"It was abridged by the editor and published in two parts in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in October and November 1965. It tied with Frank Herbert's Dune for the 1966 Hugo Award for Best Novel."
It's a short fantastic tale set in a post-apocalyptic world full of mutants and aliens.
In the beginning our protagonist Conrad, who either is or isn't Pan, [a Greek god], takes an alien visitor to a Haitian vodou ceremony. The idea of overmen, or gods, is very important here. The Haitians at the ceremony tell Conrad that his friend is possessed by a devil god named Angelsou. Well, to be fair he was a hired killer. The Haitian vodou section was a good experience reading in science fiction because Haiti isn't mentioned much in science fiction. As a Haitian-American, I find rather that most of the time Haiti is mentioned in popular works, it's always the negative zombies in the fields motif. Here, it was nice to see more of a cultural connection through religion. This shows Zelazny's interests in other cultures and makes his work more interesting other than big dumb objects in the sky of the science fiction pulp fanfare. The notion of tourism comes to mind especially while the characters are traveling in Greece, Rome, and Egypt.
The story here is nothing special. Other people want our protagonist Conrad to kill someone going on his tour. Conrad doesn't want to do it unless they have a good reason for him to. They don't. So the whole point of the book is for Conrad to figure out why they want to kill him and how he's going to protect this guy from getting killed. It's very simple but the suspense is built up throughout the entire short novel. It's quite the usual linear novel that builds to a climax.
Again, like in other Zelazny novels, it's not the story that is all that great or important, rather it is the writing style. Zelazny writes a fast, expressive exposition and dialogue that keeps you on the edge of your seat. There's a lot of fast action scenes in this novel. One of my favorite parts was when they attacked and captured by cannibals. And then some anthropologist who became leader of the cannibals pitted their vampire-god against Conrad, but it ends up being Husan, an Arab who ends up doing the fighting.
Zelazny really got me when I found out they had to fight a vampire. But it turned out that the cannibals keep this guy locked up in a cage and only let him out to eat humans and drink their blood. So he's of course being taken advantage of even though his people see him as a god. Not only that but he's also a fat slab of 350 pounds that can barely move. However, what gives him his godlike physical abilities is not only his drinking of blood, which is the reason why he's called a vampire, because he drinks the blood, but also the cannibals give him drugs that numb any pain that may be inflicted upon him. He's basically a fat beefcake that feels no pain when fighting. But the fight was lackluster. It turned out that Husan had poison on his finger tips and although he got his ass kicked, the poison at some point finally kicked in and our vampire god dies in one instant. Anticlimactic to say the least but it does move the story along quickly. Simply put, it was written that way.
At the end we still don't know what Conrad is. What we do know is that he is or isn't Pan. Also the novel begins and ends in the same way. Conrad and his girlfriend are just hanging out. Which is a good place to begin AND end a story.
No comments:
Post a Comment