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alexanderpaez's review against another edition
3.0
Me apetecía leer algo retro, old school scifi, y que fueran relatos. Y Zelazny es un autor que, en general, me gusta mucho por su sentido del humor. Los relatos de este libro son un WTF constante, y de la mitad no he sacado nada en claro. No sé qué pensar.
nwhyte's review against another edition
http://nhw.livejournal.com/382479.html[return][return]I think this was Zelazny's first published collection? Mostly stories from his peak early years in the 1960s; includes perhaps his two best pieces from that era, the title story (which I didn't like at all on first reading it as a teenager, but which has grown on me since) and "A Rose for Ecclesiastes" which remains a favourite.[return][return]The incredibly weak ending of "This Mortal Mountain" grates a bit more than before, and a couple of the other single-idea stories seem a bit overextended. But I liked rereading "The Keys to December", "This Moment of the Storm" and "The Man Who Loved the Faioli".[return][return]For some reason iBooks have decided to combine the stories published in the original collection of this name in 1971 with those included (along with "The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth" and "A Rose for Ecclesiastes") in Four For Tomorrow, a collection published in 1967. (They also transferred the dedication "To My Mother" from Four For Tomorrow rather than the original "To Alan Huff".) The two extra stories are "The Furies", which remains excellent (though knowing Zelazny's later works as we now do, we can see ideas recycled from it into both To Die In Italbar and Eye of Cat) and "The Graveyard Heart", an eccentric choice, eighty pages in which nothing much happens, and poorly proofread to boot (especially the few German phrases, which are horribly mangled).[return][return]Anyway, glad I put some time into rereading this.
arkron's review against another edition
4.0
Fisher, climber, cowboy romanticism, terraforming, a proto-amber and other stories.
My favourite ★★★★★ story was
No ★ or ★★ for me were
Contents:
My favourite ★★★★★ story was
- A Rose for Ecclesiaste
No ★ or ★★ for me were
- The Great Slow Kings
- Corrida
Contents:
- ★★★★ for The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth • (1965) • fisher story on Old Venus - review
- ★★★1/2 for The Keys to December • (1966) • terraforming for Cold Cats - review
- ★★★ for Devil Car • (1965) • Wild West romanticism with A.I. cars - review
- ★★★★★ • A Rose for Ecclesiastes • (1963) • fatalisms of Old Marsians - review
- ★★ for The Monster and the Maiden • (1964) • two-pager faery story, a twist about the eponymous topic
- ★★★1/2 for Collector's Fever • (1964) • three-pager funny, bizarre SF about trying to collect an intelligent stone. Nearly 100% dialogue but with an interesting world-setting.
- ★★★ for This Mortal Mountain • (1967) • mysticistic climbing turning real - review
- ★★★ for This Moment of the Storm • (1966) • storm watcher leads a city through the perils of a storm - review
- ★★ for The Great Slow Kings • (1963) • satirical and witty story about reptile Gods taking years for simple conversations, witnessing civilizations fade away while they try to come up with answers. "Masters," suggested Zindrome, "the half-life of radioactive materials being as ephemeral as it is, I regret to report that only one spaceship is now in operational condition."
- ★★★ for A Museum Piece • (1963) • an artist decides to flee the world, exhibiting himself as a statue in a museum. Others do similar. Satirical, witty, absurd story.
- ★★★★ for Divine Madness • (1966) • reverse time love story - review
- ★ for Corrida • (1968) • a man awakes as the bull in a tauromachia; thankfully only two pages long
- ★★★★ for Love is an Imaginary Number • (1966) • proto-Amber - review
- ★★★ for The Man Who Loved the Faioli • (1967) • A month. A month, he knew, and it would come to an end. The Faioli, whatever they were, paid for the life that they took with the pleasures of the flesh.
- ★★1/2 for Lucifer • (1964) • the eponymous lightbringer (from "lux"+"ferre") brings back life to a city in the form of electricity, if only for a few moments
mburnamfink's review against another edition
4.0
Few authors are as like themselves as Roger Zelazny, and as hard to explain why they are like themselves. This collection encompasses the short fiction of the middle 1960s, when Zelazny was at the height of his power (his two novel Hugos were awarded in this time.) The stories are lyrical meditations on great themes of life, death, change, and small moments of humanity in the face of the absolute powers of the universe.
The stories are all solid, but the clear standout is "A Rose for Ecclesiastes", which follows a genius poet on a mission to understand Martian religion and culture, and translate the who sense of that dying race.
