The Road to Amber (70 page)

Receiving fewer awards in his last years did not bother him. “I don’t really think I have anything to prove anymore. I know that I know how to write, and I know how to write fairly well, and I still come up with an original idea every now and then. The readers seem to like them too because the books do pretty well. I don’t lust after any more awards.”
[36]

In convention appearances during that last year, Zelazny surprised audiences by calling himself a hack writer.
[89,94]
“I sometimes enjoy thinking of myself as a ‘hack’—well, a ‘professional’—able to write to order in a hurry when the need arises.”
[94]
Jane Lindskold explained, “Although frequently praised for the artistry of his prose, Roger was equally proud of being a working writer who could write an essay on a tight deadline or a short story to meet the request of an editor. Not for him the pensive musing, the artistic pose, the fits, tempers, and blocks that so many writers affect. His breadth of enthusiasms meant that frequently he had many irons in the fire, and he was not unknown for delivering a novel past deadline. However, when he turned the novels in, they required so little polishing and editing that the editors patiently learned to accept the delay.”
[68]

February 1994
[17]
and Easter 1995
[14]
interviews asked Zelazny to name his favorite published works. “
Lord of Light
,
This Immortal
,
Doorways in the Sand
,
Eye of Cat
, and this recent one,
A Night in the Lonesome October
, are my five favorite books. They have very little in common with each other, and I liked them for different reasons.”
[17]
He omitted
Nine Princes in Amber
,
Isle of the Dead
, and
Jack of Shadows
, perennial fan favorites. Certainly
Nine Princes in Amber
and its nine sequels and other spin-offs provided the financial security that he enjoyed as a full-time writer. He didn’t name
Creatures of Light and Darkness
, but it was his favorite experimental novel. He mentioned no collaborative novels, but
Coils
,
The Mask of Loki
,
Wilderness
and
Deus Irae
represent the best of them.

He rarely named his least favorite books, but an interviewer pushed him on this point in 1976. “Let me put it this way: The books that I’d put at the other end of the list are not necessarily things that I consider bad. It’s hard to say you hate a particular book or anything like that; I don’t actively dislike any of my books. But I tend to be suspicious of anything that I write too easily. Maybe it’s a carry-over of the old work ethic or something. But the books that I did the fastest jobs on are the ones that are lower on my list.
Damnation Alley
was written quite quickly…actually, so was
Nine Princes in Amber
. For a long time I didn’t have a really high opinion of that book, just because I wrote it that quickly…
To Die in Italbar
was another quickly-written book. I’m still not sure whether I played fair with my intentions at all in that book. I don’t know that drumming in Sandow as a
deus ex machina
was the best thing to do. I still sort of think that if I had it to do over again I would’ve continued and worked out a disease mechanism. It’s better than a goddess.
[Laughter]
”
[95]

Roger Joseph Zelazny died on June 14, 1995, at age 58 of kidney failure and complications of colorectal cancer. Walter Jon Williams noted that Zelazny had appeared confused during a gaming session just days before,
[79]
He had been in remission for a year after chemotherapy, and close friends noted that he seemed thinner but otherwise well. Two days after the gaming session, he collapsed and was taken to the hospital. He died the next day. His children—Devin, Trent, and Shannon—were with him for much of his last day, and both Jane Lindskold and Trent were at the bedside when he passed. His body was cremated, and his ashes were scattered across the Sangre de Cristo Mountains outside of Santa Fe. It was a fitting location. He’d often described his view of the range from his office window to friends, and the mountains inspired works, ranging from “24 Views of Mt. Fuji, by Hokusai” to Mt. Kolvir of
The Chronicles of Amber
. Fred and Joan Saberhagen hosted a memorial at their home, and attendees included George R. R. Martin, Neil Gaiman, Walter Jon Williams, Steven Brust, Jane Lindskold, Trent Zelazny, and other authors whom Zelazny had influenced as author, friend, or both.

The science fiction community’s response was swift and shocked. George R. R. Martin said, “He was a poet, first, last, always. His words sang. He was a storyteller without peer. He created words as colorful and exotic and memorable as any our genre has ever seen.”
[70]
Carl Yoke, his friend for 52 years, wrote, “I can’t imagine a world without Roger in it. He and I had vowed to live forever. Death was not permitted.”
[96]
WalterJon Williams said, “if Roger’s later works did not achieve the impact of his earlier work, possibly it was because the center of the field had shifted in his direction: his work stood out less because everyone else’s work had become more like Roger’s.”
[79]
Neil Gaiman noted
Lord of Light
‘s influence on his
Sandman
series and observed that Zelazny’s “influence on all of us, both in comics and in fiction, was immeasurable. When he died, I wound up spreading the news around DC Comics, and lots of people who had never met Roger were broken up on a level I’ve only seen when rock stars died… I’d get these phone calls from people who took it personally. And one of the reasons that they took it personally was that he made the business of writing look interesting. A lot of writers are Roger’s fault. There are a lot of us who without Roger (or if we hadn’t read his stuff) would have gone off and done something more sensible.”
[53]
In the afterword to
The Sandman Volume X: The Wake
Gaiman wrote, “Roger Zelazny died as I completed the first chapter of
The Wake
, and his memorial informed the second chapter.”
[97]
He dedicated
American Gods
“For absent friends—Kathy Acker and Roger Zelazny, and all points between.”
[98]

The August 1995 issue of
Locus
contained appreciations from many writers, including Michael Bishop, Robert Silverberg, Norman Spinrad, George R. R. Martin, Joe Haldeman, Jack C. Haldeman II, Walter Jon Williams, and Edward Bryant. Charles N. Brown noted in his editorial, “Many of the appreciations in this issue—most came in unsolicited—expressed shock and horror. I feel strongly that an appreciation should be a warm and positive remembrance, or story, or anecdote about the person, not a wail against death, so some of these have been cut. I couldn’t cut all of them, and understand how it was the first thought when people sat down to write.”
[99]
Brown acknowledged the experimental nature of much of Zelazny’s work. “Zelazny became fascinated with the technical problems of writing and characterization. He would write entire novels to test and experiment with possible solutions.”
[99]

