That was all. It was a difficult piece of climbing. He was right behind me one second, was gone to the next. There was no body to recover. He had taken the long drop. The soundless blue was all around him and the great grey beneath. Then we were six. We shuddered and I suppose we all prayed in our own ways.
In the morning, one more crew member is gone:
“So we were five—Doc and Kelly and Henry and Mallardi and me—and that day we hit a hundred and eight thousand and felt very alone.” (It suggests Kafka’s parable “Fellowship”: “We are five friends . . . and cannot be tolerated with this sixth one.”) Once more the hallucination of the woman joins them. There is a conversation in which she seems strangely present and absent at the same time. “Why do you hate us?” Jack Summer asks.
“No hate, sir,” she said.
“What then?”
“I protect.”
“What? What is it that you protect?”
“The dying, that she may live.”
“What? Who is dying? How?”
But her words went away somewhere, and I did not hear them. Then she went away too and there was nothing left but sleep for the rest of the night.
They climb for another week.
“I’m not worried about making it to the top,” Henry says. “The clouds are like little wisps of cotton down there.”
The purgatorial allegory results with approach of the uppermost level of the lustful—only the woman involved is as cold and stony as Leota Mathild Mason in cold-sleep in “The Graveyard Heart.”
What the text recalls even more than the ascent of Purgatory is Sigfried breaking through the circle of fire surrounding Brunhilde, with the flames themselves taking on the aspect of demons and dragons.
I left Henry far below me. The creature was a moving light in the sky. I made two hundred feet in a hurry, and when I looked up again. I saw the creature had grown two more heads. Lightnings flashed from its nostrils, and its tail whipped around the mountain. I made an another hundred feet, and I could see Mallardi clearly by then, climbing steadily, outlined against the brilliance. I swung my pick, gasping, and I fought the mountain, following the trail he had cut. I began to gain on him because he was still pounding out his way and I didn’t have that problem yet. Then I heard him talking:
“Not yet, big fella, not yet,” he was saying, from behind a wall of static. “Here’s a ledge . . . ”
I looked up, and he vanished.
The seventh and final section—the entrance into the cave at the mountain top—replays the entrance into the cold-sleep bunker at the end of “The Graveyard Heart” without the Grand Guignol of the stake through the heart/womb. The disease Linda’s husband—Carl—is trying to help her survive until it is cured is something called Dawson’s Plague.
A death . . .
A life . . .
A lot of technological hugger-mugger . . .
At the top of a mountain whose peak is forty-two miles high, above the atmosphere itself. Clearly Zelazny is aware of the Puragotrial allegory. (“Tell me what it was like to climb a mountain like this one. Why?”
(“There is a certain madness involved,” I said, “a certain envy of great and powerful natural forces, that some men have. Each mountain is a deity you know. Each mountain is an immortal power. If you make sacrifice upon its slopes, a mountain may grant you a certain grace, and for a time, you will share its power.”)
I think the key to why “Damnation Alley” is less effective than it might be is in Zelazny’s own note: “I wanted to do a straight, style-be-damned action story with the pieces fall[ing] wherever.” Well, when the style is let go, the truth is there’s not that much left to a Zelazny tale—though the results are still interesting.
Zelazny’s own comments on the movie is instructive: there were two scripts, the first of which he was shown, and which was much better than the second which they actually used. It recalls Lessing’s characterization of genius: the ability “to put talent wholly into the service of an idea,” which is what the flexibility of voice that Zelazny’s strives for in his various styles accomplishes in the passages where the style is most in evidence:
The stories, such as the ones here, where the full toolbox is used most artfully.
And that is why one should continue to read him.
—Friday, February 8, 2018,
Philadephia, PA.
Introduction
by Theodore Sturgeon
There has been nothing like Zelazny in the science fiction field since—
Thus began the first draft of this introduction and there it stayed for about forty-eight hours while I maundered and chuntered on ways to finish that sentence with justice and precision. The only possible way to do it is to knock off the last word. And even then it misses the truth, for the term “science fiction” gives the comment a kind of club membership which trims verity. So much which is published as science fiction is nothing of the kind. And more and more, science fiction is produced and not called science fiction (and paid for heartily—i.e. On the Beach, Dr. Strangelove, Seven Days in May, 1984, etc., etc., et al.—which makes the pro science fiction writers candidates for persecution mania). Suffice it for now to say that you’ll be hard put to it to find a writer like Zelazny anywhere.
Genuine prose-poets we have seen, but quite often they fail when the measures of pace and structure are applied. And we have certainly had truly great storytellers, whose narrative architecture is solidly based, soundly built, and well-braced clear to tower-tip; but more often than not, this is done completely with a homogenized, nuts-and-bolts kind of prose. And there has been a regrettably small handful of what I call “people experts”—those especially gifted to create memorable characters, something more than real ones well-photographed . . . living ones who change, as all living things change, not only during the reading, but in the memory as the reader himself lives and changes and becomes capable of bringing more of himself to that which the writer has brought him. But there again, “people experts” have a tendency to turn their rare gift into a preoccupation (and create small ardent cliques who tend to the same thing) and skimp on matters of structure and content. An apt analogy would be a play superbly cast and skillfully mounted, for which somebody had forgotten to supply a script.
And if you think I am about to say that Zelazny delivers all these treasures and avoids all these oversights, that he has full measures of substance and structure, means and ends, texture, cadence and pace, you are absolutely right.
Three factors in Zelazny’s work call for isolation and examination; and the very cold-bloodedness of such a declamation demands amendment. Let me revise it to two and a pointing finger, a vague and inarticulate wave toward something Out (or Up, or In) There which can be analyzed about as effectively as the internal effect of watching the color-shift on the skin of a bubble or that silent explosion somewhere inside the midriff which is one of the recognitions of love.
First, Zelazny’s stories are fabulous. I use this word in a special and absolutely accurate sense. Aesop did not, and did not intend to, convey a factual account of an improbably vegetarian fox equipped with speech and with human value judgments concerning a bunch of unreachable grapes. He was saying something else and something larger than what he said. And it has come to me over the years that the greatness of literature and the importance of literary entities (Captain Ahab, Billy Budd, Hamlet, Job, Uriah Heep) really lies in this fabulous quality. One may ponderously call them Jungian archetypes, but one recognizes them, and/or their situational predicaments, in one’s own daily contacts with this landlord, that employer, and one’s dearly beloved. A fable says more than it says, is