STEVE MILLER

For the sin of saying “We ought to have a club!” while sitting with a group of fellow SF readers (we'd gravitated together after an English class, all of us carrying as many books with sfictional covers as school books), I ended up as the presiding officer of The Infinity Circle, a small organization of fans at UMBC (University of Maryland Baltimore County) which was a school being built from the ground up amidst rolling farmland west of Baltimore, in what was then recognized as Catonsville.

Organization probably overstates the case: what we did was schedule a room where five to ten of us could gather and talk science fiction and fantasy together. Included were a familiar mix – the film fan, the horror guy, the girl who read a lot and didn't talk much, the convention fan, the would-be writer.... Actually, there were two girls, one of them the future Sue Miller – and she was also my usual ride to and from the school.

The key things about going from a couple people just sitting around to an official club at a new campus was in fact the ability to schedule a room or set of rooms for events, and the existence of a budget from the Student Affairs Center.

At 18 I'd never been to a convention, and I'd never met a well-published writer other than my grandmother (who later won a gold medal from the World Congress of Poets), so when the subject of “what shall we do with our money?” came up we decided not to let it burn a hole in our pockets – instead we opted to invite a writer to campus.

Logically, we started with A, as in A is for Asimov, and I sent Isaac a letter offering a chance to visit our muddy and still under construction campus in return for egoboo, dinner, and transportation costs. He declined rapidly, with prior commitments, but encouraged us to try again later.

In the meantime, we'd all been reading and thinking, and I'd seen a note to the effect in a magazine that a certain writer lived with his wife in -- Catonsville. His name wasn't listed in the phone book, but his wife's was, and when I said to the group that maybe we could get Roger Zelazny to come, they went for it in a flash, and after several tentative phone calls, we arranged for Mr. Zelazny to speak to us, which he volunteered to do without a fee.

On the day, he arrived early at our meeting place in the basement of the library's first building phase. He was a tall and thin man, nervous it seemed, with a quick flitting smile. He quickly got rid of the “Mister,” insisting that we call him Roger, and mentioned that he'd, um, got a few books in the car to maybe donate to the library, too.

He spoke about his writing -- he had books out, he had books coming out, he had stories, and he good naturedly answered questions, warming to his task over time. He charmed us, he joked about himself, he knew people, he enjoyed the writing: having him there was like sitting in front of a fire on a cold winter’s eve. Eventually, as our scheduled time for the room drew to a close, he went with several volunteers to his car, returning with box after box of science fiction books and magazines -- hundreds of each! We were in the basement of the library, and as President of the club I thought the best bet was to immediately convey this magnificent gift upstairs. Roger went along with this, having no desire to carry all of these hundreds of books home. It took several trips, IIRC, to get all the boxes to the front desk.

And then, adventure struck! The librarian on duty took a look at these boxes and boxes of old paperback books, boxes full of pulp magazines and what not, and told us after grabbing a box of hardcovers and then sniffily pointing at the paper-covered stuff they “simply aren't set up to accept these kinds of donations.”

“These kinds of donations?”

We were appalled. Also, as it was getting late, some of the club members had drifted off. My ride was getting impatient –

At which point I said “Well, if there's no place here, I have room!”

This was true -- I'd recently inherited my off-to-be-a-soldier brother's room; I had dozens of feet of bookshelves at my disposal, and I had an active interest in reading every issue of Galaxy, F&SF, Amazing, Fantastic, Fantastic Adventure....

Things got odd for a moment or two, with my ride threatening to depart on the instant and Roger at a standstill, knowing he couldn't possibly face his wife after having told her he was getting rid of all these things.

And so, Roger Zelazny agreed to drive me home, with his books. That meant Sue, my ride, could leave. Also, it meant that it took two more trips to reload the car.

A note here about Baltimore County. If you punch “Catonsville” and “Owings Mills” into a road-trip web site it may say the distance is 10 miles, but that's only accurate in so far as driving closest point to closest point. Owings Mills is large enough to encompass a state park and half-encircle Liberty Lake, the metro region's main water supply. In fact, we lived on a large feeder stream on the border of Liberty Lake -- if I walked down the hill, into my stream and under the bridge, I was on lake property. I lived very much in the country, while UMBC sat in a green enclave on the edge of the city.

It was, thankfully, not a dark and stormy night. However, Roger was recent transplant from Ohio, and his understanding of country distances in Maryland at that point was not good. Also, he was driving the Ford car that inspired his story “Devil Car.”

We talked some on the ride about my goals in writing, and he offered very general advice, and suggested that if I wanted to show him a story of mine he'd be glad to see one. I think he began to get very nervous when he realized that he hadn't seen a traffic light in some miles. He actually asked, just before “the turn” if it was going to take much longer – by now I realized that yes, we were a long way from anyplace he knew, and that the corner gas station was dark.

At which point we turned right for a 7/10 mile downhill run. Yes, we lived on a rise next to the lake's feeder, at the bottom of the hill, on an old one and a half lane country road. There were, at the time about six houses on the right side of the road, all crushed up on the first quarter mile near Liberty Road, on a pretty obvious slope. Then the houses went away, as did the street lights and the slope increased, and the road devolved into a rough tar on gravel wending between steep walls of brush and tree, at which juncture the road turned hard to the right, revealing a sudden flat spot.

