The Road to Amber (68 page)

After twenty-eight years of marriage and three children, Zelazny separated from Judy but never divorced her. He moved in with Jane Lindskold in June 1994 and remained with her for the last year of his life.

The chemotherapy in early 1994 was excruciating. His friend Gerald Hausman helped him, using cures for ailments and nausea that he’d gathered during summers in Jamaica. “I used to make Irish Moss, the only thing he would eat for a while. It’s a Jamaican substance, a sea moss, boiled with linseed. He couldn’t eat and was often dizzy, and I found homeopathic remedies for him.”
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The chemotherapy also rendered Zelazny unable to write, but he kept up with his reading program. “When I’ve gone for long stretches of time, like when I was sick a while back, I felt very uncomfortable. I read a lot, but I can only read so much before I want to start putting words down myself”
[14]
Once that interval passed and his muse returned, he resumed writing energetically.

He and Lindskold shared a crammed, book-lined office where they worked on their writing projects, bounced ideas about, and read rough drafts to each other.
[66]
Lindskold discovered that Zelazny laughed aloud at the jokes he wrote and rehearsed other lines
sotto voce
.
[14]
Devin, Trent, and Shannon Zelazny were frequently in the home, “bringing their triumphs, problems and concerns.”
[68]
Zelazny had a reputation for knowing just about everything, and even his children’s schoolmates asked him to explain things that the teachers could not.

The goal was long term survival if not a cure, and by most accounts Zelazny spent his last year in very good spirits, energetic, full of life, writing and editing. Trent Zelazny, Walter Jon Williams, Jane Lindskold, George R. R. Martin, and others who knew him observed how happy he was in that last year.
[69-71]
As Trent put it, “The last year or so of his life, I never saw my father happier. I never saw him more outgoing in the 18 years I was fortunate enough to know him.”
[7]
Jack Dann recalled that by March 1994, “Roger had finally aged. Seeing him was a shock. It was as if he had just decided to look old. He was, of course, ill; but he certainly didn’t act it.”
[72]
Indeed, Zelazny expected to beat the cancer and behaved as if that were the case. He often had a blood transfusion before major public appearances, boosting his energy and making him look healthier than he actually was,
[73]
Consequently, when he died, it was quite unexpected for many of his friends, who’d had no idea that he had cancer, not even suspecting that anything was wrong with his health.
[74]

Jane Lindskold wrote, “Despite his illness, during the last year of his life Zelazny’s enthusiasm for writing was, if anything, more intense than it had been in the previous decade. He completed several short stories, edited two anthologies, contributed to a computer game, and worked on two novels,
Donnerjack
and
Lord Demon
.”
[65]

Biographer Krulik said, “by August 1994 Roger knew that he was dying of cancer. In the face of that, he threw himself into his writing, working to complete projects he had begun. Among these was a series of Amber short stories.”
[75]
Krulik’s remarks suggest a desperate man and contradict the description provided by Zelazny’s son, friends, and colleagues. But Zelazny didn’t write “a series of Amber short stories” during his final year: four of the five were written before the cancer diagnosis.

Carl Yoke concluded, “I’m certain that even with Roger’s cancer, he never anticipated that he would die. There was still that youthful aura of invulnerability about him.”
[76]

Despite hints of familiarity with role-playing games in the latter five Amber novels, the
Wild Cards
series, and the
Amber Diceless RolePlaying Game
, Zelazny was not a gamer. Eric Wujcik introduced him to gaming in 1993; Jane Lindskold’s essay “Zelazny and the Zelaforms” recounts that first experience.
[77]
After Lindskold and Zelazny moved in together, she encouraged his interest in the games, and he came to enjoy them very much. George R. R. Martin, Melinda Snodgrass, and Walter Jon Williams numbered among their regular gaming companions. There are several accounts of the characters he created, including foul-mouthed wildcat oil man Oklahoma Crude, crazed ex-Vietnam veteran New York detective Drum, the Chinese poet warrior Li Piao, and Sky, a ship’s chaplain who recited “The Agnostic’s Prayer” from
Creatures of Light and Darkness
and believed himself capable of ministering to any sentient being—human, alien, or rock
[78,79]
Some of the characters derived from stories that he was writing—detective Dale Drum appeared in the
Donnerjack
trilogy’s original outline (in the novel, he was
Desmond
Drum), and a character named Li Piao figured in
Lord Demon
.

