Reminiscences of Roger
I once had the privilege of spending the better part of a weekend with Roger Zelazny
It was in the early ’nineties, and the Computer-Assisted Language Instruction Consortium (CALICO) of which I was an almost-founding member, was holding its annual convocation in Monterey CA with Roger as the Guest of Honor. (Roger wasn’t actually the CALICOfest organizers’ first choice — they had tried to get Isaac Asimov, unaware that the Good Doctor’s fear of flying ruled out a transcontinental trek).
in any case, it’s safe to say that Roger was not nearly as well known as Isaac would have been to the crew of college professors and other assorted language teachers who frequent CALICOfests. In fact, I was probably one of the few in attendance who even knew who he was, much less had read him. As to that, I had been a fan ever since reading The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth and Lord of Light — a fan-fetish that kicked into hyperdrive with the first Chronicles of Amber pentalogy.
All of which worked out splendidly as far as I was concerned, because it meant I basically had Roger all to myself for the weekend. It was like a WorldCon for one!
Although he wouldn’t have realized it at the time he got the GoH invitation, I was in all likelihood the link that connected Roger to CALICO. It happened like this:
Some years prior to the event in question, I had been casting about for an appropriately evocative name for a small company I was forming, in hopes of commercializing a foreign-language instructional game I’d coded (more about that here: http://www.academia.edu/4331182/Herr_...). At the time I was also re-reading The Hand of Oberon , the fourth book in the first of two Amber Chronicles pentalogies, when I came upon page 52 and the all-too-brief scene where Corwin, the hero of the tale, meets its author — his maker, so to speak — who’s standing guard down in Castle Amber’s dungeon, as follows:
“Good evening, Lord Corwin,” said the lean, cadaverous figure who rested against a storage rack, smoking his pipe, grinning around it.
“Good evening, Roger. How are things in the nether world?”
“A rat, a bat, a spider. Nothing much else astir. Peaceful.”
“You enjoy this duty?”
He nodded.
“I am writing a philosophical romance shot through with elements of horror and morbidity. I work on those parts down here.”
Until I (re)read that line, it had never occurred to me that The Amber Chronicles was a work of philosophy. Thereafter, I could never forget it. Because the work as a whole is shot through not only with “elements of horror and morbidity,” but moreover with Roger’s personal outlook on life, the universe, everything, which I’d been unconsciously absorbing all along — and which, unless I miss my guess, enabled him to contemplate his subsequent too-early death with some measure of equanimity.
More, that line illuminated how Roger had managed to enlighten while seeming merely to entertain — the very model of what I was, in my own small way, trying to accomplish with my computer game for teaching intermediate German conversation. Was it any wonder, then, if I went and named my company “Amber Productions”?
Or if I came prepared for the meeting with Roger bearing a rare hardcover copy of The Hand of Oberon , which he obligingly signed on page 52, right next to the above-quoted passage.
Suffice it to say, we talked a good deal over that weekend in between the language-learning presentations and panel discussions. And I even got an answer to the question that had been bugging me ever since Amber Book II, The Guns of Avalon — namely: Did you always know the truth about Ganelon?
Saturday night, I got to introduce Roger at the CALICO Banquet. Ironic in a way, because to the CALICO audience, I was the celebrity — they all knew Amber Productions far better than the Amber Chronicles that gave the company its name.
For his banquet speech, Roger related the story of a discussion he’d had with a fellow sf&f writer (Roger mentioned his name, but I’ve forgotten it) about human genetics, and what traits to breed for, assuming you even could (this was in the early nineties, remember — around the time Nobel laureate Jennifer Doudna was being awarded her PhD from Harvard Medical School). Anyway, Roger and his friend quickly rejected physical beauty and money-making ability as desirable attributes, because, in either case, how could you be sure if people really liked you for you? Intelligence was on the table, but then lots of intelligent people seem to be pretty miserable pretty much of the time. Finally, perhaps harking back to how Larry Niven’s two-headed Puppeteers messed with Earth’s Birth Lottery, they settled on luck as the best genetic legacy one could bestow on one’s progeny. Which left them, however, with the problem of how to do the bestowing?
