New editions of The Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny are out now! A fascinating, superb collection of Roger Zelazny‘s short and longer fiction, the six volumes are published by NESFA.
The stories in this series are enriched by editors’ notes and Zelazny’s own words, taken from his many essays, describing why he wrote the stories and what he thought about them in retrospect.
Here are the titles and synopses for each volume (full tables of contents are available on NESFA’s website)…
Volume 1: THRESHOLD
The first in a six-volume series, Volume 1: Threshold contains all of Zelazny’s short works from his early years through the mid 1960s — a period of experimentation and growth that flowered into gems such as “A Rose for Ecclesiastes,” “The Graveyard Heart,” “The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth,” and “He Who Shapes.”
Volume 2: POWER & LIGHT
The second in a six-volume series, Volume 2: Power & Light covers the mid 1960s, Zelazny’s most prolific period, where he continued to incorporate mainstream literary qualities and added a wealth of mythological elements into powerful stories such as “The Furies,” “For a Breath I Tarry,” “This Moment of the Storm,” “Comes Now the Power,” “Auto-Da-Fé,” and the Hugo-winning novel …And Call Me Conrad.
Volume 3: THIS MORTAL MOUNTAIN
The third in a six-volume series, Volume 3: This Mortal Mountain contains Zelazny’s short works from the late 1960s and early 1970s, Zelazny’s breadth of interests developed into a variety of styles displayed in such rich stories as “This Mortal Mountain,” “The Steel General,” “Damnation Alley,” “The Man Who Loved the Faioli,” and the Hugo and Nebula-nominated “The Engine at Heartspring’s Center”.
Volume 4: LAST EXIT TO BABYLON
The fourth in a six-volume series, Volume 4: Last Exit to Babylon contains Zelazny’s short works from the late 1970s and early 1980s when Zelazny’s popularity opened new markets for his work. He continued to produce highly-crafted stories, such as the popular “The Last Defender of Camelot,” the Hugo-winning “Unicorn Variation,” and the Hugo and Nebula-winning “Home is the Hangman.”
Volume 5: NINE BLACK DOVES
The fifth in a six-volume series, Volume 5: Nine Black Doves contains Zelazny’s short works from the 1980s, when Zelazny’s mature craft produced the Hugo-winning and Nebula-nominated stories, “24 Views of Mt. Fuji, by Hokusai” and “Permafrost,” and other entertaining stories such as “Kalifriki of the Thread,” “Dilvish, the Damned,” and his first two Wild Cards stories about Croyd Crenson, “The Sleeper” and “Ashes to Ashes.”
Volume 6: THE ROAD TO AMBER
The last in a six-volume series Volume 6: The Road To Amber, the last in the series, covers the final five years of Zelazny’s career in the early 1990s, when he reached for new ideas and continued familiar themes with stories such as “Godson” and “Godson: A Play in Three Acts,” two more Wild Cards stories (“Concerto for Siren and Serotonin” and “The Long Sleep”), and a linked sequence of five Amber stories leading to planned but unwritten Amber novels.
Roger Zelazny’s Chronicles of Amber novels area avilable now in the UK, published in two volumes as part of Gollancz‘s SF Masterworks series.
