Last Exit to Babylon
Edited by David G. Grubbs, Christopher S. Kovacs and Ann Crimmins. Cover art by Michael Whelan.
The fourth in a six-volume series, Volume 4: Last Exit to Babylon contains Zelazny's short works from the late 1970s and early 1980s when Zelazny's popularity opened new markets for his work. He continued to produce highly-crafted stories, such as the popular "The Last Defender of Camelot," the Hugo-winning "Unicorn Variation," and the Hugo and Nebula-winning "Home is the Hangman." The stories in this series are enriched by editors' notes and Zelazny's own words, taken from his many essays, describing why he wrote the stories and what he thought about them in retrospect.
Contents:
Introductions
- The Prince of Amber (by Joe Haldeman)
- What I Didn't Learn from Reading Roger Zelazny (by Steven Brust)
Stories
- My Name Is Legion: Précis
- The Eve of RUMOKO (series: My Name Is Legion)
- 'Kjwalll'kje'k'koothaïilll'kje'k (series: My Name Is Legion)
- Home Is the Hangman (series: My Name Is Legion)
- Stand Pat, Ruby Stone
- Go Starless in the Night
- Halfjack
- The Last Defender of Camelot
- Fire and/or Ice
- Exeunt Omnes
- A Very Good Year...
- The Places of Aache (series: Dilvish 5 of 11)
- A City Divided (series: Dilvish 6 of 11)
- The White Beast (series: Dilvish 7 of 11)
- Tower of Ice (series: Dilvish 8 of 11)
- The George Business
- The Naked Matador
- Walpurgisnacht
- The Last of the Wild Ones (series: Jenny/Murdock)
- The Horses of Lir
- Recital
- And I Only Am Escaped to Tell Thee
- Shadowjack (series: Shadowjack)
- Shadowjack: Character Outline (series: Shadowjack)
- Unicorn Variation
Articles
- Some Science Fiction Parameters: A Biased View
- Black Is the Color and None Is the Number
- The Parts That Are Only Glimpsed: Three Reflexes
- Future Crime
- A Number of Princes in Amber
- Balance Art Commerce
- Amber and the Amberites
- "... And Call Me Roger": The Literary Life of Roger Zelazny, Part 4
Poetry
- Diadoumenos of Polycletus
- Come, Let Us Pace the Sky-Aspiring Wave
- On the Death of a Manned Stellar Observation Satellite
- I, a Stranger and Revisited
- On the Return of the Mercurian Flamebird After Nesting
- There Is Always a Poem
- Doctrine of the Perfect Lie
- Pelias Waking, within the S.C.
- Torlin Dragonson
- Wriggle Under George Washington Bridge
- Lamentations of the Prematurely Old Satyr
- Moonsong
- Nuages
- Friend
- The Burning
- Dance
- Ye Who Would Wish to Live
- Shadows
- great cummings
- The Man Without a Shadow
- When Pussywillows Last in the Catyard Bloomed
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Roger Zelazny
Roger Zelazny (1937–1995) was an American writer of fantasy and science fiction short stories and novels. He won the Nebula award three times and the Hugo award six times, including two Hugos for novels This Immortal (1965) and the novel Lord of Light (1967).
Zelazny was born in Ohio, the only child of Polish immigrant Joseph Zelazny and Irish-American Josephine Sweet. In high school, Roger Zelazny was the editor of the school newspaper and joined the Creative Writing Club. He was accepted to Columbia University in New York to study English and specialized in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, graduating with an M.A. in 1962.
The Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny
"These six hardcover volumes contain all of Roger Zelazny's short fiction and poetry that we could find, however obscurely published, along with a number of unpublished works retrieved from Zelazny's archived papers. We also included shorter early versions of several novels, two novel excerpts and a few of Zelazny's articles on topics of interest to him."
The Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny consists of six books. The current recommended reading order for the series is provided below.
