both cyclical and eternally insecure; and Amber itself is dominated
by a cabal of squabbling siblings whose quasi-Olympian feudings generate
vast cat's-cradles and imperfect nestings of Story, out of which the
fabric of lesser realities takes its shape. The Amber books constitute
RZ's most substantial edifice, though not his finest work, which is
sf. Other fantasies have been lesser.

RZ's first published story was "Passion Play" for AMZ in 1962, and for
several years he was prolific in shorter forms, for a time using the
pseudonym Harrison Denmark when stories piled up in AMZ and Fantastic,
and doing his finest work at the novelette/novella length; he assembled
the best of this early work as Four for Tomorrow (coll 1967; vt A Rose
for Ecclesiastes 1969 UK) and The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His
Mouth, and Other Stories (coll 1971). The magazine titles of his first
2 books were as well known as their book titles, and the awards given
them were attached to the magazine titles. THIS IMMORTAL (1965 FSF as
". . . And Call me Conrad"; exp 1966) won the 1966 HUGO for Best Novel;
THE DREAM MASTER (1965 AMZ as "He Who Shapes"; exp 1966) -- the magazine
version was eventually released as He Who Shapes (1989 dos) -- won the
1966 NEBULA for Best Novella; and in the same year The Doors of His
Face, the Lamps of His Mouth (1965 FSF; 1991 chap) won a Nebula for
Best Novelette. Taken together, the 3 tales make up a portrait of RZ's
central worlds, themes and protagonist, a portrait which would be repeated,
with sometimes lessened force, for decades. The VENUS on which "Doors"
is set, like most of RZ's worlds to come, is fantastical, densely described,
almost entirely "unscientific"; the plot intoxicatingly dashes together
myth and literary assonances -- in this case Herman MELVILLE's Moby-Dick
(1851) -- and sex. THIS IMMORTAL takes place in a baroquely described
post-HOLOCAUST Earth which has become a kind of theme-park for the ALIEN
Vegans; in this shadowy realm of belatedness and human angst, the immortal
Conrad Nomikos serves ostensibly as Arts Commissioner but turns out
to be in a far more telling sense the curator of the human enterprise,
for, despite the US thriller idioms he uses in his personal speech,
he closely resembles Herakles -- whose Labours the plot of the novel
covertly replicates -- but is certainly both the Hero of a Thousand
Faces and the Trickster who mocks the high road of myth, redeemer and
road-runner both. Under various names, this basic figure crops up in
most of RZ's later books: wisecracking, melancholic, romantic, sentimental,
lonely, metamorphosing into higher states whenever necessary to cope
with the plot, and in almost every sense an astonishingly sophisticated
wish-fulfilment.

In THE DREAM MASTER -- for one of the few times in his career -- RZ
presented the counter-myth, the story of the metamorphosis which fails,
the transcendence which collapses back into the mortal world. In THIS
IMMORTAL, RS had already evinced a tendency to side, perhaps a little
too openly, with complexly gifted, vain, dominating, immortal protagonists,
and, as THE DREAM MASTER begins, his treatment of psychiatrist Charles
Render seems no different. Render is eminent in the new field of neuroparticipant psychiatry, in which the healer actually enters the mindspace of his
t psychiatry, in which the healer actually enters the mindspace of his