At that point I was not a driver. How thrilling the ride might have been for him I don't know. I do know that as we reached the bridge at the bottom (a bridge that once collapsed under the weight of a dump truck, he was looking up the rise at the small point of light that was the light above our back door that he said “Up there?”

All in all Roger was good about it, very good. He helped schlep boxes, as did I, and as did my younger brother (who had read several of Roger's books and was properly amazed to have him in the house). He dealt with meeting my mother (surprised for me to be coming home late and with a stranger, not surprised for me to be bringing more books in to the house) in good graces... and then he fled, back up Wards Chapel Road, down Liberty Road, across Rolling Road (where tobacco was rolled to market), over finally to Wilkins Avenue and then down toward the city, to the far side of Catonsville.

Altogether he'd gone around 40 miles out his way, I'm guessing in reconstructing the route.

My mother's reaction? “So, he's a novelist? I mean, he wasn't -- he wasn't at all how I thought a novelist would be!”

On the other hand, I was caught. He lived story in a way I could only admire, he understood words in a way that no one else I'd met ever had, he -- I was caught.

And here's the rest of the story: the library did put the science fiction and fantasy hardcovers into the general collection, and the SF club was noticed. In a few months Roger came back to the school to give a “real” lecture, this for an English faculty event which was well-attended, well received, and for which he was well paid – I think his topic was that science fiction was the last refuge of true tragedy and comedy. And someone noticed that the school had a science fiction club and had such a lecture and donated a few thousand hardback SF books.... which helped form the core of the UMBC SF collection I was later Curator of.

And yes, he called one day a few months later, when he was just finishing up a project, and asked if I had anything storywise of mine I wanted him to see, and invited me to come to his place. By then I was driving. So I sat and read the opening chapters of the just finished Nine Princes in Amber while he looked over “The Inventoried” for me.

Steve Miller is, with Sharon Lee, the author of the best-selling and critically acclaimed books of the Liaden Universe®, the most recent of which is Mouse and Dragon. Visit Lee and Miller at their website: www.korval.com

FURTHER READING

Val Con Came First, an interview with Sharon Lee and Steve Miller, Issue 3, May 2010
Love Letters to Liad, fans impart their paeans of praise on the Liaden Universe®, Issue 3, May 2010

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JOSH WANISKO

I can't remember if Roger Zelazny's Roadmarks was the first or second book of his that I read. My father's girlfriend lived down the street from us when I was about fourteen or so. I was at her house one day in the summer, looking for something to read, and she gave me her ex-husband's shoebox full of sci-fi paperbacks. I grabbed two that looked nifty, Roadmarks and Creatures of Light and Darkness.

I'm sure I started reading Roadmarks first, but it was just confusing. There were two alternating chapters, "One" and "Two," and the book opens with "Two." So I may have put it down and finished Creatures first instead. I've read them both so many times, and it was so long ago that I first picked them up, that I really don't recall.

It's the quintessential Zelazny book. The unusual narrative structure, the throwaway quotations and obscure references. It has no pretensions to being anything more than an adventure novel, but it's a fantastically crafted and literate adventure novel.

I've always thought Roadmarks the most cinematic of all his books. It lends itself to such striking visuals. I'd love to see Hitler driving around in his black VW looking for the place where he won, the fight between Archie and Timyin Tin, Mondamay the potter raising his hand and setting the sky ablaze, Doc Savage throwing John Sunlight over his shoulder and ripping his shirt in the process and of course, "The death of Chadwick! By Tyrannosaurus Rex! Under the direction of the Marquis de Sade!"

Josh Wanisko is a life-long Zelazny fan, a dad, and a part time blogger. He hangs his words at: where-there-had-been-darkness.blogspot.com/

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DAVID WEBER

There have been several pros I've enjoyed meeting who fall into the legend category [Anne McCaffrey is one, as mentioned in last issue’s Close Encounters - Ed.]. But the one that really stands out is Roger Zelazny, not so much for our very first meeting as for our second one. And for the friendship that grew out of them.

I had a grand and glorious total of two books out -- Insurrection and Mutineers' Moon -- and I'd been invited to a local science fiction convention. My now wife Sharon, who was then a fairly new friend and the assistant manager of a Waldenbooks store here in Greenville, had arranged a signing for me in conjunction with the convention. Steve White was coming down from Charlottesville, Virginia, so the two of us were going to be signing the collaboration (Insurrection) and I was going to be signing my very first solo novel (Mutineers' Moon). I mentioned this with some pride to Toni Weisskopff at Baen, who said "You know, Roger is going to be at Magnum Opus Con, as well. Would your friend like him to come and sign, too?" Well, I'd been introduced to Roger (very briefly) at the same convention the year before, and he was one of my favorite writers in all the universe, so, of course, I said "Yes!" (And, equally of course, no bookstore in its right mind was going to turn down that kind of opportunity, so Sharon's "Yes" was as enthusiastic as my own.) Then, a week or so later, Toni called again to say "By the way, Lois Bujold is going to be in town for the convention, too. Would you like her to come along, as well?" Which is how Steve and I wound up at "our" first signing sitting between Roger Zelazny and Lois Bujold. I can honestly say that the store sold all the copies of our books it had in stock; it would've taken a front end loader to haul all of Roger and Lois' books out the door.

