The last half of the month got pretty hectic, as you can tell from my missing my regular feature the last couple of weeks. Besides an increased demand from my students who are starting to realize that they have entered the Now-or-Never portion of the semester, I am also negotiating a couple of major life changes which entails getting lots of things done. However, I always have to read something (and it has to be unrelated to work) before I fall asleep, and so while my blogging has suffered, I've still been reading. I recently got hold of two more Zelazny volumes, so the acquisition of Vance and Zelazny novels that I missed out continues to be more often Zelazny than Vance. First I found
Lord of Light and then
Changeling. (Scans of the covers are to the left and above.)
Lord of Light was quite enjoyable -- a creative use of Hinduism and Buddhism to create a sci-fi tale of advanced humans using their technology to rule over a world colonized with humans who are kept in pre-scientific times (take Clarke's Third Law, apply liberally). So the tale feels very close to fantasy and even alternate history, in spite of its scientific rationale. My copy is a Gollancz reprint. I'm very grateful that they reprint older works like this, because they are already harder to find than I would wish, and usually they do an excellent job with them, but this one seemed to have more editorial issues than previous volumes I've read. They were pretty much all irritating spelling errors that made the word that context demanded into a similar word, with maybe a single letter different. Whatever they are using to spell check, they clearly need a pair or two of patient and attentive eyes
reading these before they go to press.
The next book I finished was Sharon Kay Penman's
Time and Change for a heaping helping of my favorite Plantagenet king and murdered archbishop of Canterbury (by the way, nice Richardian hand inscription in the front, Ms. Penman). After that literary jawbreaker, I was ready to go back to Zelazny.
Changeling was next -- very fun pitting of science vs. magic that is perfect for fans of
Expedition to the Barrier Peaks. It is also to be recommended for its excellent interior illustrations by Estaban Maroto. These two Zelazny novels motivated me to go out and find more, so I picked up
Dilvish the Damned and
The Changing Land. Thus I have continued to catch up on good old Sword & Sorcery that I missed out on the first time around. Dilvish and Black stand with Corwin as my favorite Zelazny characters so far -- though you have to work a lot harder to gain an impression of who (what!) Black is. If you haven't read these Zelazny novels yet, then consider this my recommendation. They are quick reads with plenty of action, speculation that doesn't overpower the story (with perhaps the exception of
Lord of Light), and plenty of harkening back to the older weird tradition. Also, the romantic elements tend to be more understated and less formulaic, which make for a nice change of pace. My only complaint are the cover illustrations. I would recommend not allowing them to influence your own imaginative projections of Dilvish, Black, and their world.
Well, that does it for the Zelazny that I know I want to read, with the exception of
Creatures of Light and Darkness. Anybody have any other suggestions for future reading or comments on their Z love? In the meantime, March will probably end on a bit of a whimper while I try to take care of other fires, and I plan to crank the blog back into overdrive for April. Thanks for not giving up on our rambles together!
The city. Urbs. Civitas. Polis. There is something powerful about the packing of places and teeming of characters that make it rich for the imagination to inhabit. Thus it is one of the settings that I love, even for fantasy adventure. It's not because I eschew variety: the hamlet, the wilderness, and -- especially the Underworld -- all have their charms. But a well-drawn city matches the well-done Underworld in my book. Dickens' London (to choose one London), lives for me and it is one of the Londons that I love; Rutherford's is another. McCullough's late Republican/early Imperial Rome likewise seems a real place with its own distinctive character. I'd like to find fiction set in Venice and Florence that do the same for those cities in the Renaissance. It's been a long time since I read much Ann Rice, but I think I'd probably say her New Orleans, and perhaps to a lesser extent her Paris, read well. The Thieves World novels made Sanctuary breathe and roar and spit. In game settings, the Free City of Greyhawk, Waterdeep, and Golarion's Absalom (for sale here) are intriguing cities that promise strong sense of place. 
