This Immortal

Excellent book, mystical in a practical way. Does need some classical education to fully appreciate. Echoes of mythical tales, and story telling.

Fans of Bullfinch's Mythology will love this one! And Zelazny lovers will not be disappointed either. On to the next!

The other one is Doorways In The Sand. This Immortal is a brilliant combination of fantasy/hard science fiction that sets a high bar for the rest of the writers of fantasy particularly. Nearly all "fantasy" fiction is so simplistically and repetitiously formulaic that it rapidly causes fatal levels of ennui in the poor reader. Unfortunately, the many other writers who turn out this drivel, have obviously never read This Immortal. The way Zelazny weaves elements of Greek legends with a rather interesting hero's journey, while building a future Earth in rebellion, is compelling. Zelazney also keeps you on the edge of your chair, with constant new surprises, both in the multiple interwoven story lines, but also in the evolution and interaction of the many characters. An amazing tour de force by a master writer. If you want to learn to write great fantasy/science fiction, study this novel, as each time you read it, it will reveal to you new levels of writing technique brilliance. Don't miss Doorways In The Sand, another unique story by Zelazney, from which aspiring writers can learn many lessons on how to write brilliant novels.

I first read this book in the late 60s and this was about my dozenth re-read. I found it new and refreshing nevertheless.The story is classic Zelazny, a fictional autobiographic slice of the life of an intelligent but grumpy and deformed bureaucrat. The protagonist is a country boy from the hills who has grown up to be a functionary in a backwater agency on a future earth. His main purpose in life is to salvage what culture and history remains after civilization destroyed itself. He is called to entertain a nosy travel writer from a wealthy and successful planet which just happens to be the world which is buying up our radioactive jungle grown planet. Throw in a beautiful young wife, an assassin, a few legends from the dark centuries, a PG rated but decidedly odd interspecies triangular affair, an anthropologist turned cannibal, lots of mutants and a giant armor plated dog and its a great tale.Needless to say the ending has numerous twists.Edited to add that Zelazney was one of the most poetic of the old sci fi writers. His dialog meets and often exceeds expectations, even if the reader’s critical abilities were honed on Clarke, Asimov, Campbell, Heinlein, Smith, other greats of the previous generation. Every sentence has meaning, falling into place like tumblers on a well fitted combination lock. His writing has no fat; he crams into these few (184 in the hardbound edition) pages what many others would have taken forever to write.No I won't put in a spoiler. Read the damned book.

I enjoyed the mutated humans and beasts as well as the involvement in human affairs of the alien Vegans. The tour guide{the Immortal} is a very interesting and mysterious character that held my attention. On the negative side of the ledger, I must say that I was not emotionally involved with the cast or the story. This short novel never really captivated my interest or made an impact on me. I doubt if I'll be able to recall much of the plot in a few months.

And the pendulum swings. About every 10 years, I re-read Roger Zelazny's "This Immortal." The last time, I felt that it hadn't weathered the intervening decades since its publication (1965) very well. This time, I'm scratching my head wondering what I was thinking, and am revising my rating of the book to a Very Good 4 stars out of 5. This is quintessential Zelazny: man crossed with myth. There's definitely a lot of 1960s (and 1970s, surprisingly) metaphysical writing going on here. But, it works well with the story. In fact, the prose is practically poetic. It's very nicely described, thought-provoking, and both intellectually and emotionally satisfying. Also, according to the Wikipedia entry for the book, "it tied with Frank Herbert's Dune for the 1966 Hugo Award for Best Novel." I can definitely see why.A note about the Kindle edition: I bought this first Kindle version within a week of its first appearance. Unfortunately, there are a lot of OCR-type errors strewn throughout the book. This is a bit upsetting since the publisher is charging about $8 for a 50 year old book. For that kind of money, I'd expect someone to have actually proof-read the conversion. Oh, well. I assume later editions will correct this.

Zelazny does a great job of painting a post-apocalyptic world and telling an exciting story within it. The characters and situations felt real and the prose is so smooth.

There are many good authors these days with a nearly limitless abundance of good and enjoyable books to read. Zelazny is a cut above. So when you are ready for something with that little extra, choose him and prepare to think and see.

The story takes its time to get started but uses nationalist stereotypes from beginning to end. Female characters are there to be girlfriends, lovers and people who are hurt so the men can feel something. If you compare this to Dune which came out in 1965 as well. Even Dune doesn’t have so many female characters but those it has are three dimensional and have their own motives. The background story is interesting but let down by people being described only by where they come from as of it sums them up completely.

The book itself is great, but the editing of kindle file you are about to read must have beendone by some dodgy fly-by-night outfit who simply didn't care. There are noticeably many typos here, of the kind that could only result from plopping an old book on a scanner and running some character recognition software - with the only proof reading being entrusted to a skim-read by a tired intern.Zelazny is a classic of sci-fi. Do yourself a favour and buy a different copy.

La historia, como es natural, perfecta. Merecido premio Hugo en 1966 (empatado ni más ni menos que con Dune). ¿Esta edición electrónica? Una auténtica basura, llena de errores de transcripción. Casi vale la pena obtener el libro por canales "alternativos", seguro que el texto será más fiel al original que el de esta edición "legal".

This is not a proper book. They reprinted it from a low-quality scan of the 2000 edition, most probably downloaded from archive.org you can see how many letters have parts missing, which makes it very unpleasant to read. You can compare it with the scan from archive.org, every page is exactly the same, but of much poorer quality.

I love these yellow Gollancz Classic SF copies and this story was v v good though I reserve 5 stars for only the most astounding science fiction, but still a very enjoyable read.