020060112 23:00 • 
As I turned, yet again, the final page of The Amber Chronicles, I was still hungry for more of Zelazny’s writing. I found myself reaching for one of his lesser known works, Creatures Of Light And Darkness.
Set far in the future, the Middle Worlds of Life are kept in balance by Anubis and Osiris. These two deities, governing humanity from their poles in the House of Life and the House of Death, are the perpetrators of a coup against The Prince Who Was A Thousand, Thoth Hermes Trismegistus. In this story they seek his complete destruction.
Zelazny has worked such trickery with this novel, he blurs the perceptual line into fantasy while still remaining firmly in science fiction. He drops subtle hints, bits and pieces of technological explanations, as in referencing the genetically engineered canid head of Anubis… just enough to build to a realization everything he is writing about does have a technological explanation. I remember spending some time with pencil and reference sorting the actual gene manipulation it would take to fashion a son who is the father of his father, as in the relationship between Set the Destroyer and Thoth.
One of the stylistic qualities I most appreciate about speculative fiction from the 60s and 70s is the adventurous, experimental nature of many writers from this era. Zelazny interspersed pages of incredibly visual, stream of consciousness hell-rides throughout the Amber Chronicles, and here he cuts between glorious prose and verse, even employing a flash of actor’s script in the finale.
As in all his works, Zelazny moves you to think about far more than the immediate situation:
“How do you feel, Wakim?” asks Anubis.
“I do not know,” he answers, and his voice comes strange and harsh.
Anubis gestures, and the nearest side of the cutting machine becomes a reflecting surface.
“Regard yourself.”
Wakim stares at the shining egg that is his head, at the yellow lenses, his eyes, the gleaming barrel, his chest.
“Men may begin and end in many ways,” says Anubis. “Some may start as machines and gain their humanity slowly. Others may end as machines, losing humanity by pieces as they live. That which is lost may always be regained. That which is gained may always be lost. —What are you, Wakim, a man or a machine?”
“I do not know.”
“Then let me confuse you further.”
Anubis gestures, and Wakim’s arms and legs come loose, fall away. His metal torso clangs against stone, rolls, then lies at the foot of the throne.
020060102 17:48 •
I was all of twelve when I first read the original five books in Roger Zelazny’s Chronicles Of Amber. I’d just joined the Science Fiction Book Club and the Boris Vallejo covers on their dual volume omnibus edition had me spellbound. Cloaked warrior in blue jeans, wielding a blade against giant feline demons set in one of Vallejo’s impossibly lush fantasy backdrops: sword and sorcery here I come!
This fateful decision, based purely on a child’s interpretation of a stereotypical pulp aesthetic, was one of the best I’ve made. I started reading and couldn’t put the story down. Even at twelve I quickly realized I’d received much more than I’d bargained for.
There is the one true realm, Amber, and endless images cast by this realm, called Shadow. Beyond Shadow itself is Chaos, from which all came and, if Chaos wins its hand, all will return. Everything imagined by one of the royal blood of Amber can be found in Shadow. Theirs is the power to traverse these endless worlds until enwrapping existence conforms to their every desire, conscious change by conscious change.
Zelazny spins a tale of intrigue, physical and mental mastery, dysfunctional family dynamics, inherent power and reality-warping par excellence. He’s a delicious, prismatic writer, always employing a few devious tricks in the telling to surprise farther in.
As a child I felt the world I saw around me, the world I was embedded in each and every day, was but one aspect of a vast, endless range of possible space and place. Now, in re-reading the books which shaped me, as the greater and smaller arcs of my life fly in trajectories much like the writings of Zelazny, Heinlein and Sturgeon, I find this feeling stronger every day.
Roger Zelazny himself puts in a cameo as prison guard. He’s encountered by the central character, Corwin, in the dungeons deep beneath the palace. Corwin was once imprisoned here long-term, by a brother who had claimed the throne. Roger explains his enjoyment of dungeon duty to Corwin:
“Good evening, Lord Corwin,” said the lean, cadaverous figure who rested against a storage rack, smoking his pipe, grinning around it.
“Good evening, Roger. How are things in the nether world?”
“A rat, a bat, a spider. Nothing much else astir. Peaceful.”
“You enjoy this duty?”
He nodded.
“I am writing a philosophical romance shot through with elements of horror and morbidity. I work on those parts down here.”
“Fitting, fitting,” I said. “I’ll be needing a lantern.”
He took one from the rack, brought it to flame from his candle.
“Will it have a happy ending?” I inquired.
He shrugged.
“I’ll be happy.”
“I mean, does good triumph and hero bed heroine? Or do you kill everybody off?”
“That’s hardly fair,” he said.
“Never mind. Maybe I’ll read it one day.”
“Maybe,” he said.
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