What Makes This Book So Great by Walton Jo

Author:Walton, Jo [Walton, Jo]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates
Published: 2014-01-21T00:00:00+00:00

AUGUST 27, 2009

67. Beautiful, poetic and experimental: Roger Zelazny’s Doorways in the Sand

Roger Zelazny was a demented genius who could squeeze words until they sang. I first read Doorways in the Sand (1976) when I was thirteen years old. It blew my head off. I’ve read it a couple of times since then, but it isn’t in my frequent rotation, like Isle of the Dead (1969) and This Immortal (1966). Like those books, it has a typical Zelazny first-person smart-ass protagonist, like them it has aliens and shiny SFnal ideas, but unlike them it is written in an experimental way, where almost every chapter starts in the middle and then goes back to get you up to speed just in time for a new chapter and a new reverse-cliffhanger lurch. I didn’t like this when I was thirteen, though I thought it was clever, and I don’t like it now. It seems like grandstanding, and it gets in the way of my enjoyment of the story. It isn’t possible to read the book without spending a lot of time thinking, “Huh? How did that happen?” and waiting to find out. It makes it easy to identify with a protagonist who doesn’t know what’s going on either, but it’s irritating. However, the Zelazny I really like is getting too familiar for me to read, so it’s time to turn to the less favourite and therefore still readable.

The too-clever story shaping aside, there’s a lot here to like. There’s the way Zelazny invented this awesome system of education whereby you can take courses in whatever you like, and learn about absolutely everything without ever graduating and getting a degree. He explains it was invented by a Harvard professor called Eliot, in typical science fiction as-you-know-Bob explanation. I was astounded when I found out (too late) that it was real. Fred Cassidy has been a full-time student for thirteen years without graduating. He has a hobby of climbing on buildings, which he dignifies with the name acrophilia. He knows quite a lot about a vast range of subjects. By the terms of his uncle’s will, Fred gets a comfortable monthly income until he graduates, so Fred has bent the rules and stayed in school. Meanwhile, we’ve discovered aliens and are part of an alien cultural exchange ring—the Mona Lisa and the Crown Jewels have left Earth in exchange for a very odd machine that reverses stereoisomers and the mysterious Star Stone. The Star Stone goes missing and lots of people and aliens seem to think Fred’s got it. Fred thinks he hasn’t.

Things get weird from there on, but Fred wisecracks his way unflappably through the plot from crisis to crisis, climbing on things from time to time for recreation or escape. It’s a future without technology or social mores having changed much from the mid-seventies when this was written but apart from the way everyone (even the aliens) smokes cigarettes all the time, you almost don’t notice. There’s an alien that disguises itself as a wombat, and another that looks like a Venus flytrap, after all.

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