Creatures of Light and Darkness

[learnedax]

Just read Roger Zelazny's Creatures of Light and Darkness. It was good, but a little more disjoint than it could have been. The overall effect was a bundle of very interesting bits and pieces, which almost flowed smoothly into an excellent whole. I'd say it was a near thing at being a great book, and as it is it's a quite good book.

The thing that really interested me is how many evocative ideas he put into it. There are the Masters of Temporal Fugue (short-range time travel) who fight duels in paradoxical loops backwards and forwards; the Steel General, who when his whole body has been replaced piecemeal by robotics wears a ring of his original flesh; the non-diest, non-sectarian priest, who recites the Possibly Proper Death Litany*; one scrier reading the living entrails of another, with the latter rising up to argue the former's interpretation; half-human, half-machine oracles that can continue to analyze the future so long as they receive stimulation; the teleporter, who presumes an infinite universe must contain anything he can visualize, and may teleport anywhere he can envision. This last idea is only briefly touched upon here, but is essentially the basis for the Amber series. One wonders what he would have come up with if he'd gone down more of these paths...

In any case, I think I need to read more of Zelazny's early work. I had read the first half of Amber a while back, and enjoyed it, but it wasn't until I read the most excellent Lord of Light that I got really interested in him, and unfortunately the next thing I read was the later Amber quintet, which I found deeply unsatisfying.

*"Insofar as I may be heard by anything, which may or may not care what I say, I ask, if it matters, that you be forgiven for anything you may have done or failed to do which requires forgiveness. Conversely..."

Comments

[gyzki.livejournal.com]

"O clever skull, thus to have tricked the fink god!" (Quoting from memory, so quite possibly inaccurate, but just to prove I love the book.)

CofL&D comes from the period when all Zelazny's books only had the one plot: a group of near-immortals with more-than-human powers rule the world/galaxy/multiverse, until Our Hero (Sam, Corwyn, Prince Who Was 1K, Shadowjack, etc.) returns from exile (either self-imposed or banishment) to Shake Things Up and end the oppressive rule of the establishment. Some of them work better than others. Lord of Light had a bunch of cool ideas, and they all came together in one theme. CofL&D had whole heaping bunches of cool ideas, but they didn't come together as well. But like I said, I love the book.

You might also like To Die in Italbar (also partakes a bit of the One True Plot) and the short stories "Doors of His Face, Lamps of His Mouth" (I think I got those paired up right) and "Rose for Ecclesiastes." Just recommendin'. Maybe also the Dilvish the Damned stories.

[learnedax.livejournal.com]

Good memory.

One of the things I really liked about LoL that didn't really line up so well in CoLaD was that the cosmology he picked was tightly integrated with the technology he was exploring and its implications. Which is not to say that I could put this book down either.

Thanks for the suggestions; I should be occupied for a little while.

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

I believe I have both of the aforementioned stories.

Somewhere. My book room is messy right now.

[(Anonymous)]

I really liked LoL. so much so that I almost bought a new copy just to have a very readable one, vs the old OLD hardcover copy I have.

I considered buying the Amber series, since you can get it all in one handy LARGE book now. Is it worth reading?

Try Orson Scott Card, Robert Heinlein, perticularly the Lazerous Long books and I have a few other non classic authors kicking around that have some great stuff.
I bought Philip Jose Farmer's River World Series and Piers Anthony's Incarnations of Immortality series. but i haven't had a chance to read them yet.

[learnedax.livejournal.com]

My recommendation is seriously to read just the first five books of Amber, since the two quintets are not a continuous plot.

I've read bunches of Heinlein, and up until the end I like him a lot; the only Card series I got into was Ender's game, and after two books that started to go downhill in a hurry; I have actually read Incarnations of Immortality, although as with most Anthony I read at that time I was interested at the beginning but kept reading the later books mainly out of stubbornness.

BTW, should I know you?

[riccakitty.livejournal.com]

sorry I sometimes post anonymously on accident thinking i'm logged in.
it's kitty from shaughn's party.

[patrissimo.livejournal.com]

I really liked LoL and Amber, and enjoyed Jack of Shadows/CoLaD. So let me know if any of the other early ones are really good.

[jducoeur]

I've never gotten around to reading "the second half" of Amber, because I don't consider it anything of the sort. The original quintet stood on its own for, what, well over a decade before he decided to do the sequel series. That trick *never* works, so I mostly just pretend it didn't happen.

On the subject of "evocative ideas", and taking that to the comic-book side: have you read any Grant Morrison? He's pretty much the deity of Cool Ideas. His writing quality is extremely variable, but everything he writes is chock-full of intriguing concepts.

(Other idea-packed authors include Adam Warren, whose cute anime art wraps surprisingly dense science fiction, and of course Warren Ellis, at least when he's in that mode. I assume you've read Transmet, right?)

[learnedax.livejournal.com]

The separation between the two halves of Amber was mainly why I intentionally took a couple of years between the two. I didn't want the later books to blend wiht the earlier ones, and as it turns out I could have held off indefinitely just fine.

The new Doom Patrol is all the Grant Morrison I've read. I found it intriguing, if not always especially coherent. I've read about the first third of Transmet, and the remainder is definitely high on my list. I've also read most of Planetary, which has some wonderfully clever black parody. Adam Warren I haven't seen before. Hmm... Google turns up some interesting-looking stuff, although I've never been as interested in the Manga art style.

[jducoeur]

Newer Grant Morrison gets even stranger than Doom Patrol. The Invisibles is probably the most distinctive and famous of his stories (an incredibly messy and confusing book, but fascinating in its weirdness), but there have been lots more; his recent series The Filth is pretty similar in style. His run on Animal Man is almost certainly his *best* work -- still fabulously strange, but relatively coherent and truly mind-bending. At the time, it was a ground-breaking book.

Adam Warren is easy to miss, since his stuff is manga through and through. He's probably best known for his Dirty Pair comics. But they're a curious beast -- he takes an anime series that wasn't all that odd, and uses it as a launchpad for some truly strange SF. He's one of those rare people who takes science fiction seriously, and assumes that the future is just plain stranger than we would normally imagine. I'm not a huge manga fan myself -- I buy a few comics, but I've never gotten into anime or manga as a genre -- but I make a point of buying all of Warren's stuff, because it's so intellectually playful.

(His most recent work is a Marvel miniseries called Livewires, which is basically about what it's like being part of a team of superintelligent killer androids. It's cute, fun and sometimes downright silly, but at the same time never shies away from the implications of the premise. The viewpoint character is a girl who has just discovered that she *is* a superintelligent killer android, and is having some trouble dealing with the concept. That gives you a pretty good idea of his thought processes right there...)