Trent Zelazny wrote a poignant essay about how he’d been in denial that his father was going to die. He’d also not appreciated his father’s writing while he was alive but grew to love it afterward, too late to tell him. “With the exception of a couple of pieces, I did not read my father’s work while he was alive. Within a month of his death, I picked up
Nine Princes in Amber
…the book just blew me away. I have a special fondness for “The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth,”
Dream Master
, and
My Name is Legion
.
Lonesome October
is up there too. I found a love for his writing, as well as newfound love for the man. I regret not reading his work while he was around. I regret not being able to toss one of his books down in front of him and say ‘This rocks.’ I regret that I never got to tell him how proud I am of him.”
[100]
Trent later said, “I cutse myself constantly for not being able to tell him how truly brilliant I think he is/was.”
[7]

Zelazny owned a vast number of books covering the sciences, humanities, and arts, collected over many years. Like Zelazny’s ashes, his book collection was scattered to the winds after his death. Gregory Benford observed, “I happened to be staying there in the home of another friend when, after Roger’s death from cancer…his magnificent book collection [was sold] to a used book dealer.”
[101]
From that local book store in Santa Fe some of Zelazny’s books eventually found their way into the collections of his readers around the globe. The selection ranged from Zelazny’s copies of his own novels to books on theoretical physics he had dog-eared, marked up, underlined, and signed his name in, to the very copy of Damon Knight’s
In Search of Wonder
that had inspired Zelazny’s 1962 return to science fiction.

Until recently, Wikipedia, the Internet Movie Database, and other on-line biographies said that Zelazny died of lung cancer caused by cigarette smoking. Other on-line commentary (none of which will be cited here, to avoid giving them credence) proposes that Zelazny’s premature death was retribution for a chain-smoking habit that he’d quit too late. He also appears in databases listing celebrities who died due to smoking. In a 2009
Locus
review of
The Dead Man’s Brother
, Richard Lupoff cited the 1971 novel’s frequent references to cigarettes, adding that Zelazny’s smoking “surely contributed to, if it did not actually cause, his death at age 58 from cancer.”
[102,103]
George R. R. Martin responded to Lupoff in
Locus Online
, listing these facts: Zelazny switched to a pipe in the 1970s, quit altogether in the 1980s (there was a brief lapse), and died from colorectal cancer—not a cancer commonly associated with cigarette smoking.
[104]
However, neither Lupoff nor Martin was completely correct.

Zelazny died from metastatic colorectal cancer and kidney failure; the cancer and chemotherapy combined to destroy his kidney function. There is a modest link between colorectal cancer and cigarette smoking. While most of the carcinogens in cigarette smoke are inhaled, a smaller amount is swallowed, increasing the risk of colorectal cancer. It is impossible to determine whether smoking causes any one person’s cancer or not; we can only say that the lifetime risk of developing colorectal cancer is 5.0% in nonsmokers and 5.9% in smokers.
[105,106]
Similarly, it is impossible to determine definitively if smoking contributed to Zelazny’s death from this cancer; we can only say that his risk was somewhat higher than a non-smoker’s.
[105,106]

For those who assumed retribution from Zelazny’s smoking history, there is no proof.

Zelazny collaborated on novels with Philip K. Dick, Fred Saberhagen (twice), Thomas T. Thomas (twice), Robert Sheckley (thrice), and Ger¬ald Hausman. He also finished an Alfred Bester novel and co-wrote two short stories with Dannie Plachta and one with Harlan Ellison.

He endured much criticism that his later work wasn’t as good as what he’d written in the 1960s. But in the years after his death, some critics twisted the facts surrounding his death in their assessments about the quality of his later work. In reviews, essays, and blogs—none ofwhich will be cited here—a common assertion grew that once Zelazny knew he was dying of cancer, he embarked on a whole series of collaborations—and even the Merlin series—in order to ensure his family’s financial security. This notion is completely unfounded. He received the cancer diagnosis in early 1994 after all of those collaborative novels and the second Amber series were finished; only
A Farce to Be Reckoned With
and
Psychoshop
had not yet been published. Zelazny died the year after the diagnosis.

Collaboration wasn’t something that Zelazny always enjoyed doing. “Oh, not particularly. It’s sort of the same reason I’m not particularly interested in working for TV: the fact that the final product is not mine… I normally don’t like to do it just because I like to do my own thing.”
[95]
He collaborated with Dick “simply [because] I liked that particular story…and I have long been an admirer of Phil Dick.”
[95]
He did the other collaborations for similar reasons: the project and the collaborator both appealed to him. And he approached each effort as yet another learning opportunity in the writing craft.

“The Three Descents of Jeremy Baker” appeared in July 1995 issue of the
Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
, the last publication of a new Roger Zelazny short story in the sf magazines. Reprinted in
The Years Best Science Fiction
, it ranked fifth on the Locus Poll for best short story. “Preludes and Postlude” and the Amber short stories, “Blue Horse, Dancing Mountains” and “Hall of Mirrors,” each appeared in original anthologies in the months after his death. Remembrances occurred at science fiction conventions during the following year.

Prior to his death, Zelazny was excited about a new poetry chapbook in the works,
Hymn to the Sun: An Imitation
. It was the first full appearance of “Ikhnaton’s Hymn to the Sun,” portions of which headed chapters in the collaborative novel
Flare
. The chapbook also included poetry extracted from
Lord of Light
and
Eye of Cat
.