Follow up to the Question about A Canticle for Leibowitz

From Chris Kovacs, who literally wrote the book on Roger Zelazny. The comments system wouldn't accept it, so I'm posting his reply here with his permission.


In all of my reading of Zelazny's papers and correspondence, I don't recall any mention of Miller or this book. But it was published in 1959, at a time when it was possible to read all SF published in a year, and this has always been a prominent book. And so I have no doubt that Zelazny will have known about it and likely read it. Whether he was alluding to it is impossible to say. I read Canticle over 30 years ago and can't recall it well enough to be able to comment any further.

Zelazny Hypotheticals

I began role-playing in the early 80s, just like those Stranger Things kids. I’m probably more familiar with the RPGs of the 90s, for the few years I spent working in a comic book store. The most popular game of that era was not Dungeons & Dragons, but White Wolf’s Vampire: The Masquerade and its associated spin-offs. Seen through the eyes of the adult, the entire setting is the very epitome of cringeworthy pretentiousness.

 And yet…I can’t bring myself to sneer at its horde of befanged arrested adolescent katana/trenchcoat murderhobos, because I really do think it came from a place of sincerity for its creators (at first, at least) and they built a unified mythology for the modern world.

 Each of the game lines came with a built-in expiration date, because each group of monster characters was fighting a losing battle against a greater evil, and one of the game designers came out and said something along the lines of, “You can’t say the world is ending for fifteen years and not deliver.”

And, yeah, on one level it was a way to sell more books, but there’s a certain satisfaction of ending a campaign in style. Werewolf: The Apocalypse did it best. I was never the biggest fan of the line. The veneer that the characters were anything other than meatgrinders with legs (the legs were also meatgrinders. With meatgrinders of their own. It was meatgrinders all the way down) seemed thinnest here, and the pretention at its zenith. You’re a bunch of genocidal furries, with more than a little bit of cultural appropriation thrown in for flavor. But there was something about the way its apocalypse scenario was written.

One chapter holds a particular wealth of possibilities, offering an explanation of why each of the game’s tribes of werewolves could be the baddies in the end. Something about that approach fascinated me, I think because the authors understood the nuances of how a characteristic that could be a virtue in moderation could become a vice in its extreme or if placed in a different context. Which brings me to the point of this post.

I do enjoy What If? speculation about works I enjoy. It’s part of the fun of being a fan! To that end I’m going to engage in a bit of speculation along these lines in a series of posts, asking in turn, “What if Benedict/Fiona/Corwin/Prince or Princess X had been the villain of the Corwin Chronicles?”

I’ll do my best to stick to a schedule, one post a week in the series on Monday evening, starting with “What if Random had been the villain of the Corwin Chronicles?”

Necromancy in Damnation Alley

Thread necromancy, that is!

Promoted from the comments.

Q: Sorry about this necromancy of reviving the old comment thread after so many years, but, re-reading Damnation Alley, I have an idea I can't get rid of, and perhaps someone could share their view on it, too…

So, can't that pre-final scene, where Hell sees a pilgrim priest in his delirium dream, besides being a reference to the Japanese Noh theater (as Carl Yoke suggests here https://bit.ly/35Kcked), be also an allusion to A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr., a famous post-apocalyptic science fiction novel dedicated mostly to the Catholic church in the post-nuclear world (that is, having a lot of monks, priests and pilgrimage in it)? That came to my mind after I had read the both books within a year.

A: My first instinct would be to say no, as Zelazny rarely referenced other fictional work in that fashion. However, it's certainly not impossible, as the Grimjack cameo in the Merlin series shows. That said, I don't know Leibowitz nearly as well as I know Zelazny's works, so I'll have to qualify my opinion as uninformed. 

Chris I? Chris II? Any insight that you would care to share?

Meanwhile, at the Bear Owl Sanctuary

We started what may become a new D&D campaign. It quickly went off the rails (as all the best campaigns do) with our unintentionally racist cleric and our mercenary paladin. Things reached their peak when our characters killed a sleeping owlbear. Our daughter commemorated the moment with this picture.

And now for some sadder news.

Mungo the porgbear was loved by all the children at St Brutus's Hospital, where he wandered the children's wing as a therapy bear. He could often be found rocking them to sleep, snuggling up with them or turning his head around to amuse the children who had been dealt a losing hand in life.

That is until this weekend, when he was brutally murdered in his sleep by a party of "heroes" employed by King Tristan. When asked for comment, the party's paladin Orion demanded payment up front before speaking, Raveena  tugged on her beard, Vidalia ate her namesake onions and Moser shouted racial slurs.

In lieu of flowers, the family of 400 surviving baby porgbears is requesting donations to St Brutus's. Services will be held at the chapel in the Starcourt Mall. It will be closed casket due to the condition of the deceased.

The Storms of Venus

I won't reprint the letter here, but a Zelazny fan whose first language is not English asked for some clarification regarding this exchange from "The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth"

"You're from the Midwest, aren't you?"
"Yeah."
"Get bad storms out there?"
"Sometimes."
"Try to think of the worst one you were ever in. Got a slide rule handy?"
"Right here."
"Then put a one under it, imagine a zero or two following after, and multiply the thing out."
"I can't imagine the zeros."
"Then retain the multiplicand—that's all you can do."

It's a bit tricky to decipher because it involves both the archaic instrument of a slide rule and the word "multiplicand", which itself is hardly in common use.

I think the slide rule is something of a distraction. Davits is basically saying that you want to imagine a large Midwestern storm (which would be the multiplicand, the item which is multiplied) and the one followed by a one or two zeroes in the multiplier.

A one followed by one zero would be ten and a one followed by two zeroes is one hundred. Davits is telling Mike that the tropical storms on Venus are ten to one hundred times more powerful in the American Midwest.