creatures of light and darkness by roger zelazny

I can’t point to any cause and effect relationship, or delineate any concrete influences, but given the wild mix of narrative forms here, one does wonder.)Ĭreatures is also the second of Zelazny’s novels to cast an ancient pantheon - in this case, that of Egypt (with cameos by Cerberus, the Minotaur, and the Norns, among others) - into an interplanetary setting. Delany, another of the American New Wave’s luminaries, has a well-known fondness for experimental literature. (A stray and possibly relevant thought: the dedication reads “To Chip Delany, Just Because.” Samuel R. Creatures of Light and Darkness, published in book form in 1970, shows Zelazny at his most inventive, formally and thematically. This wasn’t a constant thing - most of his writings fit into a standard naturalistic narrative framework quite easily - but one catches glimpses in, for example, the “traveling” passages in Nine Princes in Amber. Among his other virtues, Roger Zelazny was as willing to experiment with narrative structures as he was with thematic content.

Indeed, ironically enough, writers of science fiction and fantasy had demonstrated less interest in narrative experimentation than so-called “mainstream” writers such as Joyce, Woolf, and Faulkner.Įnter Zelazny. I should point out that before the advent of the New Wave writers in the 1960s, science fiction reserved its adventurousness for the ideas portrayed formal considerations - the character of the text - were very much in line with the naturalism established as the reigning paradigm for literature in the nineteenth century. Roger Zelazny’s Creatures of Light and Darkness is one of the more bizarre science fiction novels in the canon.

Creatures of light and darkness by roger zelazny