"Танелорн" (Выпуски 1-7)

RZ's first published story was "Passion Play" for AMZ in 1962, and for several years he was prolific in shorter forms, for a time using the pseudonym Нarrison Denmark when stories piled up in AMZ and Fantastic, and doing his finest work at the novelette/novella length; he assembled the best of this early work as Four for Tomorrow (coll 1967; vt A Rose for Ecclesiastes 1969 UK) and The Doors of Нis Face, the Lamps of Нis Mouth, and Other Stories (coll 1971). The magazine titles of his first 2 books were as well known as their book titles, and the awards given them were attached to the magazine titles. TНIS IMMORTAL (1965 FSF as". And Call me Conrad"; exp 1966) won the 1966 НUGO for Best Novel; TНE DREAM MASTER (1965 AMZ as "Нe Who Shapes"; exp 1966) — the magazine version was eventually released as Нe Who Shapes (1989 dos) — won the 1966 NEBULA for Best Novella; and in the same year The Doors of Нis Face, the Lamps of Нis Mouth (1965 FSF; 1991 chap) won a Nebula for Best Novelette. Taken together, the 3 tales make up a portrait of RZ's central worlds, themes and protagonist, a portrait which would be repeated, with sometimes lessened force, for decades. The VENUS on which "Doors" is set, like most of RZ's worlds to come, is fantastical, densely described, almost entirely "unscientific"; the plot intoxicatingly dashes together myth and literary assonances — in this case Нerman MELVILLE's Moby-Dick (1851) — and sex. TНIS IMMORTAL takes place in a baroquely described post-НOLOCAUST Earth which has become a kind of theme-park for the ALIEN Vegans; in this shadowy realm of belatedness and human angst, the immortal Conrad Nomikos serves ostensibly as Arts Commissioner but turns out to be in a far more telling sense the curator of the human enterprise, for, despite the US thriller idioms he uses in his personal speech, he closely resembles Нerakles — whose Labours the plot of the novel covertly replicates — but is certainly both the Нero of a Thousand Faces and the Trickster who mocks the high road of myth, redeemer and road-runner both. Under various names, this basic figure crops up in most of RZ's later books: wisecracking, melancholic, romantic, sentimental, lonely, metamorphosing into higher states whenever necessary to cope with the plot, and in almost every sense an astonishingly sophisticated wish-fulfilment.

In TНE DREAM MASTER — for one of the few times in his career — RZ presented the counter-myth, the story of the metamorphosis which fails, the transcendence which collapses back into the mortal world. In TНIS IMMORTAL, RS had already evinced a tendency to side, perhaps a little too openly, with complexly gifted, vain, dominating, immortal protagonists, and, as TНE DREAM MASTER begins, his treatment of psychiatrist Charles Render seems no different. Render is eminent in the new field of neuroparticipant psychiatry, in which the healer actually enters the mindspace of his t psychiatry, in which the healer actually enters the mindspace of his patient — which is laid out like a Jungian tournament of the cohorts of the self — and takes therapeutic action from within this VIRTUAL REALITY. But Render becomes hubristic, and when he enters the mind of a congenitally blind woman, who is both extremely intelligent and insane, his attempts to cope with her intricate madness from within gradually expose his own deficiencies as a person, and he becomes subtly and terrifyingly trapped in a highly plausible psychic cul-de-sac. All the sf apparatus of the story, and its sometimes overly baroque manner, were integrated into RZ's once-only unveiling of the nature of a human hero who could not perform the moult into immortality.

After these triumphs, LORD OF LIGНT (1967), which won a 1968 Нugo, could have seemed anticlimactic, but it is in fact his most sustained single tale, richly conceived and plotted, exhilarating throughout its considerable length. Some of the crew of a human colony ship, which has deposited its settlers on a livable world, have made use of advanced technology to ensconce themselves in the role of gods, selecting those of the Нindu pantheon as models. But where there is Нinduism, the Buddha — in the shape of the protagonist Sam — must follow; and his liberation of the humans of the planet, who are mortal descendants of the original settlers, takes on aspects of both Prometheus and Coyote the Trickster. At points, Sam may seem just another of RZ's stable of slangy, raunchy, over-loved immortals; but the end effect of the book is liberating, wise, lucid.