from the 1996 World Fantasy Program Book

Thank God (or at least Amber) for Roger Zelazny. Along with Moorcock he changed the face of High Fantasy, unmedievalizing it unmercifully. It couldn't have happened to a more tiresome genre.

I only met Zelazny once, but I have known his work for almost thirty years. Like an exotic track in familiar sand ("where'd that come from?"), "Rose" and "Lamps" signalled a sea change in SF, from a literature written by scientists for schoolboys to a literature written by the schoolboys (and girls) themselves; by truants and troublemakers and poets. Along with Disch, Delaney, Russ, Malzberg (and others), Zelazny talked about new things in new ways. I had grown up on the grand old Simak stuff but grown weary of it, grown away from it. There had been poets in SF before (e.g. Bradbury) but they hadn't taken over the building; they hadn't unscrewed the doors themselves from the jambs. I liked the new spirit. Here were stories that flew, not just stories about things that flew.

Zelazny was a word-slinger, a street singer, SF's Villon.

I hadn't paid much attention to his novels. I undertook adapting the Amber books without having read them (yes, Byron, I lied; we all lie), knowing only that the author was one I trusted to dazzle me. When I sat down with Nine Princes I stood up, amazed at how many of my own "original" ideas had been swiped from Zelazny: shape-shifting road signs, cars in fantasy landscapes, magic gas tanks: Zelazny had wedged the bypass into the zeitgeist and I had swiped it unwittingly. To have been embarrassed would have been ungenerous. We all steal; the best steal from the best, and Zelazny had picked every pocket from Homer to Hammett.

Comic scripting is "poor man's screenwriting," and Zelazny, a most cinematic writer, is a joy and a cinch to break down into panels. When I heard that he liked the scripts, I was pleased but not surprised. What's not to like? All I did was follow Corwin into Amber, stay out of his way and take down his talk. The only change I made was to toss the Luckies, since fratricidal slaughter is not PG-13 in America unless it's smoke-free. Now I sort of wish I had left them in.

But only sort of. Zelazny never expected or even reached for perfection. Not here. That's why he left for Amber, right?

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