Zelazny was approached in 1993 about completing a novel—
The Psycho Hockshop
—that Alfred Bester left unfinished. Archived correspondence at Syracuse University indicates that he read the fragment, became enthusiastic, and against his better judgment, started working on it. He sheepishly admitted completing a substantial amount even before he had a contract. He finished
Psychoshop
in 1994; the editor requested revisions, and he completed those by early 1995. In an Easter 1995 interview at the Conquest convention in Melbourne, Australia, he said, “The most recent [collaboration] that I’ve just finished is the novel Alfred Bester was working on when he died. I’m a great admirer of Alfred Bester’s, and I thought, ‘Well, I can be off writing something else for more money, but I’ll never have another opportunity to finish a book by Alfred Bester.’ It’s called
Psychoshop
, about a shop in Rome where you can actually pawn parts of your psyche that you’re unhappy with or want to replace. It has a very unusual proprietor. I couldn’t resist that.

“Bester had written ninety-two pages [of manuscript], and that was it. There were also about four pages missing from the ninety¬two. What I did was treat the missing pages as a black box experiment. Something went in there, and something came out here, and I just had to figure out what I needed to make it happen that way. I picked up the story where Bester had stopped mid-sentence, same thing I did with Phil Dick. I picked up Phil’s in mid-sentence, and I completed that sentence and went on writing. I did the same thing with Bester. I hope that bodes well.”
[14]

Editor John Betancourt considered Zelazny most suitable to complete Bester’s work. Zelazny understood the connection. “Bester liked eccentric characters too. He liked to get them into certain wacky situations, but he was also kind of earthy. He also had a sort of sardonic sense of humor, ultimately. And he was noted for plots that did strange twists. Someone noticed that I like that sort of procedure too.”
[36]

Zelazny was both excited and anxious. Jack Dann said, “He was worried that he couldn’t do the flash and pyrotechnics the way Alfie could. Bester was a major influence on Roger, and Roger was nervous as a colt about having collaborated with the master.”
[72]
At Zelazny’s request, Dann read and critiqued the manuscript. “I gave Roger feedback on some minor quibbles, and told him that I loved the book, that he had out-Bestered Bester. Roger seemed very pleased.”
[72]

Because
Psychoshop
did not appear until several years after Zelazny’s death, rumors spread that Greg Bear, who wrote an introduction to the book, had completed final revisions. However, Bear confirmed that he did not revise, and as far as he knew, the last author to touch the manuscript was Zelazny himsel.
[80]
Jane Lindskold also confirms that she did not write or edit it.
[81]
Moreover, Zelazny’s handwritten draft confirms that the unusual text (spiral poem, recumbent figure, starburst) were all his work and not Bester’s, as many have assumed.
[82]
Zelazny’s death simply led to delays in getting the manuscript to press.

A computer printout of Bester’s ninety-two-page manuscript—missing four pages and ending mid-sentence—resides in the archives at Syracuse University. Both Bester’s manuscript and Zelazny’s handwritten one verify that Zelazny wrote several pages to replace Bester’s missing pages, and he picked up the main writing from the very last part of chapter three.
[82]
From the start of chapter four, the writing is entirely Zelazny’s.
Psychoshop
‘s final manuscript reveals a noticeable change in typeface at the start of chapter four and the surprising discovery of a final chapter that Editor Betancourt deleted. Chapter ten consists of a poem by Zelazny, “Our Own Piece of the Sky,”
[83]
contained in this collection. To retain Zelazny’s intention, the poem should be restored in future editions of the novel. The first edition also dropped the following seven paragraphs immediately after the reclining figure on page 74:

