This Mortal Mountain (Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny)

Another fantastic, well done continuation of the collected works & the life of Roger Zelazny. NESFA really did a fantastic job with this as they have with the others in the collection. The amount of research & documentation they did is staggering. They collected comments & old correspondence from Zelazny's friends & peers. The sheer number of authors that he interacted with is amazing. A list of them reads like the Who's Who of the SF & Fantasy community. The insight into that community is wonderful.The stories were fantastic, as always. They were also well documented, each with a summary explanation of the allusions made & with related comments either by Zelazny, his editor or peers. Exactly what I've come to expect from the previous works. More fantastic was the corrected conversation between Morningside & Jack from "Jack of Shadows". It never seemed to be quite right & now I know why. There was also a deleted scene from "The Guns of Avalon" that was interesting, but not critical.I had one complaint with the book, the lack of a few pictures. In the previous books, once or twice it was mentioned that Zelazny wrote a story based on a picture. In this volume, it was mentioned several times fairly close together. Often enough that I put the book down & tried to find them on the Internet without any luck. Even thumbnails would have been nice. A fairly minor complaint, but a real one. If I could knock off a 1/4 star for it, I would. I've heard that early in 2010, there might be a 7th volume that will correct this.All told, this is another fantastic effort by NESFA. I highly recommend it to anyone, but it's a must if you're a fan of Zelazny's work, as I am.

This Mortal Mountain is volume three of the masterful Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny. (For an overview of the series, see my review of the first volume, Threshold.) While this volume, covering the years 1967-1977 maintains the high standards of scholarship of the series, the source material is less impressive. (Let me be clear -- I'm grading on a curve here. Substandard Zelazny still knocks the socks off most other writers.) Zelazny's short story output decreased in quantity and quality during these years. Indeed, Zelazny explains the origin of the final story in this volume, "The Engine at Heartspring's Center", published in 1974, as follows:"Tom Monteleone, visiting one afternoon, pointed out to me that I had not written a short story in over two years. So I did this one right after he left to prevent the interval's growing any longer."There were a few reasons for this slump.First, it was during this time that Zelazny began to put most of his literary effort into novels. He explains as follows"Word for word, novels work harder for their creators when it comes to providing for the necessities and joys of existence. Which would sound cynical, except that I enjoy writing novels, too."First, I find it charming that Zelazny feels it is necessary to justify doing work for which he gets paid. Most Americans make that choice without ever feeling any need to apologize. Second, getting paid for his work had suddenly become more important to Zelazny -- he and his wife quit their jobs with the Social Security Administration in 1969. Zelazny's writing abruptly became their sole income. It seems extraordinary to me that a writer such as Zelazny really had to worry about his ability to keep the wolf from the door. However, the Chonicles of Amber, which would become his most popular works and main meal ticket, were just getting started.The editors point out, however, that the short-story slump can't be blamed entirely on novel-writing -- Zelazny's total output decreased during this period. This was mostly because he undertook an awe-inspiring self-education project during this time. As Christopher S. Kovacs writes,"He started by reading one book in each science, aiming to read 10 books in each area. He read history ... and biography or autobiography. ... In 1972 he added poetry to the program... To keep current in sf, he read current works and the classics."It is not surprising that this program had an effect on his output.The stories are also not as good, in my opinion, in this volume as in the previous two. I read them and think to myself, "Clever idea...", but they grab me by the head rather than the heart. Because I have already read almost everything Zelazny published during his lifetime, I know there is better to come.My favorite two stories in this volume were "Way Up High" and "Here There be Dragons". These were an experiment for Zelazny -- two middle-grade children's stories written in collaboration with artist Vaughn Bodé. They were new to me. Because of an intellectual property dispute with Bodé, they were published only late in Zelazny's life -- in 1992. They appear in this volume without illustrations.In summary, this period saw a decrease in the quantity and quality of Zelazny's short fiction. It was, I believe, only temporary, and I look forward to the three volumes yet to come.

Volume 3 in a 6-volume set collecting all the shorter pieces (published and previously unpublished) of Roger Zelazny, one of the most stylish writers to ever write science fiction. The set includes hundred of stories, poems, and articles by and about Zelazny. It effectively makes all other collections of his work obsolete - good as they were. A companion volume contains a complete bibliography of his work, together with reproductions of book and magazine covers. Zelazny died before his 60th birthday, but he left these 6 books and dozens of novels.

Arriving at volume 3 of the complete short stories of Roger Zelazny, we find the title story followed by The Man Who Loved The Faoli, plus the magazine version of Damnation Alley, a self-contained extract from Creatures of Light & Darkness, collaborations with Harlan Ellison and Dannie Plachta and the proverbial 'many more'.As always with this series we have celebrity introductions, one of whom this time around is Neil Gaiman, non-fiction writings, comments on stories, biographical and autobiographical pieces, and curiosities including a deleted sex scene from The Guns of Avalon.See my review of Threshold (vol.1) for a fuller overview of this unmissable series.