Simple, said Roger’s friend: put a bunch of fertilized chicken eggs on a platter and throw them up in the air. Let the unbroken eggs hatch and grow to maturity. Rinse, repeat. After not too many generations, you’d have bred a strain of the luckiest chickens alive.
“And so,” Roger summed up, “As I look out at the CALICO audience here tonight, I see a bunch of people doing what they most want to do, engaged in the work they love the best. As am I. And so I think we are, all of us, lucky chickens.”
That was the last time I saw him — had to leave early Sunday morning for the drive down to San Diego. We corresponded a little over the next couple of years. I recall him being very excited about his collaboration with Gahan Wilson on A Night in the Lonesome October — a project he’d been thinking about since the 1970s.
Oh, and somehow along the way, he inspired me to try my own hand at writing.
Well, Roger’s been gone over a quarter century now, and is still much missed.
He was indeed a lucky chicken!
======
A postscript, ICYMI, WIRED just published a retrospective on Roger’s work and its critical reception (here: https://www.wired.com/2021/05/geeks-g...), which I coincidentally happened upon just as I was putting the final touches on this brief reminiscence. Lucky indeed!
It was in the early ’nineties, and the Computer-Assisted Language Instruction Consortium (CALICO) of which I was an almost-founding member, was holding its annual convocation in Monterey CA with Roger as the Guest of Honor. (Roger wasn’t actually the CALICOfest organizers’ first choice — they had tried to get Isaac Asimov, unaware that the Good Doctor’s fear of flying ruled out a transcontinental trek).
in any case, it’s safe to say that Roger was not nearly as well known as Isaac would have been to the crew of college professors and other assorted language teachers who frequent CALICOfests. In fact, I was probably one of the few in attendance who even knew who he was, much less had read him. As to that, I had been a fan ever since reading The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth and Lord of Light — a fan-fetish that kicked into hyperdrive with the first Chronicles of Amber pentalogy.
All of which worked out splendidly as far as I was concerned, because it meant I basically had Roger all to myself for the weekend. It was like a WorldCon for one!
Although he wouldn’t have realized it at the time he got the GoH invitation, I was in all likelihood the link that connected Roger to CALICO. It happened like this:
Some years prior to the event in question, I had been casting about for an appropriately evocative name for a small company I was forming, in hopes of commercializing a foreign-language instructional game I’d coded (more about that here: http://www.academia.edu/4331182/Herr_...). At the time I was also re-reading The Hand of Oberon , the fourth book in the first of two Amber Chronicles pentalogies, when I came upon page 52 and the all-too-brief scene where Corwin, the hero of the tale, meets its author — his maker, so to speak — who’s standing guard down in Castle Amber’s dungeon, as follows:
“Good evening, Lord Corwin,” said the lean, cadaverous figure who rested against a storage rack, smoking his pipe, grinning around it.
“Good evening, Roger. How are things in the nether world?”
“A rat, a bat, a spider. Nothing much else astir. Peaceful.”
“You enjoy this duty?”
He nodded.
“I am writing a philosophical romance shot through with elements of horror and morbidity. I work on those parts down here.”
Until I (re)read that line, it had never occurred to me that The Amber Chronicles was a work of philosophy. Thereafter, I could never forget it. Because the work as a whole is shot through not only with “elements of horror and morbidity,” but moreover with Roger’s personal outlook on life, the universe, everything, which I’d been unconsciously absorbing all along — and which, unless I miss my guess, enabled him to contemplate his subsequent too-early death with some measure of equanimity.
More, that line illuminated how Roger had managed to enlighten while seeming merely to entertain — the very model of what I was, in my own small way, trying to accomplish with my computer game for teaching intermediate German conversation. Was it any wonder, then, if I went and named my company “Amber Productions”?
