Click on a book's image or title to order from Amazon.com

This Immortal

I picked this one up from the Science Fiction Book Club years ago because I'm always interested in reading new takes on immortality. Unfortunately, the fact that the protagonist is immortal is largely incidental to the story. Fortunately, it carries Zelazny's trademark friendly writing style, and is a pretty good yarn anyway.

The backstory is this: Earth suffered a nuclear holocaust at some point in the future, and the hero, Conrad Nomikos, became immortal as a result. Aliens arrived soon thereafter and pretty much took the planet over, having never seen anything like this before. The Vegans are not dictators - they're more like rich dilettantes who use Earth as a vacation resort - but naturally many remaining humans resent their presence.

Conrad has become the director of arts and archives - essentially the guy charged with safeguarding Earth's historical relics. He is assigned to guide a Vegan journalist around a number of old monuments and places. However, a human independence faction wishes to assassinate him, and Conrad is sure that the man hired to guard him has also been hired as the assassin.

The best feature of the story is Zelazny's evocative writing. The plot, however, is somewhat lacking; it jumps from place to place and doesn't possess much structure. Many of the conflicts in the story are resolved in a deus-ex-machina fashion, which ultimately makes the book seem thin despite the depths of cultural info with which Zelazny packs it. Still, when a novel's under 200 pages, it's tough to complain too much.