Roger Zelazny
The Last Defender Of Camelot
INTRODUCTION
Though it is contrary to my general practice to introduce my own works, I decided to say a few words to go before this collection and some before each story itself because I have put this one together out of materials drawn from the beginning, middle and recent sections of the eighteen-year period I have been writing. I have changed during that time, a condition I share with the world around me, and I redden now or blanche (as the case my be) to read over much that I once considered adequate. For this reason, there are dozens of stories that I prefer keeping interred beneath bright covers in yellowing sheets, stories that 1 will never willingly see reprinted. I feel some affection for the ones I have gathered here, however, and I will say some things about them in the proper places.
The nature of my work and my working habits shifted radically in the late 60's, when I went in more heavily for the writing of novels. I had started out as a short story writer, and I still enjoy writing short stories though I no longer do nearly as many as I used to in a year's time. The reason is mainly economic. I went fulltime in the late 60's, and it is a fact of writing life that, word for word, novels work harder for their creators when it comes to providing for the necessities and joys of existence. Which would sound cold and cynical, except that I enjoy writing novels, too.
I have no desire to explain, attempt to justify or apologize for anything that I have written. I have always felt that a story should be able to deal with such matters itself. My individual forepieces are intended only to place them within the context of my own evolving experience —which makes this an autobiographical work for me, if not for anyone else.
So, to even things up and answer a number of requests, I'll tell you a little about myself (purely subjective, not dust jacket material)—
If I couldn't write worth a damn, I think I'd like to own a hardware store. I've long been fascinated by the enormous varieties of tools used to maintain our society, as well as the clips, hinges, pins, brads, screws, pulleys, wires, chains, clamps and pipes that hold it together. Not to mention the putty, piaster, cement and paint that keep it looking well io places. Even more than a book store, where I probably wouldn't get to read much anyway, I believe that I could have been fairly happy m a good general hardware shop, But then, I would probably open late and stay open late because I'm a night person- I prefer sunsets to sunrises. I pick up steam in the late hours. I've probably done most of my best writing after midnight.
There is a group of writers living within about a 100mile diameter circle around here who get together once a month for lunch. On one such occasion, Stephen Donaldson asked me what book by someone else I wished I had written. I gave him a quick answer which seemed appropriate at the moment. I thought about it later, though, and changed my mind. Something like War and Peace or Ulysses, while impressive or dazzling, massively tragic or comic and invested with tons of scholarly and lay mana would only be egotistical choices, not things that I could have enjoyed writing as well as enjoyed having written— if I were able. I got it down to two books—one tragic, one comic — and I couldn't decide between them: Malraux's Man's Fate and Norman Douglas' South Wind. I have nothing deeply philosophical to say about either of them here, just a wistful bit of self-revelation and an attempt to answer Steve's question honestly in a place where I am talking about myself, anyway.
The most encouraging thing I have seen in recent years was nothing at all. That is to say, nothing where I had expected to see something. Back m 1975, I visited Trinity Site, which is open to the public one day a year. It had been some thirty years since the first atomic bomb was detonated over that hot, dusty, windy plain. A long line of cars was met by a military escort at a shopping center north of Alamogordo and taken some seventy miles out into the White Sands Missile Range. We finally parked, disembarked and walked to Ground Zero. There was realty nothing to see. I had read how that first blast had left a crater of fused aluminum silicates twenty-five feet deep and a quarter-mile across. It was gone. The desertwinds had filled it in, the desert plants (unmutated) had taken root above it. The radiation level was only slightly above normal background. The place looked pretty much like parts of my backyard. After a moment's disappointment at the absence of a spectacle following the long drive, I suddenly felt elated as I realized how completely the earth had recovered in the span of a single generation, Life's resilience.
Some years ago, a scientist who was planning on beaming some television pictures outward, in an attempt to communicate something concerning us and our ways to whatever might be watching the late show, asked me to suggest some of the content for the program. Along with a lot of predictable technical and social stuff, I recall suggesting a symphony orchestra with closeups of the individual instruments being played, sailboats and—I believe—a flight of hot air balloons—as these seemed three sorts of objects where form has been so perfectly and uniquely married to function that our tools have become works of art—which I suppose puts even my esthetic thinking into a kind of Platonic hardware store.
I enjoy being a writer and I even like the paperwork. That's enough about the author. Here are the stories.
PASSION PLAY
This was my first published story, as it states below. A while back, Jonathan Ostrowsky-Lantz, the editor of Unearth: The Magazine of Science Fiction Discoveries— a noble publication dedicated to the encouragement of new science fiction writers—began a policy of reprinting first stories by professionals in the area, along with introductory essays by the authors telling how the stories came to be written and including some advice to beginning writers.
For whatever such a preface may be worth in this place, 1*11 cause it to occur between here and the story itself—
INTRODUCTION
I had wanted to write for many years, but did not have an opportunity until I had completed my master's thesis and taken a job with the government. I was assigned to an office in Dayton, Ohio for training, and I reported there on February 26, 1962. As I had decided to try writing science fiction, I spent a week reading all the current science fiction magazines and some random paperbacks. I then sat down and began writing, every evening, turning out several stories a week and sending them off to the magazines. I drew a number of rejection slips, and then in March I received a note from Cele Goldsmith at Ziff-Davis, saying that she was buying this story, "Passion Play." It appeared in the August, 1962 issue of Amazing Stories.
Whether it actually was or was not, it seemed to me an almost classic case of applied insight, because I had done something right before I wrote it which I had not done before. I had gathered together all of my rejected stories and spent an evening reading through them to see whether I could determine what I was doing wrong. One thing struck me about all of them: I was overexplaining. I was describing settings, events and character motiva-tions in too much detail. I decided, in viewing these stories now that they had grown cold, that I would find it insulting to have anyone explain anything to me at that length. I resolved thereafter to treat the reader as I would be treated myself, to avoid the unnecessarily explicit, to use more indirection with respect to character and motivation, to draw myself up short whenever I felt the tendency to go on talking once a thing had been shown.
Fine. That was my resolution. I still had to find a story idea to do it with, as I was between stories just then. Now, I do not know how other people do it, but there is a certain receptive state of mind that I switch on when I am looking for a short story notion. This faculty is dulled when I am working on a novel, as I Usually am these days, so that if I want it now it generally takes me a full day to set up the proper mental climate. It comes faster if I am between books. Whatever, in those days I kept it turned on almost all the time.