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Donnerjack
Roger Zelazny and Jane Lindskold
Avon Books, 503 pages

A review by Neil Walsh

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I've been a fan of Zelazny's work for many years. So it was with great anticipation and some trepidation that I first heard the news of Donnerjack's publication, it being one of the two novels he had been working on at the time of his death two years ago. The cause of my excitement is obvious: another book by Zelazny! The cause of my fear was that another author had completed the work Zelazny had begun: would it hold together and be another Zelazny gem, or would it fall flat or be twisted into something other?

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.

Copyright © 1997 by Neil Walsh

Neil Walsh is the Reviews Editor for the SF Site. He lives in contentment, surrounded by books, in Ottawa, Canada.

Donnerjack
Roger Zelazny and Jane Lindskold
During his career, Roger Zelazny won 6 Hugos and 3 Nebulas as well as many other major awards in the SF field. Several of his novels and short stories are considered landmarks, including Lord of Light, Creatures of Light and Darkness, "Home is the Hangman," and "A Rose for Ecclesiastes." The 10 volume Chronicles of Amber is regarded as a classic fantasy series. For the last ten years of his life (he died in 1995), Zelazny lived in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Jane Lindskold lived with him during the final year of his life. She has published a number of novels from Avon including The Pipes Of Orpheus, Smoke And Mirrors and When The Gods Are Silent.

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