The Road to Amber (2 page)

Then, just a few days before Lunacon, a battered and tattered packet arrived from the Postal Service. Inside was a nearly shredded note from Roger Zelazny saying I absolutely should introduce myself if I did make it to Lunacon.

There something unbelievable happened. I certainly wouldn’t believe it if I hadn’t been there. We said hello, shook hands, and some connection beyond the logical happened. We were instant best friends.

“Love” is probably too strong a word to use, but, yes, it was there from that moment. We fell in love.

Of course, such things don’t happen, not between a twenty-six year-old, newly minted Ph.D. and a famous author twice her age. I didn’t know Roger, so I didn’t know he was notoriously shy. Otherwise, I probably would have wondered about his ulterior motives in inviting me to a party his agent was throwing that night—and, yes, he included my then-husband in the invitation.

But I was awed and excited, and I went (with my now-ex). And Roger and I talked a considerable amount, especially given that he was not only Guest of Honor of the convention but also of this party. The next day I came back to Lunacon and went to Roger’s Q&A. I was still very shy of him, but I wanted to get a book signed for Kathy Curran, so I steeled myself and joined the line.

To my surprise, Roger not only signed the book (a used paperback; I was
very
broke) but asked if I wanted to chat. We found a place in a hallway where there were two tall-backed chairs. I think because no one expected to find Roger there, we actually talked for quite a while without interruption. But, eventually, other members of the convention noticed the anomaly. I finally excused myself and found my friends.

The next day I didn’t come back. But from that point something changed in our correspondence. For one, Roger’s next letter ran just over three single-spaced typewritten pages. Up until then, the longest letter had been one page. He was more personal, more chatty. The letter itself was written over the course of two days, as if he hadn’t wanted to stop the conversation.

After that, the frequency of letters increased: sometimes short notes, sometimes longer, chattier missives. Often they were written serial fashion, covering several days. At Lunacon, I’d admitted my own interest in writing fiction. Roger already knew about my academic writing. Now we began to discuss the craft more often and in more detail.

Roger didn’t so much try to tutor me as to show me what the life of a working writer was like—what he was writing, when invitations to participate in projects came in, what he was reading, about judging a contest, about a review that had just come in of
Blood of Amber
.

He liked to mention the weather, part of a lively connection with his surroundings, the same that had shaped his novella “24 Views of Mount Fuji, by Hokusai.” He loved lilacs, jazz music, sweets.

When
Knight of Shadows
(the fourth book in the new Amber series I wasn’t going to read until it was done) was near release in 1989, Roger sent me an advance review copy. By the time
Prince of Chaos
was released in 1991, it was dedicated to me.

Yet, despite the fabric of words that connected us on a daily basis, Roger and I met only rarely. I was teaching college in Virginia. He was writing books and stories in New Mexico. I was married. He was married and had three kids he loved dearly. We never said anything to do with an “us.” Or at least not for a long time as such things go. That wasn’t the point. We had each found a soul-mate, someone to talk to.

What did we talk about? Everything. One thing the introductions I’ve read so far don’t touch on is how much Roger was fascinated by just about every aspect of the world. He never worked on a computer, but he read about computer science as well as other sciences, hard and soft. He read poetry daily, even though he didn’t write as much of it as he once had. He loved history and biography. He read mythology, theology, psychology, and philosophy—and didn’t draw tight lines between them. He loved writing as a craft and would read occasional “how to” books to keep up on the jargon. He also was fascinated by the business side of the field.

Unlike far too many professionals of high reputation, Roger never stopped reading the newer writers. He didn’t just read the hotshots being nominated for awards. He read novels because a splashy cover caught his eye or because a title amused him.

As our correspondence progressed, Roger sent me books—often by the box-load. We were generations apart, so some of what had formed him was out of print or unavailable to me. He’d hunt out a copy of an old favorite and send it along. Or he’d finish a book of essays on some subject, then send it so we could “talk” about it. Or sometimes, as with
Expecting Someone Taller
by Tom Holt or Terry Pratchett’s
Wyrd Sisters
, a book would make him laugh, and he’d send a copy of that, too.

