This Immortal
by Roger Zelazny
Summary
Conrad Nomikos is Commissioner of Arts, Monuments and Archives on an Earth that most of the human race has abandoned. A nuclear war left large areas radioactive and full of mutations, the survivors emigrated to Vega as a permanently second class labour force, and the planet itself has been sold, more or less, to the blue skinned Vegans, who visit it as a heritage site.
Conrad is very old, possibly immortal, certainly a mutant, with a withered leg and a patch of hair the wrong colour, and he has spent several lifetimes under different names, including a period leading a terrorist campaign against the Vegan presence that he does not advertise.
He is assigned to escort Cort Myshtigo, a Vegan journalist, on a tour of Earth's ruins: Egypt, Greece, Haiti. Everyone assumes Myshtigo is really valuing the property for redevelopment, and several members of the party intend to kill him. The tour proceeds through radiation zones full of things out of Greek myth that turn out to be mutations, or possibly not, and Conrad fights a boadile, a golem and his own history.
Zelazny writes it as myth in a wisecracking modern voice, and it is short, strange and extremely quotable.
The tone is the attraction. Conrad narrates like a man who has outlived every reason to be impressed by anything, and the mixture of Greek mythology, radioactive ruin and deadpan wisecrack is entirely Zelazny's own.
Around one hundred and seventy pages, brisk, allusive and occasionally too compressed to follow on a first pass.
Best for readers who want to see what Zelazny could do at novel length before Lord of Light, and a very odd companion piece to the enormous book it tied with.
Historical Context & Significance
This Immortal shared the 1966 Hugo Award for Best Novel with Frank Herbert's Dune, the first tie in the category and one of only three.
It was Roger Zelazny's first novel and had a complicated text. It appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in October and November 1965 as And Call Me Conrad, abridged by the editor to about forty seven thousand words. Ace restored most of the cuts and retitled it for paperback, bringing it past fifty eight thousand, and Zelazny only discovered in the 1980s, when a book club edition appeared, that some cut material had never been put back.
Zelazny was central to the American New Wave, won six Hugo Awards and three Nebulas across his career, and is most widely read for the ten volume Chronicles of Amber. He died in 1995 at fifty eight.