Zelazny

“A Rose for Ecclesiastes” was my introduction to Roger Zelazny. It was one of the many great stories in the excellent Science Fiction Hall of Fame collection I received for Christmas a while back.  I have since read (and generally purchased) almost everything he wrote, moving through “Nine Princes in Amber” through the rest of that series (and its sequels), on to  “Creatures of Light and Darkness,” “Isle of the Dead,” and “Lord of Light,” continuing through “The Doors of his Face The Lamps of His Mouth” and other stories in that and other collections. 

There usually isn’t Crisis-fodder anywhere, now that I think of it: While his protagonists may be in serious trouble, the universe around them usually isn’t changing all that much.  There are exceptions: Mahasamatman’s attempts to overthrow Heaven naturally are, uh, disruptive, although one could argue that he is instigating Awakenings. Corwin ends up attacking Amber, the Center of All, and ends up with the fate of all existence in the balance. Usually, though, the main character is in a relatively stable locale, even if it is in the aftermath of a recognizable Crisis (“This Immortal” refers to the Three Days which destroyed civilization on Earth). 

Zelazny was born in 1937, an Artist, and his characters’ worldviews often reflect that place in history. “Ecclesiastes,” in particular, is narrated by an explorer on Mars - not the usual sort, though, not whom you might expect to be sent to Mars on the first or even tenth exploratory journey. While Gallinger’s main talent is in linguistics, his fame is as a poet. He goes to Mars, which is inhabited by a race more ancient than humanity, in order to learn their tongue and their poetry. He succeeds, although that’s not really what the story is about...

My particular interest is a description of Gallinger’s relationship with his father. A fire-and-brimstone preacher,  he encouraged Gallinger’s language talents as a way to understand the Word “like in the original” (e.g. Hebrew and Aramaic). On the face of it, that seems a little unlikely, at least if you expect that the Poet must be an Artist (Adaptive) and the Preacher a Prophet (Idealist).  Since the order of generations is Artist then Prophet, it follows that a Prophet father could only have an Artist son in his 50s or 60s. (The youngest Prophet in 1937, for example, would have been born in 1882 and turning 55 years old.) It’s worth considering, also, that Reactives tend to be more conservative, as they react to the tumult of the Awakening by seeking out stability. The father’s “fundamentalist vigor” could be traced to that source instead.