This exchange wasn’t one-sided. I didn’t send as many books, but, if I mentioned liking something, he’d read it. He sent me jazz and copies of the tapes his sons made for him. I sent him David Bowie albums. We had a great time.

In 1990, I saw a short notice in
Locus
that Twayne’s American Author series was looking for writers to do books on various SF/F authors. Roger’s name was on the list. After a lot of consideration, because I was really worried the casual nature of our correspondence would change, I asked Roger if I could do the book and quote from some of our letters. He agreed. Far from the biography changing our relationship for the worse, it intensified it.

Let me shift back to the general here. Having known the man in his diversity, far too much of what is written about Roger stresses his intellectual side, his place in the SF/F field as one of the New Wave writers who improved the form, as a distant, even god-like figure.

Roger never thought he’d introduced anything remarkable, knowing full-well that literary tricks which were new to SF/F were old hat in the larger writing world. Yes, he loved writing and tried to be innovative and interesting, but that was where it stopped. He knew where he was special and knew also that many of the things for which he was praised were not the reason.

There’s another side to this poetry-reading intellectual, a side that Roger never attempted to hide, but many chose to ignore because it did not fit the image. His reading could be distinctly low-brow. He liked the Destroyer novels—and read each as it came out with enthusiasm. He read action adventure novels by authors such as John D. MacDonald and Donald Hamilton. He read a fair amount of what might be termed “modern noir” detective fiction.

Roger also liked comics and sent me copies of some of his favorites. We heatedly discussed how
Grimjack
might work out. As
Sandman
became more popular, sometimes one or the other of us would have trouble finding copies of the latest issue, so we fell into the habit of buying each other copies and mailing them back and forth. But he also liked Donald Duck, especially Uncle Scrooge. He liked broad, bad humor and limericks.

Another important element of Roger’s life became apparent as we corresponded. Roger loved his three kids. Hardly a letter would go by without a passing mention of one or the other. Sometimes it was just that he was back from dropping someone at school. Sometimes it was going to a soccer game or some other school event. Often it would include what kid’s friend was sleeping over that night.

A great deal has been said about how Roger’s productivity slowed in the eighties, and how maybe some of what he wrote then wasn’t as good or ambitious as his earlier works had been. This is one of those blanket statements which should be made with care.

The novel
Eye of Cat
, which is very ambitious and stylistically creative, was published in 1982. The novella “24 Views of Mount Fuji, by Hokusai,” which, by Roger’s own admission in the story’s introduction in the collection
Frost & Fire
was written in part in an effort to stretch his own limits, was published in 1985. It won a Hugo. The Hugo Award-winning novella “Permafrost” was published in 1986.

Yet Roger did have a new, complex, creative endeavor to occupy him during this “slower” time, an endeavor that influenced his interests as well as his writing. Their names are Devin, Trent, and Shannon, his three children, born 1971, 1976, and 1979.

Roger wrote a lot of sword and sorcery during the years his kids were young. However, sword and sorcery—and Burroughs’s Tarzan books, which he told me he had read to Trent—and other such works were what had hooked Roger on the field as a child. Is it a coincidence that Roger’s writing became more experimental once again as his kids began to get older and might understand those experiments? I don’t think so. Nor do I think Roger regretted anything he wrote during that time.

After all, Roger was diverse. He would read Proust and follow it up with Calvin and Hobbes. He loved Amber so much he named his corporation after it. He returned to sword and sorcery characters like Shadowjack and Dilvish the Damned for several projects. He loved those “lighter works” as much as he loved
Lord of Light
or
Creatures of Light and Darkness
or the novellas that brought him more critical acclaim. They were all part of him, even if fans and critics wanted to have him write solely one thing or another.

Okay. Back to those intertwined lives. Time passed. By the mid-nineties my marriage to my college beau began to fragment and then to break.

