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Originally Posted by Dr. Drib
I loved Zelazney's work when I first discovered it. I have great memories of that time. There've only been few titles I didn't care for, but I can't remember now which ones they were.
My first title I read was "This Immortal," which tied with "Dune" for the Hugo Award for Best Novel. I read this great Zelazny novel before it won the award.
And there was "Lord of Light," about the same time I discovered Herman Hesse.
Great, early novels. He has a few clunkers thrown in there, too.
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Everyone has a clunker or two.
Note that _This Immortal_ was originally published as "And Call Me Conrad" in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and the book is an expansion of the magazine version.
Similarly, _Damnation Alley_ was originally a novelette, bulked up to be a novel when an editor requested it. The bulk up is not entirely successful, with things like a multi page digression of the voyage of a brave aeronaut to post-holocaust Europe across a storm-wracked Atlantic Ocean. It's the sort of vivid and poetic writing that made Roger famous, save that it has no connection stylistically or in plot with the rest of the book, and breaks the flow of the reading.
I think _Today We Choose Faces_ may be the weakest of Roger's books for me.
Another often considered weak but I enjoyed was _Creatures of Light and Darkness_. This was picked up and trumpeted by the New Wave crowd in the late '60s, which bemused Roger: he'd written it largely as a joke, deliberately tossing in every radical writing technique he knew to see what would happen. It's lots of fun if not taken seriously, and Roger was a bit amazed anyone had.
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Dennis