The Roger Zelazny Drinking Game

Note: The Updated Version of the game is found on this page..

Let me open with the disclaimer that I have nothing but respect and affection for Roger Zelazny, both for the writer and the man.  He is my very favorite author, by a considerable margin, and by every account I've ever heard, a profoundly decent human being.

That said, he does have elements that tend to recur in his work with certain regularity, and as I've been reading a great deal of his fiction very closely and in rapid succession, I'm more aware of these elements than I otherwise would be. And once you see the old woman hidden in the curves of the young girl's necklace, you never unsee her.

So here is an affectionate look as what I perceive to be the recurring themes in Zelazny's work. Since this is the Internet, I'll present the list as a drinking game.

Every time you encounter an item on the following list, take a drink (or eat some m&ms or do whatever you do to play your particular version of the game)

• The Zelazny archetype - Take a drink for each of the traits the protagonist has:
• Long lived/immortal(includes the serial immortality of Lord of Light)
• super strong
• "laid-back.."
•  "...easy-going..."
•  "...wise-cracking..."
•  "...homicidal"
• If the story is written in an unusual format - Doorways in the Sand's cliffhanger-to-flashback format at the beginning of each chapter, the play/free verse/present tense narration of Creatures of Light and Darkness, Roadmarks' chapter structure, that kind of thing.
  
• For every dig at government inefficiency/bureaucracy
• Prose as poetry - Whenever you read a passage so lyrical that you feel compelled to put down the book for a moment to reflect on it.
• Free verse poetry - Like Corwin's hellrides or Thoth's account of The Thing that Cried in the night in Creatures of Light and Darkness.
• Use of Real-World Mythology - If you're reading about a drinking game on a blog dedicated to the works of Roger Zelazny, I trust that this needs no explanation.
  
• Use of First person narrative - Ditto
• Any time you discover a pun
• Two drinks if it's terrible
• Finish off the bottle if it's "Then the fit hit the Shan", just because.
• Each time you encounter a character with green eyes - see below
• If the plot involves a missing father figure
• If our protagonist has female robot sidekick - (Maxine, Flowers or Jenny)
  
• Any time a character smokes or talks about smoking
• Description of techniques or use of specialized terms from martial arts or fencing ("I parried in quarte and riposted.) ("I studied judo. There are three schools of it, you  know: there is the Kodokon, or the pure Japanese style,  and there are the Budo Kwai and the French Federation  systems...")
  
• "Hey, I can see Roger's house from here!" - Take a drink every time the story moves to or takes place in New Mexico 
• Use of the word "arroyo"
• For use of phrases in foreign languages
• Two drinks if it's in French
• Three drinks if you feel compelled to stop reading in order to look up the reference
• Finish the bottle and toast the author if the reference leads you to discover something incredibly cool which was previously unknown to you

Green Eyes: Green eyes are pretty rare, but you'd never know that from reading Roger Zelazny.

Just off the top of my head, we have:

Corwin, his siblings Fiona, Llewella, Gérard and Brand, his father Oberon, his "grandmother" (depending on how literal Dworkin was being with that claim) the unicorn  in the Amber books, Carol Deith and Don Walsh from the Legion collection, Heidel von Hymack, ("the green-eyed saint from the stars") from To Die in Italbar, Evene from Jack of Shadows, Dennis and Lydia Guise from Bridge of Ashes, Sanza from The Keys to December, Arlata from The Changing Land, Eleanor in This Moment of the Storm, both Red Dorakeen and Leila from Roadmarks, Mara and Maia (and probably more I'm forgetting)  from Lord of Light, and Morgana from The Last Defender of Camelot.

Things I left out of this list. Suicide is the biggy. Sure, it shows up in He Who Shapes and a A Rose for Eccelsiates, but it's not as pervasive as the other elements. I never saw the obsession with cars other critics have mentioned. Sure, he wrote Auto-de-fé and Jenny and Murdock and there were elements of this in The Dream Master, certainly, but it seems something influenced by the then-recent car accidents in his early life and grew less prevalent as he grew older.

Some quick googling seems to suggest that I'm the first person to put together a Roger Zelazny drinking game. That can't be right, can it? If it is, then I feel kind of happy to have contributed in this way.