The inhabitants of Roger Zelazny's Sign of the Unicorn are not human beings at all but a race of aristocrats who live in another dimension and who can slip in and out of Earth, which they call Shadow, when they feel like it. They are a squabbling crew of brothers and sisters, a sort of outsize Borgia family complete with daggers and swords and Renaissance castles, and the plot of the novel is closer to that of a thriller than to most science fiction plots. I mention the book, though, because it is good, because it solves the stylistic problem of science fiction in an interesting way, and because it represents a sort of boundary of science fiction, the place where it ends.

To take the last point first, the members of the family can speak to each other by means of decks of playing cards, and can actually conjure each other up physically with them. This is a form of whimsical magic which has nothing to do with science, or science fiction. On the other hand, when on Earth the family can manipulate landscapes at will, so that trees, rocks, mountains, and weather compose themselves into whatever arrangement is required, and this, it seems to me, while remaining in the realm of magic and fantasy, has something of the conceptual interest of science fiction.

Witches and wizards in medieval romance can change scenery about, turn castles into hovels and so on, but we see it's been done, we don't see them doing it, and this is where Zelazny moves into that zone of ingenuity which is science fiction's domain….

The writing of most science fiction, the movement of its style, is brisk and efficient but rather drab. Attempts at fine writing … don't seem to work, and the frequent solemnity of the genre … makes for worthiness rather than real persuasion. I know of only two more or less satisfactory solutions to the problem. One is John Brunner's (in Stand on Zanzibar, The Sheep Look Up, and more recently, The Shockwave Rider), and that is to write not badly but anyhow, because you're in a hurry and your interest is elsewhere. (p. 6)

And the other solution is Zelazny's, and that is to crash and collapse styles in much the same way as he conflates perspectives. His tone, when it is not simply deadpan, is jocular and in resolute bad taste. "Out of every life a little blood must spill," his hero hums after he has been stabbed…. The effect, as with Brunner, is to abolish the whole question of style, and this is in keeping with the brilliant pointlessness of Zelazny's novels. They simply can't be read for meaning, and I hope most of us have some sort of place for such fiction in our reading lives. (pp. 6-7)

[In mingling] triviality and intelligence Zelazny remains in the best tradition of that unnatural founding father, who created a synthetic life because he couldn't resist his own ingenuity, who stumbled so thoughtlessly on the contents of the sleep of reason. (p. 7)