There was a period from 1961–1967 when Roger Zelazny was magic, and every new story he published was an event. A visionary stylist, his language sang, his prose flowed like poetry, and his versatility shattered the boundaries between science fiction and fantasy. In six extraordinary years, he produced a succession of groundbreaking stories that helped define New Wave speculative fiction and emerged as one of its most distinctive voices. Selected and introduced by fellow SFWA Grand Master Samuel R. Delany, The Magic brings together ten landmark works from this remarkable period, revealing the breathtaking range and creative intensity of Zelazny’s remarkably accomplished early career. 

This definitive retrospective is enriched by Delany’s critical introduction, commentary from influential science-fiction author and Star Trek screenwriter Theodore Sturgeon and World Fantasy Award–winning Weird Tales editor Darrell Schweitzer, two interviews with Zelazny, and story-by-story notes compiled by celebrated Zelazny biographer Christopher S. Kovacs. Together, these materials illuminate the origins and development of the classic, often avant-garde stories that transformed Zelazny from a promising new writer into a Hugo and Nebula Award–winning legend.

Titles included:

• “A Rose for Ecclesiastes”
  A gifted linguist travels to Mars to translate the sacred texts of an ancient civilization facing extinction. His relationship with a Martian dancer draws him into a tragedy of forbidden love, prophecy, and cultural survival.
  Hugo Award nominee for Best Short Fiction; later selected for The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume One and ranked third in the 2012 Locus poll of the best twentieth-century novelettes.

• “The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth”
  On the alien oceans of Venus, a disgraced adventurer joins his former lover’s perilous expedition to capture the colossal sea creature that nearly killed him years before. Beneath the deep-sea action lies a tense struggle with pride, romantic rivalry, and obsession.
  Winner of the Nebula Award for Best Novelette and nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Short Fiction.

• “The Ides of Octember”
  A psychotherapist uses experimental technology to enter and reshape his patients’ dreams. When a brilliant blind psychiatrist asks him to train her in the technique, their shared dreamworld becomes increasingly distorted—and dangerous.
  Winner of the Nebula Award for Best Novella. Originally serialized as “He Who Shapes,” the story was later expanded into the novel The Dream Master.

• “For a Breath I Tarry”
  Long after humanity has vanished, a machine intelligence governs the Northern Hemisphere under the authority of the planetary computer Divcom. Fascinated by the extinct beings who created it, it ultimately attempts to become human itself.
  Hugo Award nominee for Best Novelette.

• “Damnation Alley”
  In a post-apocalyptic America shattered by nuclear war, an outlaw biker is offered a pardon in exchange for carrying desperately needed medicine from Los Angeles to plague-stricken Boston. To complete the mission, he must cross a continent ravaged by lethal radiation, mutated monsters, and lawless survivors.
  Hugo Award nominee for Best Novella. The story was later expanded into a novel and loosely adapted as the 1977 feature film Damnation Alley.

• “The Graveyard Heart”
  The glamorous elites of the Party Set spend decades in cryogenic stasis, awakening only for the next exclusive celebration while civilization rapidly changes around them. An elegant tragedy of unrequited love, social privilege, and futuristic cryonic decadence.

• “The Furies”
  Three extraordinary hunters—a living geographic calculator, a psychic empath, and a legendary assassin—are sent across the galaxy to capture a former captain turned pirate. This mythic interstellar pursuit blurs the boundaries between hero, traitor, justice, and revenge.

• “The Keys to December”
  When a supernova destroys the frozen world for which they were genetically engineered, thousands of displaced Catforms begin terraforming another planet into a new home. But their planetary engineering accelerates the evolution of an indigenous species, forcing the choice between their own people’s survival and the destruction of a newly intelligent alien civilization.
  Nebula Award nominee for Best Novelette.

• “This Moment of the Storm”
  Nearly six centuries after fleeing Earth and the grief of his past, a catastrophic storm engulfs his adopted colony world, unleashing floods, deadly alien wildlife, looting, and violence. The immortal and heavily armed Hell Cop must protect his new home while confronting the love and loss he can never escape.
  Hugo and Nebula Award nominee for Best Novelette.

• “This Mortal Mountain”
  On an alien planet, an aging mountaineer leads an expedition up the Gray Sister, an impossible mountain nearly forty miles high. Battling lethal altitude, treacherous terrain, mysterious apparitions, and an automated defense system determined to drive them away, the climbers discover that something—or someone—has been hidden at the summit for centuries.
  Nebula Award nominee for Best Novelette.

Perfect for fans of Samuel R. Delany, Ursula K. Le Guin, Philip K. Dick, Harlan Ellison, Michael Moorcock, Cordwainer Smith, Tanith Lee, and Gene Wolfe, as well as readers of literary science fantasy, planetary romance, cerebral sci-fi, hard SF, philosophical speculation, existential dread, poetic prose, psychological depth, inventive world-building, doomed love, alien worlds, altered consciousness, experimental technology, rogue AI and artificial-intelligence fiction, sentient machines, interstellar vengeance, intergalactic adventure, nuclear devastation, dystopian wastelands, far-future civilizations, modern mythology, cosmic horror, mythic space opera, and narratives about humanity's struggle to survive—and transcend—its limitations.

"An explosion of style and personality unique in science fiction, Zelazny is a law unto himself, driving over and through the conventional forms of science fiction . . . ." –Speculative Bulletin

"A storyteller without peer. He created worlds as colorful and exotic and memorable as any our genre has ever seen."  –George R. R. Martin

". . . his performance was never anything other than dazzling."  –Robert Silverberg

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