The stories are all solid, but the clear standout is "A Rose for Ecclesiastes", which follows a genius poet on a mission to understand Martian religion and culture, and translate the who sense of that dying race.
smartflutist661's review against another edition
4.0
The fact that it's a collection of some of Zelazny's earliest works shows. In particular, some of the shortest stories fell rather flat. But the longer stories are all well worth the read.
dolangueando's review
1.0
Se eu tivesse demorado mais cinco dias, eu teria lido esse livro em exatamente dois anos! Terminei o livro porque eu tenho muita dificuldade de largar livros de contos, eu sempre acho que o próximo conto vai ser melhor... A verdade é que raramente é. Se eu estou odiando todos os contos, ou a maioria deles, até aqui, dificilmente o próximo conto vai ser bom o suficiente pra fazer valer a leitura. Que fique de lição pra mim.
carol26388's review
4.0
Zelazny was a master at the short, novelette and novella (rather a pity, since his world-building often leaves me wanting much more) and this collection almost consistently kicked my mental butt for his exploration of humanity and his creativity. His use of language is impressive; he can write concisely, clear-cutting to a quiet moment in the middle of a hurricane, or he can weave together words to perfectly describe an alien sunrise. There is tone of melancholy running through these stories, themes of time and loneliness, but how he translates it into exotic settings is amazing. Who knew he was such a romantic? A few weaker works are included, as well as one or two that seemed like they were fun writing exercises, but even his least efforts are worth reading. A craftsman.
The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth: (Nebula winner) Deep-sea fishing on Venus. A baitman takes one last job hunting the biggest sea monster yet, only the commission is from a makeup millionaire. She's filming it, to boot--is Zelazny prescient or what? "Venus at night is a field of sable waters... Dawn is like dumping milk into an inkwell. First, there are erratic curdles of whites, then streamers. Shake the bottle for a gray colloid, then watch it whiten a little more. All of a sudden you've got day."
The Keys to December: Haunting. Beautiful. A group of people bioengineered by General Mining to work in the cold world of Alyonal (now defunct) buy themselves a world and plan to bioengineer it to fit their physical forms. They cryo-sleep during the accelerated planetary evolution, but leave a few people to stand guard each decade, which gives them an unique opportunity to observe local evolution--and extinction. What is it to be human? To be a race? What does one marginalized species owe another? "I'm afraid," she said..."(of) Living the way we've been living, I guess. Leaving little pieces of ourselves in different centuries."
Devil Car: Zelanzy's post-apocalyptic answer to Christine. Groups of wild escaped cars are living in the wastes, led by the Devil Car. Murdock and his artificed car Jenny are tracking him down. What does it mean to be alive and wild?
A Rose for Ecclesiastes: One of his classics. An internationally acclaimed poet with a knack for languages is invited to Mars. He becomes the first human to learn the Martian language, and the first invited into the inner sanctum to see the Martian dance, a mix of spirituality and poetry. "For the next three weeks alphabet-bugs chased each other behind my eyelids whenever I tried to sleep. The sky was an unclouded pool of turquoise that rippled calligraphies whenever I swept my eyes across it." Braxa, the performer, becomes his tutor, and he gains more insight than he expected into the Martian race and a prophecy. A poet as narrator gives Zelazny full reign of wordsmithing. This one is a heart-render.
The Monster and the Maiden: a quick two-pager with a twist.
Collector's Fever: a nephew with ulterior motives collects a Stone that doesn't want to leave. A bit silly, a bit of social commentary. Kind of cute.
This Mortal Mountain: a mountain climber and his team attempt the impossible, the highest mountain in the universe, a mountain higher than the atmosphere. Similar to "A Rose--" it involves a man at the peak of his profession seeking the ultimate challenge. As they climb, his team is not only challenged by winds, but by visions. Poetic beauty; makes me almost identify with mountain climbers, but the quote I found to share contains the ultimate insult: "'You tipped off the press,' I said. 'Now, now,' he said, growing smaller and stiffening as my gaze groped its way through the murk of his central nervous system and finally touched upon the edges of that tiny tumor, his forebrain."
This Moment of the Storm: One of my favorite Zelazny novelettes. A storm predictor and a world hopper predicts the big storm. He works with the Mayor to watch, predict, and steer the city through the Big One, even as society is disrupted. Heartbreaking. A classic, this one is in other collections as well, and is one of my favorites. Begins and ends the the philosophical question of What is Man? "As she looked down into her coffee, I saw a little girl staring into a pool, waiting for it to clear, to see her reflection or to see the bottom of the pool, or perhaps both."
The Great Slow Kings: seems to be a thought exercise: what would be the perspective on life of beings whose lives spanned millennia? "Drax had been musing for the past four centuries (theirs was a sluggish sort) over the possibility of life on other planets in the galaxy."
