from science fiction and fantasy by
Roger Zelazny

Roger Zelazny

This page:
Auto-Da-Fé
Comes Now the Power
Damnation Alley
For a Breath I Tarry
The Game of Blood and Dust
He Who Shapes
Is There a Demon Lover in the House?
introduction to “Passion Play”
A Rose for Ecclesiastes
Stand Pat, Ruby Stone

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Auto-Da-Fé

Copyright © 1967 by Harlan Ellison

His lips curled into the smile of a man who has known much glory and has hold upon the power that will bring him into more.

He moved, turning in a circle, not shielding his eyes against the sun.

He was above the sun.

Once I saw a blade of grass growing up between the metal sheets of the world in a place where they had become loose, and I destroyed it because I felt it must be lonesome. Often have I regretted doing this, for I took away the glory of its aloneness.

Topic:

Individuality

text checked (see note) Feb 2005

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Comes Now the Power

Copyright © 1966 by Health Knowledge, Inc.

Whether you are offender or offended, when you are hated and you live within the circle of that hate, it takes a thing from you: it tears a piece of spirit from your soul, or, if you prefer, a way of thinking from your mind; it cuts and does not cauterize.

Topic:

Hate

text checked (see note) Feb 2005

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For a Breath I Tarry

Copyright © 1966 by New Worlds Science Fiction

Note (Hal’s):
The title comes from A. E. Housman’s A Shropshire Lad, quoted in the story.

— end note

“Regard this piece of ice, mighty Frost. You can tell me its composition, dimensions, weight, temperature. A Man could not look at it and do that. A Man could make tools which would tell Him these things, but He still would not know measurement as you know it. What He would know of it, though, is a thing that you cannot know.”

“What is that?”

“That it is cold,” said Mordel, and tossed it away.

“ ‘Cold’ is a relative term.”

“Yes. Relative to Man.”

“But if I were aware of the point on a temperature-scale below which an object is cold to a Man and above which it is not, then I, too, would know cold.”

“No,” said Mordel, “you would possess another measurement.”

Topic:

Measurement

“There is no formula for a feeling. There is no conversion factor for an emotion.”

“There must be,” said Frost. “If a thing exists, it is knowable.”

“You are speaking again of measurement. I am talking about a quality of experience. A machine is a Man turned inside-out, because it can describe all the details of a process, which a Man cannot, but it cannot experience that process itself as a Man can.”

Topic:

Robots

text checked (see note) Feb 2005; Nov 2007

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The Game of Blood and Dust

Copyright © 1975 by Galaxy Publishing Corporation

Blood glanced along to the end of the sequence where the radioactive dust was scattered across a lifeless globe.

“But it was not the science that did it, or the religion.”

“Of course not,” said Dust. “It is all a matter of emphasis.”

Note (Hal’s):
It’s interesting to compare this story to “Spell My Name with an S” by Isaac Asimov.

— end note

text checked (see note) Feb 2005

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introduction to “Passion Play”

Copyright © 1977 by Roger Zelazny

Originally written for Unearth: The Magazine of Science Fiction Discoveries.
Reprinted in The Last Defender of Camelot.

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 motivations 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.

Compare to:

Strunk & White

Occasionally, there arises a writing situation where you see an alternative to what you are doing, a mad, wild gamble of a way for handling something, which may leave you looking stupid, ridiculous or brilliant–you just don’t know which. You can play it safe there, too, and proceed along the route you’d mapped out for yourself. Or you can trust your personal demon who delivered that crazy idea in the first place.

Trust your demon.

Topic:

Writing

text checked (see note) Feb 2005; Feb 2008

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Is There a Demon Lover in the House?

Copyright © 1977 by Roger Zelazny

Nightscape of the city in November with fog: intermittent blotches of streetlight; a chilly thing, the wind slithering across the weeping faces of buildings; the silence.

Form is dulled and softened. Outlines are lost, silhouettes unsealed. Matter bleeds some vital essence upon the streets. What are the pivot points of time? Was that its arrow, baffled by coils of mist, or only a lost bird of the night?

Topic:

Time

text checked (see note) Feb 2005

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Stand Pat, Ruby Stone

Copyright © 1978 by Roger Zelazny

The walker with the mitteltoth knows its wilpering best.

Topic:

Amusing one-liners

We listened with some impatience, for we were anxious to be on our way. Observers take great delight in delaying newlyweds who wish to be about their business.

Topic:

Newlyweds

text checked (see note) Feb 2005

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Damnation Alley

Copyright © 1967 by Galaxy Publishing Corporation

expanded into the novel Damnation Alley

I He raised his goggles and looked at the world through crap-colored glasses, which was pretty much the way he looked at it without them, too.
II

“Hell,” said Tanner. “That’s my name. I was the seventh kid in our family, and when I was born the nurse held me up and said to my old man, ‘What name do you want on the birth certificate?’ and Dad said, ‘Hell!’ and walked away. So she put it down like that.”

VI

Greg said, “If we don’t make it, the population of the continent may be cut in half.”

“If it’s a question of them or me, I’d rather it was them.”

“I sometimes wonder how people like you happen.”

“The same way as anybody else, mister, and it’s fun for a couple people for a while, and then the trouble starts.”

text checked (see note) Feb 2005

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He Who Shapes

Copyright © 1964 by Ziff-Davis Publishing Co.

expanded into the novel The Dream Master

I

Blindspin.

A single name of a multitude of practices centered about the auto-driven auto. Flashing across the country in the sure hands of an invisible chauffeur, windows all opaque, night dark, sky high, tires assailing the road below like four phantom buzzsaws–and starting from scratch and ending in the same place, and never knowing where you are going or where you have been–it is possible, for a moment, to kindle some feeling of individuality in the coldest brainpan, to produce a momentary awareness of self by virtue of an apartness from all but a sense of motion. This is because movement through darkness is the ultimate abstraction of life itself–at least that’s what one of the Vital Comedians said, and everybody in the place laughed.

Topic:

Automobiles

IV

“If I get you a scalpel and a cadaver, will you cut out the death-instinct and let me touch it?”

“Couldn’t,” he put the grin into his voice, “it would be all used up in a cadaver. Find me a volunteer though, and he’ll prove my case by volunteering.”

Topic:

Death

“Are you going to marry her?”

“No, marriage is like alchemy. It served an important purpose once, but I hardly feel it’s here to stay.”

Topic:

Marriage

text checked (see note) Feb 2005

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A Rose for Ecclesiastes

Copyright © 1963 by Mercury Press, Inc.

I The music was as formal as Job’s argument with God. Her dance was God’s reply.

Topics:

Music

Dancing

II

“I have come,” she said, “to hear the poem.”

“What poem?”

“Yours.”

“Oh.”

I yawned, sat up, and did things people usually do when awakened in the middle of the night to read poetry.

“That is very kind of you, but isn’t the hour a trifle awkward?”

“I don’t mind,” she said.

Someday I am going to write an article for the Journal of Semantics, called “Tone of Voice: An Insufficient Vehicle for Irony.”

IV

“Don’t,” I said, automatically, suddenly knowing the great paradox which lies at the heart of all miracles. I did not believe a word of my own gospel, never had.

Topics:

Belief

Miracles

text checked (see note) Feb 2005

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