Based on what I've read, Roger Zelazny wrote this book for his own pleasure, and later Samuel R. Delany persuaded him to publish it. It starts as if it's going to be "Lord of Light II," based on Egyptian mythology instead of Hindu, but it quickly becomes obvious that it's not.

For one thing, Zelazny creates his own mythological characters to exist alongside Osiris, Set and Anubis, such as the Steel General who has fought throughout history on the side of the oppressed. He is periodically destroyed by his enemies, but he is always rebuilt by people who need him. Sometimes he's a robot wearing a ring of flesh, sometimes he's a man wearing a ring of iron. There is also Typhon, a god who appears as a shadow of a horse and who may be a black hole.

There is also quite a bit of dry humor, and a chapter in verse.

It's not Zelazny's best work, but it's a fascinating and unpredictable ride. It's interesting to see how much wilder he was when he thought nobody was looking (though some of his later work also goes in this direction – age can make you more fearless).

Oh, and it includes the Agnostic's Prayer:

"Insofar as I may be heard by anything, which may or may not care what I say, I ask, if it matters, that you be forgiven for anything you may have done or failed to do which requires forgiveness. Conversely, if not forgiveness but something else may be required to insure any possible benefit for which you may be eligible after the destruction of your body, I ask that this, whatever it may be, be granted or withheld, as the case may be, in such a manner as to insure your receiving said benefit. I ask this in my capacity as your elected intermediary between yourself and that which may not be yourself, but which may have an interest in the matter of your receiving as much as it is possible for you to receive of this thing, and which may in some way be influenced by this ceremony. Amen."

A few years ago, as I talked about here, I was planning to write a chapter set entirely in a bar. I looked at plays set in a bar, but I found that what I was really looking for was The Time of Your Life by William Saroyan, which I'd seen years earlier and which had drilled its way into my brain. The chapter ended up being "The Dream, Now."

A morning and a night in a bar in San Francisco in 1939. The Depression is everywhere, and war is about to start. Various characters (a cynical man with money, a man hoping for another chance with the woman he loves, a hooker with stories about a successful history in burlesque, a comedian and dancer with jokes nobody laughs at, and others) "come and go and say what they must say." Sometimes they hardly interact at all, each is so wrapped up in his or her own fantasies or hopes or dreams. But at times they connect.

An earnest young man (in a bow tie) named Dudley R. Bostwick pines for a woman named Elsie Mandelspiegel, and this seems like a running joke until Elsie finally arrives and they reunion is so moving that even Nick the bartender chokes up.

Reading and seeing this again recently (and, miracle of miracles, the stage production I saw a million years ago is available on DVD), I made the connection with why I like it so much.

A bunch of characters and storylines, all advancing and intertwining, stories about realists and dreamers, it's like a Robert Altman movie. Or, really, Robert Altman made a lot of movies that were like The Time of Your Life.

I'm quite pleased with the chapter, by the way. It's in the middle of the novel U-town, but I think it can be read by itself.

Many years ago I was asked to write a series of short reviews of science fiction novels that I thought were particularly deserving of praise. The first one I chose to write about was Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany, even though it was not in print at that time.

This is the review I wrote:

Dhalgren By Samuel R. Delany (1973, 879 Pages)

When this novel came out, I had several friends who were real science fiction fans. They were in science fiction clubs, put out APAs, and went to conventions (all things I didn't do, though I did read a lot of science fiction). From what those friends told me, this book (coming after some very popular short stories and the novel Nova, which they all loved) was quite controversial when it came out. They all read it (or at least started it, some quit half way through), but it was not popular.

Too long. Too experimental. Maybe even too downbeat. Science fiction closer to William S. Burroughs than Edgar Rice Burroughs, and the science fiction fans that I knew back then were not reading Naked Lunch or Nova Express, I can tell you. Or Ulysses or Finnegans Wake for that matter (Delany deliberately evokes Joyce here, as he did in other works from this period). Nor were they reading Gravity's Rainbow, which was also published in 1973. Delany's novel is more similar to Pynchon's than it is to any other "science fiction novel" published that year.

In a year that might or might not be 1975, a loner comes to a city called Bellona. Some disaster has happened there, cutting it off from the rest of the United States. The outside world has mostly forgotten about Bellona, out of sight and out of mind. There are only a relatively few people left living there (many were killed in the unspecified disaster, many of the survivors moved away). There's no gasoline, only sporadic electric power, no official law or government. The sky is covered in clouds of smoke that hide the sky (and, in the one moment there is a break in the smoke cover, two moons are visible).

The loner has no name. This could be a cliche, but Delany carries it off by making him an individual from the beginning, (with almost all of his memories, he just can't remember his name) and by focusing most of his attention on what he's seeing, not on him. Not having a name only bothers him from time to time. People start calling him Kid (spelled Kidd in the first half of the book, Kid in the second half). He finds a notebook (many of its pages already written on) and uses the blank pages to write poems. Eventually he loses track of which pages are his writing, since all of them seem to relate to his experiences.

There are cities in literature which function almost as characters as well as settings. Dublin in Joyce's Ulysses is one type of example, Personville/Poisonville in Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest is another. Bellona (the city is mentioned in other of Delany's works from this period as well) is really part of the fabric of the book. There are a lot of people who stayed there after the disaster, either gamely pretending things were still more or less normal, or using the complete freedom to live in some way they couldn't otherwise. And some people (like Kidd, it seems) have come there because of what's happened. It's a way for them to reinvent themselves, either for a while, until they feel like returning to their real lives, or because they just don't fit in anywhere else.

Later, I wrote more about Dhalgren:

While I am always willing to hold unpopular opinions (that Casino Royale [1967 -- not the Daniel Craig one] is a great movie, that the supreme achievement in music since the year 1900 is the organ break from Del Shannon's "Runaway," that radio was not really improved by adding pictures to it, etc.) it is always gratifying to find out that at least some of those opinions are shared by others.

I've been raving about Dhalgren since it was published. I'm perfectly willing to continue to do so without any help or encouragement from anybody else. Still, it was a pleasant surprise to come upon The Ash of Stars, the first book of critical essays about Delany's writing that I've seen. Of course, I immediately read the two essays about Dhalgren.

In reading these essays I am struck by two things. One is the number of references (mostly deliberate) in my book to Dhalgren (some of them have been there for so long that I forgot where they came from). The other is the extent to which I am, in doing this, following Delany's lead, since Dhalgren is full of references to other works (and to various mythologies and even some real people), including the references to James Joyce (and, of course, Ulysses is full of these types of references as well).

There turns out to be a bit of serendipity to all this referencing, by the way. "Bellona" in Dhalgren is a city on Earth (in his book Triton it is a city on Mars). I have used the name for a country on Earth (we'll pay a visit there eventually), where there is a war going on, a war which some of my characters follow and others try to ignore. It turns out that, according to one of these essays, the name Bellona is from Roman mythology. She was the sister of Mars, and was the goddess of war.

And was mentioned in Finnegan's Wake. Damn.

Anyway, if what I am attempting here is simply an accurate representation of the inside of my own brain, it becomes increasingly obvious that the brain in question has never been exactly the same since reading Dhalgren.

The series "The Ten Pillars of Modern Literature" originally appeared in the novel U-town. It will be re-posted here on an irregular basis.