Creatures of Light and Darkness

This book feels like something out of 1960/70s Marvel comics. Basically, its about "ancient Egyptian Gods," doing battle in a sci-fi future. These Gods are presumably not really mythological Gods, but humans who have evolved into something almost God-like: half man/half animal/half machine and who sort out the politics of who-rules-where-and-which-kingdom on an interplanetary scale. The writing is poetic and kind of Shakespearean and the Roger Zelazny weirdness is so much fun. Read this book to young kids too, sure they won't get some of it, but the ideas will excite their imagination. There is a character made of pure emptiness and void that takes the shape of a horse that can change in size; a woman who is transformed into a computational machine that only gives output to questions based on the amount of sexual pleasure that can be given to her and a Millenia-old war-torn General whose human body has been entirely replaced by metal parts. Like I said, this book is pure fun, psychedelic weirdness. In terms of character development, there really is not much. The Jackal-headed Anubis, ruler of the "House of Dead" and the bird-headed Orisis, ruler of the "House of Life," appear to be something of bad guys, but their background story is not fleshed out enough to really make them any more bad or evil than any of the other protagonists of the book. However, Orisis does seem like a bit of a jerk when he jumps up and down on his carpet: a rug woven out of the nervous system of a still living person. The "Prince With No Name," is closest we have to a the hero of the story, but there is not enough development of the character to really make him a heroic figure, or even a figure we can identify with. Having said that, I guess there never really is any real good guys and bad guys in war? My favourite scene in the book is where an unfortunate seer is disemboweled for the purposes of divination. The unfortunate seer has his own entrails read by another seer who chose him to be disemboweled out of pure resentment toward him. In a darkly humorous moment, the disemboweled seer does a much more accurate job of reading his own entrails than the intended seer. I have read Zelazny's "Lord of Light" which is considered by most to be a better book, and perhaps maybe, his best book, yet I personally found "Creatures" to be a far more entertaining read, although both books have very similar ideas.

I first read this in my twenties. I didn't understand it completely, but it's the book that introduced me to science fiction, from which I moved on to Robert Heinlein and other incredible stories. I decided to read it again, decades later, and I'm really glad I did.In essence, this is an epic account of a war waged between gods Anubis, Osiris, Set, and others. It's perhaps one of the most insane books I've ever read.; my mind at times reeling - what the hell does that mean and what drugs did Zelazny take when he conjured this up? Weaving the myriad worlds of his magnificent imagination with bits of humorous commentary on modern life, I laughed out loud more times than I can count. And in the end, this masterful author somehow tied all the crazy loose ends together.Creatures of Light and Darkness is wild, weird, and wonderful. It's a classic, and it's genius.

This isn't your every-day sci-fi/fantasy novel. Roger Zelazny was arguably the greatest fantasy/sf writer of his era, and this was his first published novel -- his "Masterpiece" in the archaic sense of "his first work as a professional." He wrote it while he was still working at the Social Security Administration, and it's a *wildly* experimental book. The superficial plot is one of assassination and revenge -- a dead man is reincarnated by one calling himself Anubis, for a mission of assassination -- but that's almost no more than a framework Zelazny uses to display the novel's various experiments.Different chapters are written in different narrative styles -- one chapter's a play, one's a lyric poem, one's a call-and-response poem. Some chapters mimic the style of the King James bible. Some chapters are hilarious; some are nonsensical and cryptic. Some are only a paragraph or two long. It's probably best known today for containing the "Possibly Proper Death Litany," popularly known as the "Agnostic's Prayer" ("Insofar as I may be heard by anything, which may or may not care what I say, I ask, if it matters . . ."), but that's just one wild verbal fling in a book of continuous bizarreries.If you're looking for something like Zelazny's  The Great Book of Amber: The Complete Amber Chronicles, 1-10 (Chronicles of Amber)  -- high-quality, well-executed, popular fiction -- this is *not* that: this is something closer to a verbal experiment than a popular novel, something Zelazny wrote to help himself find his voice as a writer by experimenting extravagantly with voice, narrative, genre, and form.If you're a fan of Zelazny's more esoteric, experimental works -- things like  A Night in the Lonesome October , say -- you owe it to yourself to read this, as it has some of his most interesting and bizarre visions, some of his wildest experiments with form and genre; conversely, though, if you haven't read much other Zelazny, this isn't the place to start. Pick up  Lord of Light  or  Isle of the Dead  instead.