That was the first time I'd really met Roger, and he was quite charming. But the second time that I met him was a year or so later, at a convention in Lynchburg, Virginia. My ancient but much beloved Volvo had swallowed its timing gears just before I got to Lynchburg, and I think they had to de-mothball a production line in Sweden to build the replacement parts. At any rate, I wound up stuck in Lynchburg for an extra 10 days, staying as an unexpected -- but very graciously received -- houseguest of one of my best-friends-to-be, Jane Lindskold, while I waited for the aforesaid parts to come in and repairs to be made. Roger was also at the convention, and given that "W" and "Z" come fairly close together in the alphabet, we wound up seated at the same table for autographing. There was a lull in Roger's signing (I hadn't had a lot of people come by, since I didn't have a lot of books out at that point) and Roger turned around to me and said "I finished reading Path of the Fury last night." Picture instant heart attack on the part of the brand-new writer. The book had only been out for a month or so, and here was someone whose work I’d always loved and admired sounding like he was about to critique it for me. I don't know whether my expression gave me away or not, but he only smiled and shook his head. Then he said "I think it may be the best blend of fantasy and science fiction I've ever read." Can you picture what that kind of comment meant to me at that point in my life and my career coming from someone with a shelf full of Hugos and Nebulas? Someone who’d always been part of the gold standard of what writing was supposed to be all about as far as I was concerned?

Obviously, I thanked him for it. And, equally obviously, I wondered (I didn't know him very well at that point) whether he really meant it or whether he was just being nice to the newbie. It happened, though, that he was staying with Jane while he was in Lynchburg, as well, and the two of us had a couple of days after the con to get to know one another before he headed home to New Mexico and my (finally) repaired Volvo and I headed home to South Carolina. During those days, I got to know him well enough to realize that while he may have been being gracious and encouraging, he’d also meant it when he said he really liked the book. I remember sitting on the back porch of Jane's Civil War-era house, listening to thunderstorm rain drumming on the tin roof, with our bare feet shoved out under the runoff, drinking iced tea while we talked about writing. And what I will never forget is that he spoke to me as if I had 30 novels out or as if he had only three out. He was treating me -- me, who’d considered him one of the best writers in the world since high school -- as a fellow professional and an equal.

I got to know Roger much better in the years we had left before cancer cut his life so unfairly short, but it was that stay in Lynchburg which really defined the man for me. Which showed me that there really are people in the universe for whom the term "a scholar and a gentleman" is not merely accurate, but the only one that fits. I like to think that I would have tried to extend the same respect to the new writers I meet even without Roger's example, but I'll never know. What I do know is that he showed me that he was a man who lived his life with just as much style and just as much integrity as he put into the written works I'd always loved so much.

I still miss him.

David Weber is the best-selling author of more than 40 novels, including the celebrated Honor Harrington and Safehold series, along with numerous shorter works. Visit him at his website: www.DavidWeber.net.

FURTHER READING

No One Gets a Free Pass, an interview with David Weber, Issue 5, July, 2010

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SCOTT ZRUBEK

Roger Zelazny has been a factor in my life for over thirty years.

From the first time I found one of his books in my local bookstore until the present day, when I maintain a listing of his books, his works have played a part in my life.

I first stumbled across him in Nine Princes in Amber, the black Avon edition. The first chapter grabbed me and the book never let go. The style, the language, and the characters are unforgettable.

From the Amber stories, I fell into his other novels and then the masterful short stories. Roger's voice and his craftsmanship were ever present.

I got to meet Roger in person only once. He was signing at a local bookstore while in town for a shindig the local newspaper was putting on. I took over all of the books I had, and he signed them all. I don't remember much else about the encounter. I wish I did. I wish I'd spent some more time chatting with him.

After he passed, I felt that his short stories deserved more attention and thought to do a collection of them. I spent the next five years working on getting the rights to the stories. And then another year working on getting them published. It was a lot of phone calls, disappointment and success, and worth every bit of effort.

Roger's words influenced me when I was just discovering them when I was 16. They've become good friends 30 years later. I expect and hope that I'll continue find new layers in them in the future.

Scott Zrubek is the guy behind www.roger-zelazny.com and the editor of Manna from Heaven, even if his name is misspelled in the book. For a paying gig, he writes software.

Philip Jose Farmer said, of 1980's Last Defender of Camelot: "Zelazny, telling of gods and wizards, uses magical words as if he himself were a wizard. He reaches into the subconscious and invokes archetypes to make the hair rise on the back of your neck. Yet these archetypes are transmuted into a science fictional world that is as believable -- and as awe-inspiring -- as the world you now live in." Zelazny was a writer's writer, a man who evoked admiration in all who knew him, or knew his work. The magic of Roger Zelazny is eternal.

-- Our thanks to all who took part in this endeavor. While we could not print every response, we appreciate and concur with every one.

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