S is for Sam: Zelazny A to Z

His followers called him Mahasamatman and said he was a god. He preferred to drop the Maha- and the -atman, and called himself Sam. He never claimed to be a god. But then, he never claimed not to be a god. Circumstances being what they were, neither admission could be of any benefit. Silence, though, could.

I’m certainly getting a lot of mileage out of Lord of Light for this series of posts, but I’m not going to apologize for that. It’s a brilliant work and that opening line is one of the best in genre literature.

For this post, I’m going to offer up another quote to take a closer look at Sam the holy con man.

I barely paid any attention to Cliff’s play. I spent most of it thinking about Tommy’s eerie behavior. Why was he always so secretive about everything? why did he get so angry that Cliff rang my doorbell? Maybe, I thought, we weren’t friends. Maybe Tommy had somehow conned me the whole time. That’s the thing with con artists. They never tell you their story. They give you pieces of it and let you fill in the rest. They let you work out the contradictions and discrepancies. they let you believe that the things that don’t add up are what makes them interesting or special. they let you believe that in those gaps are the things that hurt and wounded them. But maybe there’s nothing in those gaps. Nothing but your stupid willingness to assume the best of someone.

---from The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room, The Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made by Greg Sestero & Tom Bissell.

Sam understands the value of allowing his followers to fill his silence.

R is for Romance: Zelazny A to Z

Ro·mance.

[rōˈmans, ˈrōˌmans]

 A feeling of excitement and mystery associated with love.

Zelazny’s stories seldom featured romance as it’s commonly understood as primary focus. However, it’s worth noting that there are several definitions that apply to his writing.

1. A quality or feeling of mystery, excitement, and remoteness from everyday life. (synonyms: mystery · glamour · excitement · colourfulness · color · exoticism )
2. A medieval tale dealing with a hero of chivalry, of the kind common in the Romance languages. "The Arthurian romances"
3. A work of fiction dealing with events remote from real life, especially one of a kind popular in the 16th and 17th centuries. "Elizabethan pastoral romances"

But yes, traditional romantic attraction seldom played a large role in Zelazny’s writing. I think that’s largely attributable to the period in which he wrote. Those were simply the kind of story that publishers wanted. As he progressed and the times changed, so too did his writing, and 24 Views in Particular deliberately bucks this trend.

Zelazny was a prodigious talent and he was learning and evolving right up to the end of his career. I’d stop short of saying that it would become a prevalent theme in his works had he lived longer, but it’s an addition to his armory of traits I'll not disparage.

Zelazny, Interrupted.

Sorry for the break in posting! Something came up. We now resume with the regularly scheduled series of posts. If I had planned this out better I probably could have configured it to post W for Walpurgisnacht on April 30th.

Q is for Qwibbian Qwibbian Kel : Zelazny A to Z

The lock began cycling closed and Dorphy was already raising the torch to burn through the welds.

"My vocabulary is still incomplete. What does 'qwibbian' mean in your language?"

The cycling lock struck the cable and severed it as she spoke, so she did not know whether it heard her say the word "berserker."

From Itself Surprised

"I got the story from Qwib-qwib in pieces," she began. "I had to fill in some gaps with conjectures, but they seemed to follow. Ages ago, the Builders apparently fought a war with the Red Race, who proved tougher than they thought. So they hit them with their ultimate weapon—the self-replicating killing machines we call berserkers."

"That seems the standard story," Wade said.

"The Red Race went under," she continued. "They were totally destroyed—but only after a terrific struggle. In the final days of the war they tried all sorts of things, but by then it was a case of too little too late. They were overwhelmed. They actually even tried something I had always wondered about—something no Earth-descended world would now dare to attempt, with ail the restrictions on research along those lines, with all the paranoia…"

P is for Pride (of a Prince): Zelazny A to Z

Pride

/prīd/

1. The consciousness of one's own dignity.
2. Tthe quality of having an excessively high opinion of oneself or one's importance.

Two passages on pride from Nine Princes in Amber

"Look, I said I'm sorry," I told him. "What do you want me to do? Nobody got hurt and there was no damage."

    "They shouldn't turn goddamn drivers like you loose on die road!" he yelled. "You're a friggin' menace!"

    Random got out of the car then and said, "Mister, you'd better move along!" and he had a gun in his hand.

    "Put that away," I told him, but he flipped the safety catch off and pointed.

    The guy turned around and started to run, a look of fear widening his eyes and loosening his jaw.

    Random raised the pistol and took careful aim at the man's back, and I managed to knock his arm to the side

just as he pulled the trigger.

    It scored the pavement and ricocheted away.

    Random turned toward me and his face was almost white.

    "You bloody fool!" he said. "That shot could have hit the tank!"

    "It could also have hit the guy you were aiming at."

    "So who the hell cares? We'll never pass this way again, in this generation. That bastard dared to insult a Prince of

Amber! It was your honor I was thinking about."

    "I can take care of my own honor," I told him, and something cold and powerful suddenly gripped me and answered, "for he was mine to kill, not yours, had I chosen," and a sense of outrage filled me.

    He bowed his head then, as the cab door slammed and the truck took off down the road.

    "I'm sorry, brother," he said. "I did not mean to presume. But it offended me to hear one of them speak to you in such a manner. I know I should have waited to let you dispose of him as you saw fit, or at least have consulted with you."

And

    "Wait!" he cried out. "I spoke hastily. I don't want to lose your counsel, if nothing else. Stay with me, please. I will even apologize."

    "That is not necessary," I said, knowing what this thing means to a prince of Amber. "I'll stay. I think I can help you."

The overweening pride of the royal family is largely a characterization that was abandoned in later books, but I think it's interesting to examine how it informs the first one.