This Immortal by Roger Zelazny
184 pages
Published 1966 (expanded version of novella published 1965)
Read from May 12 to May 13
Rating: ★★ out of 5
Zelazny's first full novel, This Immortal is a creaky affair, lacking polish and the assured hand of his later work. The narrator here, Conrad, is a rough prototype of pretty much every Zelazny hero: superhumanly strong, superhumanly lucky, effectively immortal thanks to a chance mutation. Also, he's telepathic because why not, this is sci-fi in 1966, baby! Prefiguring the much more effectively realized myth-scape of Lord of Light, quirks of nuclear fallout and alien infestations fashion a convenient facsimile of Ancient Greek folklore. The episodic structure is also reminiscent of the superior Lord of Light, but whereas in the later novel this comes across as an intriguing experiment in structure and nonlinear storytelling, in Immortal the random creature fights and assassin duels feel closer to the clumsily serialized (or "fixed up") adventures of 1950s pulp sci-fi. Or, given the way things wrap up, perhaps it may even fall within the definition of a shaggy dog story. Immortal is most interesting in the context of the transition of the genre as a whole from the relative artlessness of pulp adventure to the more psychological, more experimental storytelling of the New Wave. It certainly has the feel of a transitional piece, which might derive as well from Zelazny expanding from short-format fiction to the demands of the long form.
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