{"id":195,"date":"2007-03-05T20:00:41","date_gmt":"2007-03-06T01:00:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/?p=195"},"modified":"2008-07-07T13:50:24","modified_gmt":"2008-07-07T17:50:24","slug":"chips-picks-roger-zelazny","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/?p=195","title":{"rendered":"Chip&#8217;s Picks &#8211; Roger Zelazny"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The latest addition to the continuing Chip&#8217;s Picks project (which is &#8220;continuing&#8221; in the sense of &#8220;not entirely defunct&#8221; rather than &#8220;updated with anything approaching regularity, sorry about that&#8221;), is <B>Roger Zelazny<\/B>.  Zelazny writes a very loose sort of SF&#8211;what I suppose would be called &#8220;soft&#8221; science fiction&#8211;which hints at technology but doesn&#8217;t discuss the nuts and bolts.  He borrows frequently from mythological sources, and many of his characters are godlike in some way.<\/p>\n<p><!--more-->Books to look for include:<UL><LI><I>Lord of Light<\/I> &#8211; The original human colonists of a new planet have set themselves up as &#8220;gods&#8221; to their descendants, originally using life-prolonging technology and finally undergoing periodic full-body transfers.  Taking on the powers and names of Hindu deities, they maintain respect and control of the masses by blocking access to reincarnation and suppressing any technological advancements beyond a fairly primitive level.  The story centers around Sam, a renegade crewman who has turned down godhood and believes that technology should be available to all.  A most excellent read, although I&#8217;ve never been able to completely shake the suspicion that the entire novel was written as a mammoth setup to one pun in the middle of the book.  You&#8217;ll know the one I mean when you encounter it.<\/LI><\/p>\n<p><LI><I>Isle of the Dead<\/I> &#8211; The protagonist is a &#8220;Worldscaper&#8221;&#8211;a sort of mystical terraformer&#8211;who learned his trade from a dying alien race which believes that each Worldscaper takes on the aspect of a particular god in their pantheon.  He is lured out of his retirement after being sent a series of photos depicting people who were once important to him, all of whom are supposed to have been dead for years.  His quest to find the sender, and to defend himself from a godlike enemy he didn&#8217;t know he had, make up the heart of the book.  It&#8217;s a neat exercise in divine battles being translated to a more mundane plane.<\/LI><\/p>\n<p><LI><I>Creatures of Light and Darkness<\/I> &#8211; Borrowing heavily from Egyptian mythology, this rather skull-bending book is set in the far future where humans have populated numerous worlds.  Some have godlike powers (or, it is hinted, might actually be gods), and their technology is so far advanced as to be indiscernible from magic.  This book is more poetic and has less straightforward action than some of his others, but it is rich in details that explore both human nature&#8211;such as the man who offers to commit suicide in front of a curiosity-seeking audience on a world that has &#8220;solved the death problem&#8221;&#8211;and the limits of technology&#8211;such as the rug Osiris owns, with the nervous system of an enemy woven into it.  Um, yeek.<\/LI><\/p>\n<p><LI>All those zillion <I>Amber<\/I> novels &#8211; Haven&#8217;t read any of &#8217;em, sorry.  They&#8217;re a pretty solid dive into straight fantasy, rather than SF with fantasy overtones.  I did enjoy Zelazny&#8217;s one-off fantasy, <I>Dilvish the Damned<\/I>, but Shadow heaps scorn upon me for liking that, so you&#8217;re on your own there.<\/LI><\/UL><\/p>\n<p>Related:<br \/>\n<A HREF=\"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/?p=92\">Robert A. Heinlein<\/A><br \/>\n<A HREF=\"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/?p=100\">Dan Simmons<\/A><br \/>\n<A HREF=\"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/?p=101\">Tim Powers<\/A><br \/>\n<A HREF=\"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/?p=110\">Neal Stephenson<\/A><br \/>\n<A HREF=\"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/?p=201\">Richard Morgan<\/A><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The latest addition to the continuing Chip&#8217;s Picks project (which is &#8220;continuing&#8221; in the sense of &#8220;not entirely defunct&#8221; rather than &#8220;updated with anything approaching regularity, sorry about that&#8221;), is Roger Zelazny. Zelazny writes a very loose sort of SF&#8211;what I suppose would be called &#8220;soft&#8221; science fiction&#8211;which hints at technology but doesn&#8217;t discuss the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/195"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=195"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/195\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=195"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=195"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=195"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}