A Museum Piece: a gorgeous but critically unknown artist decides that "if one could not live by creating art, then one might do worse than turn the thing the other way about, so to speak." In true Zelazny fashion, he not only meets a woman, but an alien. A whimsical tone pervades. "He should have hated being reported stolen during the first week of his career, with nothing to face then but the prospect of second-rate galleries or an uneasy role in the cheerless private collections of cheerless and private collectors."
Divine Madness: a man is caught in a time loop relieves the death of his wife. Remarkable writing technique in capturing the backward loop. "How does a man undo that which has been done? He doesn't. There is no way under the sun. He may suffer, remember, repeat, curse or forget. Nothing else. The past, in this sense, is inevitable."
Corrida: a strange little tale where a man awakens in a bullring. Another short-short, this was one of my least favorite in the collection.
Love is an Imaginary Number: pre-Amber? A demigod tries to escape. Reads much like an Amber short, shifting and escape-focused. "They had made me to forget. They had nailed me with love."
The Man Who Loved the Faioli: "The Faioli were known to come to a man the month before his death--those rare men who still died--" Another haunting, love-lost tale that has the essence of wish-fulfillment about it.
Lucifer: a man who misses the lights and life of the city struggles to get the generators running. An ode to great cities.
The Furies: a little sci-fi opera with a space pirate, an empath, an assassin and a space geographer. A great chase tale with build and tension. What an ending!
The Graveyard Heart: a man meets a beautiful woman who is a member of the Set, an elite, eternal group. In order to be worthy of joining, he needs a lifestyle change and to pass an interview with the head maven. Another one where Zelazny plays with the pinnacle of career, manipulation of time and love.
"He realized, then, that his goals has shifted; the act had become the actor. What he really wanted, first and foremost, impure and unsimple, was an in to the Set--that century-spanning stratocruiser, luxury class, jetting across tomorrow and tomorrow and all the days that followed after--to ride high, like those gods of old who appeared at the rites of the equinoxes, slept between processions, and were remanifest with each new season, the bulk of humanity living through all those dreary days that lay between. To be a part of Leota was to be a part of the Set, and that was what he wanted now. So of course it was vanity. It was love."
Genius.
Cross posted at http://clsiewert.wordpress.com/2013/04/24/the-doors-of-his-face-the-lamps-of-his-mouth-by-roger-zelazny/
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth: (Nebula winner) Deep-sea fishing on Venus. A baitman takes one last job hunting the biggest sea monster yet, only the commission is from a makeup millionaire. She's filming it, to boot--is Zelazny prescient or what? "Venus at night is a field of sable waters... Dawn is like dumping milk into an inkwell. First, there are erratic curdles of whites, then streamers. Shake the bottle for a gray colloid, then watch it whiten a little more. All of a sudden you've got day."
The Keys to December: Haunting. Beautiful. A group of people bioengineered by General Mining to work in the cold world of Alyonal (now defunct) buy themselves a world and plan to bioengineer it to fit their physical forms. They cryo-sleep during the accelerated planetary evolution, but leave a few people to stand guard each decade, which gives them an unique opportunity to observe local evolution--and extinction. What is it to be human? To be a race? What does one marginalized species owe another? "I'm afraid," she said..."(of) Living the way we've been living, I guess. Leaving little pieces of ourselves in different centuries."
Devil Car: Zelanzy's post-apocalyptic answer to Christine. Groups of wild escaped cars are living in the wastes, led by the Devil Car. Murdock and his artificed car Jenny are tracking him down. What does it mean to be alive and wild?
A Rose for Ecclesiastes: One of his classics. An internationally acclaimed poet with a knack for languages is invited to Mars. He becomes the first human to learn the Martian language, and the first invited into the inner sanctum to see the Martian dance, a mix of spirituality and poetry. "For the next three weeks alphabet-bugs chased each other behind my eyelids whenever I tried to sleep. The sky was an unclouded pool of turquoise that rippled calligraphies whenever I swept my eyes across it." Braxa, the performer, becomes his tutor, and he gains more insight than he expected into the Martian race and a prophecy. A poet as narrator gives Zelazny full reign of wordsmithing. This one is a heart-render.
The Monster and the Maiden: a quick two-pager with a twist.
Collector's Fever: a nephew with ulterior motives collects a Stone that doesn't want to leave. A bit silly, a bit of social commentary. Kind of cute.
This Mortal Mountain: a mountain climber and his team attempt the impossible, the highest mountain in the universe, a mountain higher than the atmosphere. Similar to "A Rose--" it involves a man at the peak of his profession seeking the ultimate challenge. As they climb, his team is not only challenged by winds, but by visions. Poetic beauty; makes me almost identify with mountain climbers, but the quote I found to share contains the ultimate insult: "'You tipped off the press,' I said. 'Now, now,' he said, growing smaller and stiffening as my gaze groped its way through the murk of his central nervous system and finally touched upon the edges of that tiny tumor, his forebrain."
