Maybe the Joe Blotz test will help.

The test is used by honest editors considering stories by famous writers: "What would I think of this if it were a story by somebody I had never heard of, by Joe Blotz?" I think I would give To Die in Italbar by Joe Blotz an ecstatic review. "Blotz writes well; he can describe fast action and strong emotions with equal skill; he has a fertile imagination and creates colorful characters. Joe Blotz is clearly one of the most promising new writers to appear in a long time. Perhaps he is too much influenced by Roger Zelazny, but …"

No, it doesn't help. There is no avoiding the shadow; it is impossible to write about late Roger Zelazny without comparing it to early Roger Zelazny.

In 1963 Roger Zelazny published "A Rose for Ecclesiastes"; in 1968 Lord of Light won the Hugo. These dates define Zelazny's prime; sans peur et sans reproche, he was the darling of science fiction. I remember asserting publicly in 1967 that there was more real science in a page of Zelazny than in the collected works of George O. Smith; at about the same time, Harlan Ellison wrote that Zelazny was the reincarnation of Geoffrey Chaucer. I quote these statements as evidence of the spirit of the age rather than of critical acumen; either of them could be translated as "Wow!" with negligible loss of content.

But we were wowing with good reason. In an important sense Zelazny really was without fear and without blame; he would try the most daring tricks, and bring them off. Zelazny's famous skill as a culture-magpie is an outstanding instance: He would cast a computer as both Faust and Adam, mix grail legend with electric psychotherapy, work a line from the Cantos into a story whose basic plot was the old pulp chestnut about the white hunter and Miss Richbitch…. Any fool could have tried these things, and, maddened by Zelazny's example, many did; for a time we had myths like some people have mice. But Zelazny was not his epigones; he made it work.

How did he do it? We can get a clue by looking at one of Zelazny's favorite devices, a rapid shift of viewpoint, or, better yet, shift of values. In the simplest case, this is a shift from a noble view of high heroism to a comic one. (pp. 51-2)

This is an old device. It is a form of internalized comic relief—not the porter in Macbeth, but Hamlet in Hamlet…. It is sometimes called irony, but this is not quite the right word, for the comic vision does not undercut the heroic one, but underlines it. Wit is a better word, if we remember that it is the root of both witty and witting. The double vision is richer than the sum of its parts, because each part illuminates the other.

This method of multiple vision, of playing one aspect of a thing against another, is characteristic of much of the best work of Zelazny's high period…. For example, any moderately well-trained English major could write pages on the way Frost is played against Faust in "For a Breath I Tarry." Parts of the story are direct parody; Frost makes Faust funny. This leads to an implicit comparison between Faust's sophistication and Frost's naivete; Faust makes Frost funny. The endings of the stories illuminate each other; Frost succeeds where Faust fails because it is better to seek humanity than divinity. Etc.

Another approach to the same statement: There are worlds in science fiction that stick in your mind; they are solid. Hal Clement's Mesklin, Frank Herbert's Dune, Ursula LeGuin's Winter are very different places in most respects, but they do have this in common. They extend beyond the books that contain them; one feels that there is more to be said. Typically, Zelazny's worlds are not like this. They have no physics, no ecology, no sociology. They are intricately patterned and brightly colored, but they are flat, stage-sets, cartoons. But they do not need to be solid; for Zelazny's purposes, a solid world would be as useless an object as a solid violin. The function of the thing is to resonate.

This is one great advantage of working with multiple visions, of being both witty and witting. It enables the writer to assimilate material that would be too thin, too inappropriate, or simply too silly to handle in any other way. Consider the problem of the Hero…. The problem is to keep the man who saves the world from being preposterous. One solution is to humanize him, show him as being sometimes afraid, confused, tired, and wrongheaded. (pp. 52-3)

Zelazny's solution was not to eliminate the preposterousness, but to exploit it. Conrad Nomikos is an immortal man who experiences high adventures and ends up owning Earth. You find this hard to take seriously? So did Zelazny. It's one of the things he plays against in "… And Call Me Conrad," and this play is not only interesting in itself, it makes the heroism more acceptable. Conrad the admirable real hero and Conrad the preposterous comic-book hero define two surfaces; in the space they enclose Zelazny creates his resonances.

(I except from most of this "He Who Shapes" (The Dream Master). This marvelous short novel is in many ways a direct contradiction of the main themes and method of Zelazny's early work. A sign: "He Who Shapes" is as full of myth as any Zelazny story of the period, but the myth is here explicitly identified with psychopathology. It occurs to me that this may be meta-wit: Zelazny playing against Zelazny.)

Of course, this is a paradigmatic Zelazny I have been describing, triple-distilled essence of Zelazny, Zelazny as Zelazny-hero, if you want. The real Zelazny was more complicated and requires a lengthier analysis with many more qualifying phrases. Nevertheless, I think I have the essential outlines right; this is how he did it, how he made it work. But this makes what happened in the late sixties very strange. For, about this time, Zelazny abandoned his method but retrained the material that made sense only when coupled with the method. To Die in Italbar has flat backgrounds: Italbar itself has the social and economic structure of an American town, for all that it is set on an alien planet and has a few pieces of futuristic machinery and a pet lizard or two stuck here and there in the foreground. It has gigantically larger-than-life protagonists: Two of the main characters have literally god-like powers, another is a highly-successful one-man commando army, fighting an interstellar state from his private fortress, another is a paranoid prostitute redeemed by love, another is a living dead man. You find this hard to take seriously? So do I, but Zelazny has no qualms: everything in To Die in Italbar is viewed straight on, with a single vision…. (pp. 54-5)

I do not know why Zelazny began this process of reverse alchemy five years ago, why he put away his magician's tricks and turned his gold into lead. Maybe he simply ran out of steam; it happens often enough in literary careers; being a genius is a profession for the young. Or it might have been the pressures of the market. Zelazny began free-lancing full time about five years ago, and the economics of sf writing are not such as to allow time for tinkering with the elaborate and delicate machineries of wit. I don't know why; all I know is that we once had something unique and wonderful, and it is gone, and what we have in its place is only a superior writer of preposterous adventures.

Still, I enjoy reading preposterous adventures as much as anyone, and I enjoyed reading To Die in Italbar, for it is a superior specimen of the type. It is well written; fast action and strong emotion are described with equal skill; the author has a fertile imagination and creates colorful characters. Pity it wasn't written by Joe Blotz. (p. 55)