I have been hitting the "I want this on kindle" button weekly for years!This is in many ways Zelazny's finest work, showcasing his unrivalled imagination and style. Some find those qualities challenging or daunting.All I can say is "De gustibus non est disputandem".I knocked off one star for some errors in digitization of the text. Misspellings, punctuation errors, and errors in typographic composition are annoying in a more prosaic work, but in a favorite loved as much for the authors style as for a highly imaginative story it can be truly jarring to be brought out of the experience by such.

I returned the book because the printing was poor quality with grey text (not black) and annoying to read.It appears that the book I received was print-on-demand. I bought a used copy of this book elsewhere that was not print-on-demand and the text is black and much more readable.

Llevaba años buscandolo en fisico. Buena historia

I disliked the paper. It is in the newsprint range and not likely to stand up for the time my previous copy did.It was delivered quickly and I'm always amazed at Amazon's service.Anyone who is a fan of fantasy science fiction must read this book and its familiar work The Lord of Light.

闇の館でアヌビスに復活させられた男が名前を取り戻す。オシリス、イシスといったエジプト神話の神々がでてくる。視点がちょくちょくの変わるのでわかりづらいけどおもしろい

Fabulous yarn, by a gifted storyteller. Incredible imagery by Zelazny.

I recommend this book. Three stars may not sound like a strong recommendation, but this book will be a four or five star book when read repeatedly. One author said that the first time he read this book he was perplexed, the second or third time he was in awe, and the fourth time he wept. I can totally get how this was possible.It is because it is initially so confusing and inaccessible that I'm giving it three stars, because many people will be put off by that. Also because it is so unlike conventional writing.To be fair, the author never intended it for publication, but wrote it for himself, as an exercise. Hence why the form is so experimental. In the author's own words he "threw everything at it", leaving us with perhaps the best example of the tropes that the 1960s New Wave movement of sci-fi presented: rich, humourous, surreal and dream-like prose; eccentric characters drawn up in profound or revolutionary struggles; a strong feeling that there is an undeveloped moral in the story, like a rough diamond, so that the resonance with the reader is more emotional than intellectual; a story that reads like one big acid-trip of an adventure.There is no point talking about the plot; it's complex, moves at lightspeed, and is presented in fragmented windows. This book is an experiment in form, some chapters are written in verse, some as a TV script/play, some as dreamy prose.The characters are complex; gods distinctly human in behaviour and yet beyond human in their motives and their vastness. There is an agnostic priest whose amusing and ironic prayers are now well-quoted online and have a life of their own outside of the book, as religious satire (just Google "Madrak's prayer"). There is a Steel General: a champion of revolutions and underdogs since Earth's earliest military history, who has been patched up so many times that he no longer has his own body, and is now an immortal cyborg of god-like power. The gods fight each other using "fugue", which means they skip about in time and space to be in multiple places simultaneously, fighting like Neo in the Matrix. A notable character, Vramin, is (in my opinion) a parody of the author himself: a fallen angel who is now a mad poet and a magician, who constantly opens windows that act as gateways to other events, skipping around from one to the next (kind of like the plot), who leaves profound verse scorched onto the face of planets, for people to read, love and then instantly forget what it said (or in one instance, deliberately urinate on).This novel jumps from small-scale to large-scale intermittently: one moment you are immersed in detailed description of the sights and smells of a seedy alleyway outside a cybernetic brothel, in a parody of the birth of Christ and the visit of the three wise men; next you are lost in a battle between gods in the vastness of space where entire planets are ripped apart in the course of their combat, or slip into another dimension altogether. And then there are places and creatures that are beyond even the gods' understanding; older gods that the gods themselves fear...It's hard to tell if it's mind-blowing or overwhelming. Some bits irritated me, other parts contained prose and verse so wonderful it was worth the effort just to read those sentences.It's this "effort" aspect that leads me to conclude by urging you not to read this book if you have never read Roger Zelazny before. Because you will not have the faith to know that it is worth the effort, and - worst of all - it may put you off reading anything else he wrote. Instead, go read either his short story collection The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth (currently only available from second-hand stores, which is a great shame), or his masterpiece Lord of Light (currently a bargain on Amazon for £3.50), or the compelling This Immortal, or the nostalgic gothic fun of A Night in the Lonesome October.Once you have read those, you will know Zelazny at his most brilliant, and then you will be ready to try this book, knowing it is a book that will get better each time you read it...