This Immortal

I've been a fan of this author since I was a teenager, but I didn't think I'd actually read this book before. About a quarter of the way in, though, I started to recognize scenes and characters I had mostly forgotten since I'd encountered something like forty years ago. I didn't remember enough to ruin the suspense but every now and then a phrase would come back to me, an image, sometimes a sense of how a particular scene was going to play itself out.

The engine that keeps the novel going is the voice of the first person narrator, a fellow currently going by the name of Conrad Nomikos who is clearly not what he appears to be. This is one of a number of intelligent heroes who are just a little beyond human but not enough to make them unfamiliar that Zelazny has honed in a number of his most successful novels. This time the background is the nuclear tension of the mid 1960s considered from a time after the big showdown has already occurred, the "three days" when Earth's population was reduced to a small fraction of what it once was, leaving most of the mainland too lethal for the survivors to live. This was written before the ideas of human caused climate change had been elaborated, so there was no nuclear winter and no greenhouse effect to contend with. Instead, the challenge that drives the hero's actions is the threat from the aliens from Vega with their superiority in technology and their expressed interest in our planet and our culture. Humans occupy a second-class status to the aliens and there is an underground resistance movement which tries to restore Earth to something closer to what it once was, with the population in exile returned to a cleaned up homeworld rid of the outsiders. One of the Vegans is intent on a world tour of the ancient sites and Conrad is enlisted as guide and bodyguard with a band of others whose motives are all somewhat shrouded. Adventures with megafauna and monstrous tribesmen ensue.

The action sequences were enjoyable, not maybe as mind-blowing now as when I first read them. But what really appealed to me were the little bits of flavor Zelazny introduces around the scenes to flesh out the characters and suggest a richer wealth of culture they inhabit. In this book, he draws on his knowledge and affection for ancient Egyptian and Greek history (with a little bit of Haitian voodoo at the start) all left there for the attentive reader to tease out by themselves. It is all so deft you don't realize how much talent it must take to make it sound so effortless. There are substantial bits of dialogue among the narrative scenes to liven up the pace. I never did quite understand what the people opposing Conrad's aims suspected of the Vegan, but I didn't care that much in the end because of the way I'd already bought into the story.

The audio narration was good, with the voice of the alien sounding something like Mr. Burns from the Simpsons, not altogether incongruously. The character of the assassin Hasan was not too stereotyped, I thought, while some of the other incidental antagonists were more broadly depicted.