This Moment of the Storm: One of my favorite Zelazny novelettes. A storm predictor and a world hopper predicts the big storm. He works with the Mayor to watch, predict, and steer the city through the Big One, even as society is disrupted. Heartbreaking. A classic, this one is in other collections as well, and is one of my favorites. Begins and ends the the philosophical question of What is Man? "As she looked down into her coffee, I saw a little girl staring into a pool, waiting for it to clear, to see her reflection or to see the bottom of the pool, or perhaps both."
The Great Slow Kings: seems to be a thought exercise: what would be the perspective on life of beings whose lives spanned millennia? "Drax had been musing for the past four centuries (theirs was a sluggish sort) over the possibility of life on other planets in the galaxy."
A Museum Piece: a gorgeous but critically unknown artist decides that "if one could not live by creating art, then one might do worse than turn the thing the other way about, so to speak." In true Zelazny fashion, he not only meets a woman, but an alien. A whimsical tone pervades. "He should have hated being reported stolen during the first week of his career, with nothing to face then but the prospect of second-rate galleries or an uneasy role in the cheerless private collections of cheerless and private collectors."
Divine Madness: a man is caught in a time loop relieves the death of his wife. Remarkable writing technique in capturing the backward loop. "How does a man undo that which has been done? He doesn't. There is no way under the sun. He may suffer, remember, repeat, curse or forget. Nothing else. The past, in this sense, is inevitable."
Corrida: a strange little tale where a man awakens in a bullring. Another short-short, this was one of my least favorite in the collection.
Love is an Imaginary Number: pre-Amber? A demigod tries to escape. Reads much like an Amber short, shifting and escape-focused. "They had made me to forget. They had nailed me with love."
The Man Who Loved the Faioli: "The Faioli were known to come to a man the month before his death--those rare men who still died--" Another haunting, love-lost tale that has the essence of wish-fulfillment about it.
Lucifer: a man who misses the lights and life of the city struggles to get the generators running. An ode to great cities.
The Furies: a little sci-fi opera with a space pirate, an empath, an assassin and a space geographer. A great chase tale with build and tension. What an ending!
The Graveyard Heart: a man meets a beautiful woman who is a member of the Set, an elite, eternal group. In order to be worthy of joining, he needs a lifestyle change and to pass an interview with the head maven. Another one where Zelazny plays with the pinnacle of career, manipulation of time and love.
"He realized, then, that his goals has shifted; the act had become the actor. What he really wanted, first and foremost, impure and unsimple, was an in to the Set--that century-spanning stratocruiser, luxury class, jetting across tomorrow and tomorrow and all the days that followed after--to ride high, like those gods of old who appeared at the rites of the equinoxes, slept between processions, and were remanifest with each new season, the bulk of humanity living through all those dreary days that lay between. To be a part of Leota was to be a part of the Set, and that was what he wanted now. So of course it was vanity. It was love."
Genius.
Cross posted at http://clsiewert.wordpress.com/2013/04/24/the-doors-of-his-face-the-lamps-of-his-mouth-by-roger-zelazny/
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
bluebec's review
2.0
A collection of short stories about men, most of whom are arseholes, and the women they want or end up getting. Some interesting gems of ideas, but the men are tiring and I'm just not interested in hearing about them any more. They're all fairly similar too.
olbrownwarder's review
4.0
So the copy of the book I read was an audiobook recorded for the Library of Congress's Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped. Apparently that's not a version Goodreads has records of, and I can't find anything substantial about the recording online. The narrator was Eric Zwemer, and he did an amazing job with the material. The recording was done in January of 1980, and Zwemer's voice has a delightful timbre and rhythm that's both excellently suited to Zelazny's writing style, and curiously absent from the field of modern narrators.
The stories themselves (this is a collection of 15 stories, rather than a single piece of prose) are all delightful, and range from silly though experiment pieces to fleshed-out longer pieces. Of those stories included here, A Rose for Ecclesiastes is probably best well known, but I was partial to Devil Car (which one reviewer called a "post-apocalyptic answer to Christine", but I prefer to think of as a direct ancestor of KITT and Knight Rider) and A Museum Piece.
lordofthemoon's review
3.0
This is a collection of short stories from reasonably early in Zelazny's career and there's a wide span both in terms of size (one is almost novella sized, another is just over a page long) and scale. There's something here for everyone, although I particularly enjoyed The Keys to December and The Great Slow Kings, two very different stories.
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