I have been reading the biography of Roger Zelazny as written by fantasy writer Jane Lindskold. It has been fascinating reading. Here is the cover blurb to give you all an idea of what it is about...
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Rich in biographical detail and comprehensive in its coverage of Roger Zelazny's works, Jane M. Lindsold's study will be appreciated by science fiction fans as well as students and scholars of Zelazny. Lindskold's thematic assessment of the author's more than 30 novels and numerous short stories is informed with her extensive correspondence with him; Zelazny's letters to Lindskold provide insights into his maturation as a writer, his approach to story development and style, his choice of protagonists, and the influence of his personal interestes, his wide reading, and his life experience on his work. Lindskold begins with a biographical sketch, tracing Zelazny's interest in writing to his boyhood in what was then rural Ohio. She then follows his evolution as a writer from his years in college and graduate school and his stint in the National Guard and at the Social Security Administration through his attainment of professional success and his decision to move to Santa Fe, where he now resides. An entire chapter is devoted to Zelazny's "education", which he continues today through a program of reading fashioned after Leonardo da Vinci's design for self-education. Mythology, psychology, world history, ecology, and Buddhist philosophy all find their way into Zelazny's work as a result of his intensive reading. In other chapters Lindskold examines the influence of other Zelazny interests - jazz, the visual arts, the martial arts, and poetry, particlularly his own poetry - on his prose. Lindskold also explores Zelazny's treatment of female characters and takes up the charge made by some critics that Zelazny's heros - all but one of whom are male - are cast from the same mold. Through a close analysis of such mythical Zelazny figures as Francis Sandow in Isle of the Dead, Conrad Nomikos in This Immortal, and Billy Blackhorse Singer in Eye of Cat, Lindskold argues that while certain motifs do recur - the protagonist is immortal, for instance - the personal history and inner life of the heros continually evolve. If there is one theme to which Lindskold returns again and again, it is that of evolution: the evolution of Zelazny as a writer through a vigorous program of self-development, and the consequent evolution of his work as he moves his characters through different times and spaces in an effort to convey and comprehend what appear to be the unlimited horizons of the human experience. ____________________________________________________ ******************************************************
Our lives are the songs that sing the universe into existence.~David Zindell <i></i>
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