Roger Zelazny

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From Sixteen to Upper Sixth: 'My Name Is Legion'

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Roger Zelazny is one of my favourite writers of light fiction, but though I have read some half a dozen of his books. [My Name is Legion] is the first to come my way which crosses the tenuous borderline between fantasy and SF. Here are three stories describing three missions by 'the nameless one', a big-scale, freelance, single-handed troubleshooter. All are narrated in the first person, and are rooted in a technology basically our own but advanced some few score years. The first concerns a man-made submarine volcano, the second dolphins, and the third a humanoid robot who seems to have run amok. Zelazny's action is nearly as fast as Harry Harrison's (and I know of none faster). The protagonist is untrammelled by [James] Bond-type sex diversions, and his superhuman ability and resource are cloaked by careful planning and training. Success is achieved with a minimum of suffering by others, whose deaths, when they come, are not usually at his hand. (pp. 410, 412)

Norman Culpan, "From Sixteen to Upper Sixth: 'My Name Is Legion'," in The School Librarian, Vol. 27, No. 4, December, 1979, pp. 410, 412.

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