A 1967 collection of four novelettes by Zelazny, from near the start of his career.

The Furies

Second paragraph of third section:

In his earlier years he had chalked up the most impressive kill-record of any agent ever employed by Interstel Central Intelligence. Forty-eight men and seventeen malicious alien life-forms had the Lynx dispatched during his fifty-year tenure as a field agent. He was one of the three men in the galaxy to have lived through half a century’s employment with ICI. He lived comfortably on his government pension despite three wives and a horde of grandchildren; he was recalled occasionally as a consultant; and he did some part-time missionary work on the side. He believed that all life was one and that all men were brothers, and that love rather than hate or fear should rule the affairs of men. He had even killed with love, he often remarked at Tranquility Session, respecting and revering the person and, the spirit of the man who had been marked for death.

This is the one about three men with unusual superpowers, chasing the villainous Victor Corgo to his death in a space opera universe. I found two things particularly interesting: the first is that Corgo’s motivations are very well explained, to the point that I think we are asking whether his quest for revenge from a grievous wrong really does make him the bad guy, and whether the trio of hunters are any better at all. The second is that in the end he is tracked down due to what we would now call a data hack from his artificial heart, an early case of a breach of electronic privacy of the kind we are now facing daily.

The original title of the story was “Hunt Down the Happy Wallaby“, that being the name of the Corgo’s spaceship. Frederik Pohl rejected this for Galaxy, saying that he found the narrative “multiply confusing”, which I find an extraordinary comment – it’s crystal clear what is happening and why. Apparently Zelazny wrote it “to honor the comic book heroes that he loved”, and one can see that – the characters are pretty much out of that tradition. The superpowered hunters reappear in a different form in Eye of Cat.

The Graveyard Heart

Second paragraph of third section:

He asked himself (from the blister balcony of his suite in the Hundred Towers of the Hilton-Frisco Complex): Is this the girl I want to marry?

This is the one about a near-future group of fabulously rich people who spend most of their time in cryogenic sleep, emerging now and then for wild parties. The protagonist is in love with an unattainable girl who fortunately turns out to be attainable. There’s also a matriarch, and the girl gets pregnant by the protagonist. However their love provokes the deadly jealousy of a failed poet who is also part of the ‘Set’. (The poetry is Zelazny’s own unpublished work.)

In all four of these stories, the gender roles are pretty firmly baked in, and I thought this one has aged even less well than the others; females are threats, whether cunning crones or unwitting maidens. There is some social commentary about celebrity culture, and capital punishment, but it feels a bit painted on. Not a story I’d recommend to someone who didn’t already know Zelazny.

The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth

Second paragraph of third section:

I had to shed my jacket as we flashed out over the bay. To our rear, the skyline could have been under water for the way it waved and rippled in the heatfall. A hopper can accommodate four people (five, if you want to bend Regs and underestimate weight), or three passengers with the sort of gear a baitman uses. I was the only fare, though, and the pilot was like his machine. He hummed and made no unnecessary noises. Lifeline turned a somersault and evaporated in the rear mirror at about the same time Tensquare broke the fore-horizon. The pilot stopped humming and shook his head.

This is the one about catching a super-giant fish creature on the seas of Venus (which were rapidly turning out to be completely mythical). Some critics have apparently complained that it is too obviously lifted from Moby-dick, but that’s completely unfair in my view; The Old Man and the Sea is the much more obvious source, and anyway it’s a completely different story. The narrator is the spurned lover of a rich woman who wants to hire him to help her catch the Big Fish, and the fundamental implausibility of the plot is very well covered by the pace and descriptive drama of the writing; it won the first ever Nebula for Best Novelette.

A Rose for Ecclesiastes

Second paragraph of third section:

Ecclesiastes, abandoned and returned to a dozen times, was almost ready to speak in the High Tongue.

This is the one set on old-fashioned Mars, where the newly arrived Earthfolk are delicately engaging with the dying Martian civilisation (where there is another matriarch, and another girl who gets pregnant by the protagonist). The protagonist is a lonely genius (how optimistic to think that a famous poet would ever be chosen for a space mission!) who cheers the Martians up by fertilisation, and by translating the Book of Ecclesiastes into their language and telling them, hey, it could be worse. It’s one of Zelazny’s earliest stories, written several months before his first publication, and retains a raw narrative power, at least for me. Apparently the emotional charge is based on his relationship with the folk singer Hedy West. I don’t know what to read into the fact that it turns out that the narrator’s Martian girlfriend never really liked him that much in the first place, and was only pretending.

All four of these stories show both the good and the bad of Zelazny’s early writing. The descriptions are fantastic and the use of language lyrical, and his protagonists’ motivations are very well conveyed; but he’s not comfortable writing about women, either old or younger, and the plots sometimes don’t really stand up even on their own terms.

Here is Hedy West singing a song about a murder.

But you can get Four for Tomorrow here, probably quite cheaply.