Roger Zelazny - Death and the Execut教程.pdf

ROGER ZELAZNY Death and the Executioner Like a number of other writers, the late Roger Zelazny began publishing in 1962 in the pages of Cele Goldsmith’s Amazing. This was the so-called “Class of ‘62,” whose membership also included Thomas M. Disch, Keith Laumer, and Ursula K. Le Guin. Everyone in that “class” eventually achieved prominence, but some of them would achieve it faster than others, and Zelazny’s subsequent career was one of the most meteoric in the history of SF. The first Zelazny story to attract wide notice was “A Rose for Ecclesiastes,” published in 1963 (it was later selected by vote of the SFWA membership as one of the best SF stories of all time). By the end of that decade, he had won two Nebula Awards and two Hugo Awards and was widely regarded as one of the two most important American SF writers of the sixties (the other was Samuel R. Delany). By the end of the 1970s, although his critical acceptance as an important science fiction writer had dimmed, his long series of novels about the enchanted land of Amber—beginning with Nine Princes in Amber— had made him one of the most popular and best-selling fantasy writers of our time, and inspired fan clubs and fanzines worldwide. Zelazny’s approach to fantasy was similar to the brisk, wise-cracking, anachronistic slant of the de Camp and Pratt “Harold Shea” stories such as The Incomplete Enchanter, but in a somewhat different key, with less emphasis on whimsy (very few authors, with the exception of de Camp and Pratt, T. H. White, and Lewis Carroll, were ever really able to use whimsy s