Donnerjack | |||||||||
Roger Zelazny and Jane Lindskold | |||||||||
Avon Books, 503 pages | |||||||||
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A review by Neil Walsh
Well I'm happy to say that Donnerjack was not a disappointment.
Zelazny himself had written a few hundred pages of this work before he
passed away, and he left behind him a detailed outline for the rest of it.
Jane Lindskold was Zelazny's companion and biographer. Although she
and Zelazny had spent a great deal of time discussing Donnerjack,
she did some additional homework before tackling the project of completing the book.
Lindskold went back to Zelazny's previous novels, studied his style,
his sentence structure, his word usage patterns. All in an effort to
be as true as possible to Zelazny's own voice. I doubt that anyone
was expecting perfection, but I think Lindskold succeeded admirably
in what must have been a difficult challenge.
The story, as Zelazny fans might expect, is a weird mix of myth and
machine, science fiction and fantasy. The world of the future has been
split in two: Verité, or the "real world"; and Virtù,
the "virtual reality" of the worldwide computer network that has taken
on a life of its own. Or is Virtù actually the collective
unconscious of humanity, which has attained a certain level of
objective reality through the artificially created, but now
self-directed, virtual reality?
There are many parallels to many different myths and faerie tales.
Everything from making a deal with Death to the obvious parallel of
the wrestling match between Herakles and Antaeus. The story is fraught
with gods and godlings, heroes and heroines, Death personified, ghosts
and robots, flying bulls, and a whole host of less probable creatures --
not to mention a whole lot of entirely improbably technology. Somehow,
though, as only Zelazny (or a Zelazny-Lindskold collaboration) could hope
to achieve, it all ties together sufficiently by the end so that the
reader is able to look back and say, "OK, that was fun."
And now I'm looking forward eagerly to Lord Demon, the other novel
Zelazny left unfinished. Apparently it is to be published by Avon in 1999.
Neil Walsh is the Reviews Editor for the SF Site. He lives in contentment, surrounded by books, in Ottawa, Canada. |
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