Hey, been a while since I've done one of these!
I recently needed to drive down to Florida to help someone out and I flew home after it was done. I'm glad I could help, but that drive is not an experience I'd want to repeat. Shades of Damnation Alley.
I traveled light. Carried everything I needed in one backpack. Among those essentials was my copy of Volume 3 of the Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny: This Mortal Mountain. I read some stories for the first time in years and others for the first time ever.
I don't think I had read He That Moves previously. It is not, as the title may suggest, a companion piece to He Who Shapes, but rather something else entirely.
I think I would have remembered it. It's everything I love about Zelazny's writing. According to the Speculative Fiction Database, the Collected Story represents the first time it was published since its debut in 1968, so it's unlikely that I would have encountered it elsewhere and if I missed it during my initial readthrough, as it now seems I must have, then this is indeed my first time encountering it.
I'm delighted to have read it within the Collected Stories, because the endnotes serve to provide some much needed context and background. I love it because it's classic Zelazny, mythic! Literate! One of the introductions to the volume notes that Zelazny was one of those writers who made you feel smart for understanding his allusions and that's on full display here. However, had I encountered it as a young teen, the age where I first started reading him, I feel I might have found it frustratingly opaque in parts. I doubt that I would have identified Eric Weiss as Harry Houdini, though I would have felt clever for recognizing Sappho and Agamemnon. Perhaps that's why it had remained unpublished for so long. If you're unfamiliar with the inscription on Shakespeare's tomb,
Good friend for Jesus sake forbeare,
To dig the dust enclosed here.
Blessed be the man that spares these stones,
And cursed be he that moves my bones.
then you'll likely have the nagging sensation that you're missing something vital.
It's difficult to explain succinctly and I'm somewhat loathe to give too much away. It seems to hardly exist at all online, and I'm reluctant to spoil the chance for someone to discover a new-to-them Zelazny story so long after his passing. So instead, I'll touch on its origins. It was another story written to match the cover art, a la Angel, Dark Angel, which endlessly fascinates me. Given a million years to write, I would have never gotten from there to here.
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| Science Fiction’s bold vision of the future where everyone lives inside a lava lamp |
I like it a lot. I love living in a world where this exists. I particularly enjoyed the final line: Eric Weiss turned away from her strange, sad eyes, prisoner once more in the barless cage of himself.
That's your reading assignment, everyone. Find your copy of This Mortal Mountain and treat yourself to this story!
