Roger Zelazny Book Review: The Furies

I bet you thought my next Roger Zelazny book review after Coils was going to be The Black Throne, his second collaboration with Fred Saberhagen! But hypothetical you was wrong! Nobody cares about The Black Throne!

(Actually, I care about it, but only a little bit. I'll get around to covering it eventually)

The Furies is more of a straight SF story than we usually see from Zelazny. I seem to remember that he originally wanted to call it "Hunt the Happy Wallaby", which I happen to prefer. I've got about a million copies of the story too. It's a good read, which is probably why it seems to be included in every collection.

Sandor Sandor, Benedick Benedict and Lynx Links each have a silly name and a special talent.  Sandor Sandor is better than a computer when it comes to identifying locations, Benedick Benedict can get psychic impressions from people and objects and Lynx Links is really good at killing people.

I especially like the description of Links.

Lynx Links looked like a beachball with a beard, a fat patriarch with an eyepatch, a man who loved good food and drink, simple clothing, and the company of simple people; he was a man who smiled often and whose voice was soft and melodic.

This is the story of how Lynx Links, Sandor Sandor and Benedick Benedict hunt for Victor Corgo, the man without a heart.

Ahh...Victor Corgo! He was: "a terror to brigands and ugly aliens, a threat to Codebreakers, and a thorn in the sides of evildoers everywhere...the pride of the Guard, the best of the best, the cream that had been skimmed from all the rest."

Unfortunately, Corgo sold out.

He became a heel.

...A traitor.

A hero gone bad...

Corgo loses his entire crew in a raid on a pirate hideout, but he's nursed back to health by the aliens who live there. He trains them to crew the ship and then wipes out the pirate, and then, learning that aliens had been marked for death after they refused relocation to a Reservation planet, takes sides with the aliens against his own species.

Captain Corgo protested, was declared out of order.

Captain Corgo threatened, was threatened in return.

Captain Corgo fought, was beaten, died, was resurrected, escaped restraint, became an outlaw.  He took the Wallaby with him. The Happy Wallaby, It had been called in the proud days. Now, it was just the Wallaby.

Hmmm...did I really leave a quest for revenge out of the Roger Zelazny drinking game? That's a rather appalling oversight.

As the tractor beams had seized it, as the vibrations penetrated its ebony hull and tore at his flesh, Corgo had called his six Drillen to him, stroked the fur of Mala, his favorite, opened his mouth to speak, and died just as the words and the tears began.

"I am sorry . . ." he had said.

They gave him a new heart, though. His old one had fibrillated itself to pieces and could not be repaired. They put the old one in a jar and gave him a shiny, antiseptic egg of throbbing metal, which expanded and contracted at varying intervals, dependent upon what the seed-sized computers they had planted within him told of his breathing and his blood sugar and the output of his various glands. The seeds and the egg contained his life.

The story is written in a very strange meter that gives it a dreamlike quality. That makes it hard to review, because that odd cadence is what makes it so good, but you don't get the whole effect if I chop it up into quotable chunks.

Elements of the story remind me of The Keys to December, for Corgo, like Jarry, takes sides with aliens against his own species because we're oppressing the aliens. Also reminds me of Malacar Miles from To Die in Italbar, as he has an alien sidekick and his relationship with Emil mirrors that of Malacar's relationship with the empathesiac telekineticist John Morwin. I had forgotten about Sandor's nurse, who was great fun to read. Much like the rest of the story.

He should have known what he was up against, and turned himself in to the proper authorities. How can you  hope to beat a man who can pick the lock to your mind,  a man who dispatched forty-eight men and seventeen malicious alien life-forms, and a man who knows every damn street in the galaxy.

He should have known better than to go up against Sandor Sandor, Benedick Benedict and Lynx Links. He should have known.  For their real names, of course, are Tisiphone, Alecto and Maegaera. They are the Furies. They arise from chaos and deliver revenge; they convey confusion and disaster to those who abandon the law and forsake the  way, who offend against the light and violate the life, who take the power of flame, like a lightning-rod in their two too mortal hands.

I know they're the Furies. It's right there in the title. That's why you should have stayed with Hunt the Happy Wallaby!