Roger Zelazny's To Die in Italbar … is an unusual work of science fiction that takes several disparate characters and gradually moves them together. While Zelazny is no feminist and makes it clear, a female god plays a major—and evil—role in his tale. There are enough elements in Italbar to make a dozen stories: intergalactic rivalry, telepathy, a world ruined by atomic war, a pathologist awaiting a cure for his own disease while existing for decades at the moment before death, a Typhoid Mary who can decimate whole planets with a variety of diseases, and the blue-skinned Deiban goddess Mar'i-ram. Only a master of science fiction could weave all these strands into his web, and Zelazny spins them in a deft and satisfying manner.