Or if I came prepared for the meeting with Roger bearing a rare hardcover copy of The Hand of Oberon , which he obligingly signed on page 52, right next to the above-quoted passage.
Suffice it to say, we talked a good deal over that weekend in between the language-learning presentations and panel discussions. And I even got an answer to the question that had been bugging me ever since Amber Book II, The Guns of Avalon — namely: Did you always know the truth about Ganelon?
Saturday night, I got to introduce Roger at the CALICO Banquet. Ironic in a way, because to the CALICO audience, I was the celebrity — they all knew Amber Productions far better than the Amber Chronicles that gave the company its name.
For his banquet speech, Roger related the story of a discussion he’d had with a fellow sf&f writer (Roger mentioned his name, but I’ve forgotten it) about human genetics, and what traits to breed for, assuming you even could (this was in the early nineties, remember — around the time Nobel laureate Jennifer Doudna was being awarded her PhD from Harvard Medical School). Anyway, Roger and his friend quickly rejected physical beauty and money-making ability as desirable attributes, because, in either case, how could you be sure if people really liked you for you? Intelligence was on the table, but then lots of intelligent people seem to be pretty miserable pretty much of the time. Finally, perhaps harking back to how Larry Niven’s two-headed Puppeteers messed with Earth’s Birth Lottery, they settled on luck as the best genetic legacy one could bestow on one’s progeny. Which left them, however, with the problem of how to do the bestowing?
Simple, said Roger’s friend: put a bunch of fertilized chicken eggs on a platter and throw them up in the air. Let the unbroken eggs hatch and grow to maturity. Rinse, repeat. After not too many generations, you’d have bred a strain of the luckiest chickens alive.
“And so,” Roger summed up, “As I look out at the CALICO audience here tonight, I see a bunch of people doing what they most want to do, engaged in the work they love the best. As am I. And so I think we are, all of us, lucky chickens.”
That was the last time I saw him — had to leave early Sunday morning for the drive down to San Diego. We corresponded a little over the next couple of years. I recall him being very excited about his collaboration with Gahan Wilson on A Night in the Lonesome October — a project he’d been thinking about since the 1970s.
Oh, and somehow along the way, he inspired me to try my own hand at writing.
Well, Roger’s been gone over a quarter century now, and is still much missed.
He was indeed a lucky chicken!
======
A postscript, ICYMI, WIRED just published a retrospective on Roger’s work and its critical reception (here: https://www.wired.com/2021/05/geeks-g...), which I coincidentally happened upon just as I was putting the final touches on this brief reminiscence. Lucky indeed!
date
newest »
newest »
message 1:
by
Timofei
(new)
May 22, 2021 09:17PM
And what was the answer about Ganelon? I always thought that when Zelazny stopped the writing of Guns of Avalon in 1967, he had no intention of using Oberon, but when he returned to writing in 1970, this idea was in his mind already. Am I right?
reply
|
flag
Timofei wrote: "And what was the answer about Ganelon? I always thought that when Zelazny stopped the writing of Guns of Avalon in 1967, he had no intention of using Oberon, but when he returned to writing in 1970..."Roger paused a moment, then said, "I always had a feeling there was something about Ganelon."
I took him to be Implying that -- while he didn' t start out with Ganelon being Oberon in mind (and, in fact, there's a scene in The Guns of Avalon where Corwin manages to contact Oberon via his Trump) -- it was clear from the first that the character (as Harold Bloom says of Hamlet and Falstaff) was bigger than the story he was in.
So your interpretation fits the facts as I know them.
You're very welcome! And thanks for the question!
The Accidental Author
In which technothriller author Bill DeSmedt discovers that a book is one of the things that just happen to a person from time to time, and what to do about it.
- Bill DeSmedt's profile
- 158 followers
