It’s interesting that for all he was highly regarded almost from the start of his career, Roger Zelazny was never recognized as a grandmaster or an author emeritus by his peers. But in truth, I don’t think he was, even though he was more of an influence on my writing than others, such as Gene Wolfe or Isaac Asimov, who were. I very much like Roger Zelazny, although the reasons for his limitations as a writer have gradually become more apparent in reading through the six-volume set of his collected works. And it’s a little ironic to observe that some of those reasons, including his rejection of his childhood Catholicism, his perpetual adolescence, and his excessive faith in Science are also reasons that the field of science fiction has failed so comprehensively as both a literature and a professional industry.

In this selection from an old essay originally published in 1975, and reprinted in The Collected Stories Volume 4: Last Exit to Babylon, it becomes evident that Zelazny was no visionary, or even capable of anticipating the obvious catastrophe that science fiction was heading toward then and in which it presently finds itself.

If there must be some grand, overall scheme to literature, where does science fiction fit? I am leery of that great classifier Aristotle in one respect that bears on the issue. The Hellenic world did not view the passage of time as we do. History was considered in an episodic sense, as the struggles of an unchanging mankind against a relentless and unchanging fate. The slow process of organic evolution had not yet been detected, and the grandest model for a world view was the seeming changeless patternings of the stars. It took the same processes that set the stage for science fiction—eighteenth-century rationalism and nineteenth-century science—to provide for the first time in the history of the world a sense of historical direction, of time as a developmental, nonrepetitive sequence.

This particular world view became a part of science fiction in a far more explicit fashion than in any other body of storytelling, as it provided the basis for its favorite exercise: extrapolation. I feel that because of this, science fiction is the form of literature least affected by Aristotle’s dicta with respect to the nature of the human condition, which he saw as immutable, and the nature of man’s fate, which he saw as inevitable.

Yet science fiction is concerned with the human condition and with man’s fate. It is the speculative nature of its concern that required the abandonment of the Aristotelian strictures involving the given imponderables. Its methods have included a retention of the higher modes of character, a historical, developmental time sense, assimilation of the tensions of a technological society and the production of a “sense of wonder” by exercises of imagination extending awareness into new realms—a sensation capable, at its best, of matching the power of that experience of recognition which Aristotle held to be the strongest effect of tragedy. It might even be argued that the sense of wonder represents a different order of recognition, but I see no reason to ply the possible metaphysics of it at this point.

Since respectability tends to promote a concern for one’s ancestors, we are fortunate to be in on things at the beginning today when one can still aim high and compose one’s features into an attitude of certainty while hoping for agreement. It occurs to me then that there is a relationship between the entire body of science fiction and that high literary form, the epic. Traditionally, the epic was regarded as representing the spirit of an entire people—the Iliad, the Mahābhārata, the Aeneid showing us the values, the concerns, the hoped-for destinies of the Greeks, the ancient Indians, the Romans. Science fiction is less provincial, for it really deals with humanity as such. I am not so temerarious as to suggest that any single work of science fiction has ever come near the epic level (though Olaf Stapledon probably came closest), but wish rather to observe that the impulse behind it is akin to that of the epic chronicler, and is reflected in the desire to deal with the future of humanity, describing in every way possible the spirit and destiny not of a single nation but of Man.

High literature, unfortunately, requires more than good intentions, and so I feel obliged to repeat my caveat to prevent my being misunderstood any more than is usually the case. In speaking of the epic, I am attempting to indicate a similarity in spirit and substance between science fiction as a whole and some of the classical features of the epic form. I am not maintaining that it has been achieved in any particular case or even by the entire field viewed as a single entity. It may have; it may not. I stand too near to see that clearly. I suggest only that science fiction is animated in a similar fashion, occasionally possesses something like a Homeric afflatus and that its general aims are of the same order, producing a greater kinship here than with the realistic novel beside which it was born and bred. The source of this particular vitality may well be the fact that, like its subject, it keeps growing but remains unfinished.

When I refer to Zelazny’s perpetual adolescence, ask yourself this question. In all his works, what percentage of his characters are parents? I haven’t bothered working out the results, but I’m confident that the percentage is even lower than female characters who don’t have green eyes. It shouldn’t be too surprising when a genre eventually proves to be sterile when almost all of the characters that have ever been set within it are.

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