Triffids Beard 2 - The Bearded Triffid

is it because it is the ultimate example of the all the things that make Zelazny the unique voice that he is.
Nothing else even comes close (except perhaps Roadmarks), and he never puts a foot wrong. As an
aside, the book is yet another proof of the truth that a talented artist can turn the oldest most
hackneyed material into an interesting, thrilling, vital work. There is nothing in this book that you haven't
seen before. But you have never, ever, seen it presented as well. The nature of the star-stone will take
nobody by surprise. The art lies in the telling of the tale, not in the tale itself. Zelazny never did it better.
Roadmarks is a most idiosyncratic time-travel novel. Zelazny makes concrete the analogy of time as a
road extending from the past to the future. Those who travel the road have access to all the turnoffs
leading to all times and places (including those that never were but that might have been). Much of the
action takes place on and near the last exit to Babylon and involves Red Dorakeen (who might be the
hero, it is hard to tell), a lethal monk, a tyrannosaur, Mondamay the Potter (a robot who lives in eleventh
century Abyssinia) and the Dragons of Bel'kwinith. Again, Zelazny has taken common coin and re-minted
it as something fresh and wonderful. Just as with Doorways in the Sand, he has built a work of art
out of trash and the book is magnificent as a result.
Zelazny is never blind to new themes and opportunities. There has always been a streak of original
brilliance in the furrows he chooses to plough, and on occasion he has anticipated later trends. The
three novellas collected together as My Name is Legion tell a rather Chandleresque story that is a
precursor to the cyberpunk sub-genre that seems so ubiquitous of late. The world is a computerised
bureaucracy. The electronic office writ large. The hero was one of the programmers who put together
the network of computers that control the world and the people in it. Consequently he knows the
loopholes, left himself back doors. As far as the world is concerned he does not exist -- the computers
have no record of him (or rather they have lots of records as he assumes personalities at will). In a
world of conformity he is perhaps one of the last individuals. (There are strong echoes of John Brunner's
The Shockwave Rider which examined many similar themes and which is also often regarded as one
of the instigators of the cyberpunk movement). In some ways, the book seems very naive nowadays.
Time has caught up with the technology Zelazny espouses and left it long behind. The hero has
destroyed his punched cards and changed his face. This sounds less than futuristic to present day ears.
But that does not invalidate the points that Zelazny was trying to make about the regimentation of
society and the message of the book is just as important as it ever was. The increasing
depersonalisation of society is a trend that shows no signs of slowing down. The drama may be
melodramatic, but it is no less real for all that. Appropriate stories are timeless stories (that is one of the
functions of myth) and the computer is one of the most powerful modern myths, an icon for the future
(pun intended) and the book can be viewed in this light as a return to Zelazny's original concerns.
Perhaps here he was building a mythology for the future based on the present rather than the past, a
step beyond books such as Lord of Light. I think he succeeded brilliantly.
The works that followed this middle period of his career (and sometimes overlapped with it) demonstrate
a slowing down of his genius. Many are pedestrian and plodding (particularly as he turned away from
science fiction and moved closer and closer to the fantasy worlds of swords and sorcery). But there
was still the occasional gem. Enough to keep me buying and reading, anyway. The brilliant Eye of Cat
and the delightfully comedic A Night in the Lonesome October (his most recent novel) are
wonderful books by anybody's standards. There was also A Dark Travelling, a juvenile novel, and
several excellent short story collections (Zelazny's short stories have always been well worth reading
and his collections are always magnificent).
And there are the collaborations of course. However with two and a fraction exceptions, his
collaborative works are uniformly dire and are best avoided. The first (and best) of his collaborations
dates back to 1967 when he put a lot of work into a novel that Philip K. Dick had stalled on. Dick's original
title for the book was The Kneeling Legless Man (which may help to explain why his inspiration dried
up) but it was eventually published as Deus Irae. It is a magnificent work and demonstrates Zelazny's
enormous skills as a writer. He managed to absorb and reproduce Dick's unique style and oddball way of
looking at things absolutely perfectly. You simply cannot see the joins.
Perhaps this fired him with enthusiasm for collaborations. Over the years he has written some fantasies
with Fred Saberhagen (very ordinary) and some hard SF books with Thomas T. Thomas (again, very