Obviously not all writers have similar strengths. A hallmark of those who excel in short fiction rather than at novel length is often proficiency at writing individual scenes moreso than in creating a long, complex, and complete plot. Roger Zelazny was a classic example of this. There has never been any science fiction writer who was a better stylist or who was better at writing individual scenes. His language, mood, and poetry made each of his scenes a perfect little gem. His short fiction tended to be aggregates of such scenes, and they generally ranged from the very good to breathtakingly exquisite.

However, Zelazny’s novels rarely hung together well. I think that was part of the reason his reputation suffered a bit post-1970. Most readers accepted his early novels as collections of scenes because Zelazny was new and fresh, and his strengths were so superior to anybody else writing at the time. Neither This Immortal nor Lord of Light were well-plotted novels, with the former novel reaching a conclusion that was a textbook example of deus ex machina. But nobody cared, including me, because both books featured so much wonderful writing, with each scene as superb as one of Zelazny’s short stories.

But in the 1970s, critics were rarely as kind to Zelazny, emphasizing the weaknesses in his novels while almost ignoring their many strengths. If you go back and reread the Amber series, or Eye of Cat or Jack of Shadows, you’ll realize that the individual scenes generally still show Zelazny in top form. What suffered was the specific aspects of the novels per se. Zelazny was no worse or no lazier in the 1970s than he had been earlier. He just never learned to plot a novel, and his critics became less and less forgiving as his career progressed.

As evidence that Zelazny was no worse a writer later in his career than he had been earlier, consider some of his later award-winning short fiction. Home is the Hangman. Unicorn Variation. 24 Views of Mt. Fuji, by Hokusai. Permafrost. All these stories compare very favorably with Zelazny’s earlier short fiction, and their reputations are all quite good because they represented the author at what was always his strength. Individual scenes. Short fiction.

I suggest you go back and reread some of Zelazny's later novels keeping this in mind, and hopefully you’ll appreciate some of them more than you might have done previously. They did not represent an author who was over the hill, but an author who was always the finest creator of individual scenes that science fiction has ever seen. He just never learned to be an outstanding novelist.

By the way, there are other contemporary f&sf writers who are better at short fiction than at plotting novels, and I’ll discuss two of them in a later installment of this blog.