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Roger Zelazny Roger Zelazny was an American science fiction writer. He did not specialize in any one subgenre within science fiction; he seemed to try everything and also succeeded at everything. But not without failing first. He received in excess of 150 rejection slips as a when submitting short stories. (I had read that Ray Bradbury received more than 800 rejection slips.) Even when Zelazny became successful, some people were complaining about his writing. It is not easy to read a Zelazny story, since he was a disciplined autodidact. An autodidact is a person with enough self-motivation to school themselves, completely outside of the system. He did get a college degree, but aggressively studied material that was not required. His knowledge of poetry and other works of fiction was staggering; he made considerable use of allusion. Which means: you had better be well read yourself or you're going to be lost when reading one of his stories. All of Zelazny's short fiction was recently published in a massive 6 volume set, spanning approximately 3,000 pages. Naturally, I bought them all and I'm partway through volume one. I'm glad he didn't give up. Just try to imagine receiving all those rejection slips and never giving up! The guy was unstoppable. A lot of science fiction is "pleasure reading", which means you're probably not going to need a dictionary to look up any arcane words or have to worry about what classic book you never read that the author is alluding to. In other words, it's almost like watching TV. You can sit in one spot and relax. Zelazny is not "pleasure reading". While ruminating about what he had written can be pleasureful, the act of reading his work is akin to working. Unfortunately, he died of cancer in 1995, so we'll never know what else he had planned to write. |
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12/15/2010 11:16 am |
happy holiday   love is the greatest gift of all 
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