Asked about his tendency to create extremely powerful characters who seemed to have no idea what was going on, Zelazny replied, “Well, if you’re going to make someone that strong, you have to put one of their feet in a bucket, or there’s no real story.”
[17]

What advice would he give new writers? “The competition has gotten stiffer, but the same advice as always applies, only maybe doubled: it’s persistence and a certain toughness of spirit. You’ve got to be able to take a beating. There was a terrific heavy-weight bout in 1956 or 1957, when Rocky Marciano successfully defended his title. In the photos of him afterward, he was all bleeding and bruised, but he won. And there was an editorial about it in some sports magazine that said, ‘Sometimes the mark of a champion is not how well you can do a certain thing, but whether you have the ability to take a greater beating than the other guy and still remain standing.’ Be assured that no matter how hard Rocky pounded that other guy, he probably took more of a beating himself, but he had more stamina. I think it’s the sort of staying-power that allows you to get your emotional butt kicked quite often from all the rejections you get. Other people are out there doing it too. If they’re more sensitive than you and they stop first, you’re still in the running. The one who is tougher, who is persistent, who keeps writing, makes it.”
[17]

He also counseled young writers to focus on their weak points and to improve them. “I thought it was wrong for a writer to find his or her strongest point and capitalize on that completely. That is, if you are extremely good at writing dialogue, and you do a story which just scintillates with brilliant dialogue, and they buy it and ask you to write another one, and you make your career of writing stories with clever dialogue, eventually you’re hurting yourself because you’re getting hypertrophied. You are capitalizing on your virtues without attempting to develop your weaknesses up to a point of at least competence… When you are finally in the position as a professional selling things regularly, you should take the chance of writing from weakness whenever you can.”
[29]

What prompted his distinctively styled word choices? “Well, I like words, the way words play with each other, talk together. Partly it comes from a liking of poetry. Partly, I suppose it goes back to an early liking for word games and crossword puzzles and all sorts of things like that.”
[36]
When he was six, he watched a retired schoolteacher do a crossword puzzle at a party, and he’d immediately become hooked on them. “She showed me how the thing worked. The next day, I worked on the crossword puzzle in the paper, and I did that every day for ages until I got so I could do crossword puzzles at a very early age.”
[36]
This undoubtedly increased his vocabulary and enabled him to use precise, sometimes unusual words.

He wrote on a legal pad while traveling to upwards of ten conventions per year. Returning home, he would type the final copy from the legal pad, where he’d already made corrections.

His extended program now involved reading up to 19 books simultaneously on such topics as economic theory, oceanography, and even foreign language. “There’s something to be said for that approach apart from the fact that you’re just acquiring information in different areas. I learned—which is one of the reasons I continue it—that there’s a kind of interesting effect in reading in lots of different areas at the same time. There’s a kind of cross-fertilization sometimes of ideas.”
[36]
His colleagues were accustomed to his impressive knowledge but did not mistake it for vanity. George R. R. Martin recalled, “Sometimes it seemed he had read every book ever printed. He knew something about everything and everything about some things, but he never used his knowledge to impress or intimidate. In an age when everyone is a specialist, Zelazny was the last Renaissance Man, fascinated by the world and all that’s in it, capable of talking about Doc Savage and Proust with equal expertise and enthusiasm.”
[70]
Michael Stackpole said, “he was just that way: brilliant without need to or intention of showing off and helpful, always helpful.”
[84]

However briefly met, Zelazny displayed genuine interest in what a colleague or fan said, and he demonstrated uncanny recall afterwards. Graduate student and writer Peter Quinones attended the 1980 Westercon in Los Angeles where Zelazny was Guest of Honor. They met during the Ice Cream Social that kicked off the convention. Quinones planned to write a Master’s thesis on Zelazny’s works, “and he was honored and helpful when I told him of my project.” Quinones left graduate school the following year and never finished the thesis. But several years after that briefmeeting, “when I ran into him at an Octocon, he looked at me, and said, ‘Rocky Road and Strawberry. Whatever became of the thesis?’ Which totally floored me that he would remember the ice cream I was eating at the time.”
[85]