Obituary: Roger Zelazny

Roger Joseph Zelazny, science- fiction writer: born Cleveland, Ohio 13 May 1937; died Santa Fe, New Mexico 14 June 1995.

Roger Zelazny's "moment" was in the mid-1960s, during the first surge of the American New Wave in science fiction.

His earliest short stories had appeared in 1962, in the magazines Amazing and Fantastic, where they were printed alongside the first published works of Thomas M. Disch and Ursula Le Guin; but it was in 1965-66 that he truly arrived, with the publication of his first two novels, This Immortal and The Dream Master, amid a shower of Nebula awards. In those years he was a real dazzler, the prince of the New Wave, a writer who brought delightful sophistication and slyness to his reworkings of well-worn genre materials.

There was little new in the substance of his tales; it was the manner of their telling that counted. Stories such as "A Rose for Ecclesiastes" (1963) and "The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth" (1965) astonished magazine readers. They may have had conventional settings (a dry Mars in the one case and a watery Venus in the other - backgrounds which already were out of date) but they were narrated with such pizazz, with such a deftly assured blend of sentiment and hard-boiled knowingness, that they charmed almost everyone.

Zelazny's triumph was very much a triumph of style, and when that style was no longer a novelty the effect was somewhat dimmed. Younger New Wave contemporaries such as Samuel R. Delany soon overtook him in terms of substance, or intellectual weight. Zelazny remained a butterfly.

He began to go out of fashion with the critics just as he reached his peak of commercial success. Lord of Light, his third novel, won a 1968 Hugo award as the best of its year, and it remains his most famous title. Drawing on Indian mythology, it has the feel of fantasy, although there is a definite science-fiction rationale: the Hindu passengers of a long-lost starship have colonised another planet, producing a culture similar to medieval India's. An elite, descended from the original crew, possesses high technology which enables them to take on the personae and apparent powers of the traditional Hindu gods; and rebellion brews. A colourful narrative, it was criticised by some for being too baroque, but nevertheless it pleased many readers.

Thereafter, Zelazny turned more and more to light fantasy. Jack of Shadows (1971) is set on a world which has ceased to rotate and is divided into regions of permanent night and day with a band of twilight in between. The hero is a picaresque rogue who uses his supernatural powers in a quest for vengeance which turns into something larger than he expected. In the course of the narrative he travels through the "night" and the "day" realms, growing in awareness and ambition as he does so, and eventually he harnesses both the science of day and the magic of night to further his ends.

Like most of Zelazny's work, it is written in a laconic and faintly tongue- in-cheek style, full of witticisms and poeticisms. Here was a writer of considerable linguistic resource, but one felt his talents were not being stretched to the full in this beguiling, lightweight novel - nor in most of those that followed.

Zelazny's best-known contribution to modern fantasy was his "Amber" series - Nine Princes in Amber (1970), The Guns of Avalon (1972), Sign of the Unicorn (1975) and so on in a sequence which eventually reached 10 volumes. These novels, about the internecine squabbles of a group of princelings in the hidden, parallel world known as Amber, were highly entertaining at first but soon palled as one realised the nature of the card-shuffling game the author was playing.

Educated at Western Reserve University, Cleveland (where he won the Foster Poetry award in 1957 and 1959), and at Columbia University, New York, where he gained an MA in English, Zelazny once seemed the most promising writer in his field. Despite a wide readership and continued awards - another Nebula in 1975, further Hugos in 1976 and 1982, a French Prix Apollo in 1972, an American Library Association award in 1976, a Creative Achievement award from his old university in 1990 - he seemed never to have quite fulfilled that promise, settling instead into a steady career as a producer of stylish entertainments.

A number of these were written in collaboration, such as the recent "Azzie Elbub" series of humorous fantasies, with Robert Sheckley, which began with Bring Me the Head of Prince Charming (1991). Among the more notable of his later solo titles were Eye of Cat (1982) and A Night in the Lonesome October (1993). One early science- fiction novel, Damnation Alley (1969) was filmed, unmemorably, in 1977.