gold Edition there. M. A. in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama from Columbia University, that he lifted his self imposed ban on writing. The result, a short story entitled Passion Play, soon found publication in Amazing Stories. Over the months that followed he produced and read an impressive quantity of science fiction, publishing seventeen more short stories by 1. Even as he was producing all this soon to be influential work, Zelazny was undergoing a great deal of transformation in his personal life. He entered into a brief marriage, took a position with the Social Security Administration, and began serving in the Army Reserve. By 1. 96. 6 he had already finished both his military service, and his first marriage. He soon remarried, to Judy Callahan, and this relationship would prove considerably more stable, producing three children and lasting beyond their move in the mid 7. New Mexico. By 1. Zelazny quit his position with the Social Security Administration to become a full time writer. By 1. 97. 0, he had begun the enormously popular Amber series, which has since inspired both comic books and a computer game. The decision to put his writing career on hold for a time proved to be a wise one. Although many science fiction writers before him had done just fine, starting out much younger, Zelaznys decision to wait and to become more experienced about life brought his fiction to a more sophisticated level, making his first impression that much more powerful. One clear influence Zelazny had acquired over the interim was his grasp of the mythology of various traditions. His Hugo winning Lord of Light 1. Hindu pantheon and the precepts of Buddhism, Creatures of Light and Darkness 1. Egyptian gods and goddesses, while his ten Amber books reflected Arthurian legend along with elements from Tarot and Irish folklore. Later, Eye of the Cat 1. Navajo religion and folklore. Just as earlier science fiction authors dabbled in strange new technologies, envisioned on the horizon, Zelazny and other New Wave authors experimented with belief structures, symbolism, and the metalevels of reality to which they referred. Although Zelazny was much lauded for his part in introducing new styles of narrative into science fiction, as well as greater depth and literary merit, he was criticized in later years for having drifted toward a kind of mediocrity, producing well written adventure stories of little originality. Nonetheless his contribution to the genre lived on through the inspiration granted to later writers, among them George R. R. Martin and Neil Gaiman. A prolific author, Zelazny generated some 5. Hugos and three Nebulas. Zelazny died in 1. Father Joseph Frank Zelazny. Mother Josephine Sweet. Wife Sharon Steberl m. Wife Judy Callahan m. Son Trent. Son Devin. Daughter Shannon. Girlfriend Jane Lindskold    University BA English, Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH 1. University MA Drama, Columbia University 1. Hugo. Nebula. Irish Ancestry Maternal. Polish Ancestry Paternal. Risk Factors Smoking. Author of books The Dream Master 1. He Who ShapesLord of Light 1. Creatures of Light and Darkness 1. Isle of the Dead 1. Damnation Alley 1. Jack of Shadows 1. Doorways in the Sand 1. Roadmarks 1. 97. Changeling 1. Madwand 1. 98. 1The Changing Land 1. Eye of Cat 1. 98. The Black Throne 1. Fred SaberhagenA Night in the Lonesome October 1. The Mask of Loki with Thomas T. ThomasBring Me the Head of Prince Charming 1. If At Faust You Dont Succeed 1. A Farce to Be Reckoned With 1. Flare 1. 99. 2, with Thomas T. ThomasNine Princes in Amber 1. The Guns of Avalon 1. Sign of the Unicorn 1. The Hand of Oberon 1. The Courts of Chaos 1. Trumps of Doom 1. Blood of Amber 1. Sign of Chaos 1. Knight of Shadows 1. Prince of Chaos 1. Deus Irae 1. 97. Philip K. DickPsychoshop 1. Alfred BesterDo you know something we dontSubmit a correction or make a comment about this profile. Copyright 2. 01. Soylent Communications.