The Last Defender of Camelot

A collection of short stories.

• Introduction
• Passion Play (1962)
• Horseman! (1962)
• The Stainless Steel Leech (1963)
• A Thing of Terrible Beauty (1963)
• He Who Shapes (1965)
• Comes Now the Power (1966)
• Auto-Da-Fe (1967)
• Damnation Alley (1967)
• For a Breath I Tarry (1966)
• The Engine at Heartspring's Center (1974)
• The Game of Blood and Dust (1975)
• No Award (1977)
• Is There a Demon Lover in the House? (1977)
• The Last Defender of Camelot (1979)
• Stand Pat, Ruby Stone (1978)
• Halfjack (1979)
• Exeunt Omnes (1980)
  
• Fire and/or Ice (1980)
  
• Shadowjack (1978)
  
• A Very Good Year (1979)
  

Uncanny in the breadth and scope of his imagination, Roger Zelazny also creates superbly memorable characters to propel his stories. Now, in The Last Defender of Camelot, he has selected 16 of his finest works, written a brief introduction to each, and combined them into one exciting volume.

The Stainless Steel Leech tells the beautifully crafted, macabre tale of a werebot who hunts and feeds in a world of robots. Unique among 'bots in being free master of his own movements, but slave ot the endless search for each day's energy, he has but one friend; the lone, remaining vampire who long ago tasted the last blood on the planet and now lives in the dim world of the undead, nourished only by memories.

For a Breath I Tarry is the story of Frost, the machine that controls the northern hemisphere. For ten thousand years, Frost has been aware of every snowflake that falls; yet he is flawed. During his creation a solar flare affected his circuitry, and Frost, unlike Beta who controls the southern hemisphere, has been afflicted with curiosity. He is a machine with a hobby: to know - and become - one of the long-lost inhabitants of earth: man.

Damnation Alley tells of a thoroughly unrepentent criminal's attempt to earn his pardon by driving across the perilous remains of a ruined continent to deliver serum to a plague-ridden Boston. Along the way he has to battle nature's forces gone wild, predatory mutations that overrun the wilderness, human forms that barely recognize their own kind - with a superhuman cunning as his final weapon.

Among the other incisive works are the stories of a psychiatrist whose method is the ultimate in dream therapy... a cyborg who finds love in a euthanasia colony... a strategy game between aliens that reshapes history to their own ends... and more, all by an award-winning master in the field.