On the day I decided that I was going to leave that marriage at the end of my current teaching contact, find work elsewhere, start a new life, I called Roger to tell him. After all, he was my best friend. Hard as it may be to believe, we’d never discussed getting together permanently. We both believed firmly in commitments, and we both had them.

So I was shocked when Roger asked me to move out to New Mexico to be with him, “Because I realize I don’t want you going anywhere else.”

I thought about staying solo—after all, I was pretty burnt on relationships by then. I realized I didn’t want to just run and hide if Roger was willing to take a chance. So I agreed. I’d sold a few—four, I think—novels by then, although, due to quirks of publishing, none were yet out. I had a few short stories published. Hardly much on which to base a career, but at least I had a track record.

We started making plans for my move. I even considered giving notice at my job earlier than planned. Then Roger called to tell me he had just learned he had cancer. He offered me an out. I told him he was crazy, that if he was sick, I needed to be there.

But we delayed my arrival until the end of the term. This gave Roger time to start chemo, to inform his family of changes to come, to deal with a lot of things that arise at such times. We talked daily. We still wrote letters, pretty much daily. And June of 1994 came, and I went south.

Roger met me in North Carolina. We drove west in my sedan with my six cats. He’d always been thin, but I was shocked at how much weight he’d lost since I’d last seen him. I’d brought a bunch of recorded books and old radio dramas, but we didn’t listen to a single one. We talked steadily for days. We’d keep talking for the next eleven months and a bit.

I’m not sure what we talked about. The same old stuff, I guess: history, biography, mythology, theology, science, poetry, our lives together and apart, and writing, always writing. Roger read me the Bunnicula books while I did cross-stitch beadwork. I introduced him to role-playing games. We both wrote.

I taught him how to make crepes. He insisted on learning how to flip them, rather than turning them with a spatula. We bought a guinea pig. She had babies. Roger was thrilled and insisted we keep all three. When Roger was strong enough, we went touring locally. We went to conventions. We went to New Zealand.

Somewhere in there, the chemo stopped working. I was at his side when Roger stopped breathing. And stopped talking. And was finally quiet.

Except that Roger’s stories are still there making beautiful noise. Those stories are all his—the silly ones and the serious ones, the poetic and the crass, the science fiction and the fantasy. Altogether they are a complex body of work that, when taken in total, come close to reflecting a complex and fascinating man.

—Jane Lindskold

W
hen Roger and I were collaborating on the novel
Wilderness
, he would have dinner at our home and secretly sign several of his books in my living room bookshelf—never more than a couple at time—and always leave a little message for me to find at some later date. Just the other day I found one of these with Roger’s tight, neat script adorning the title page. He’d written: “Finally finished the one I told you about.”

There were many Rogers—but the one I began to know best was the elusive Roger. The one who left messages in books like messages in bottles, little threads that were tied to conversations. These were not inscriptions but rather encryptions, and Roger expected me to remember as much as he did. He remembered everything: names, dates, people, plots. A mathematical mind in the soul of a mage.

In each of these small inscriptions I found some earthly or ethereal wisdom, an epiphany that uplifted me for days, weeks or months. Roger was instinctive about the needs of his friends, and he lavished this largesse of love, giving each and every one of us, his friends and extended family, something that we needed.

For one man who played musical instruments in a band, Roger told all of his friends about this musical buddy, and, more importantly, he was there in the flesh to applaud when his friend performed. He met folksinger and sci-fi writer Will Sundown Sanders at a city coffeehouse where Will was playing, and Roger made sure all of his other friends knew about Will, his riffs, and his writing.

In my case, Roger was clear and definite. “You need an agent,” he said one day, and he found me one. Shortly thereafter, I found myself with a top flight editor, a major publisher, and a contract—all of which might not have happened without Roger’s help. He also wrote a comment for my new book, comparing me to Carlos Castaneda and Philip K. Dick. Over the top, but what the heck…friends.