A number of people have asked for more details about NESFA's Roger Zelazny project. Here's a quick summary of what we are doing. (Note that many aspects of the project are not settled, so please do not depend on any detail mentioned here.)
We plan to print a complete collection of Roger Zelazny's short fiction and poetry, in (most likely) six hardcover volumes. We expect to include all published fiction and poetry we can find, however obscurely published, and a number of unpublished works retrieved from Zelazny's archived papers. We also expect to include the shorter early versions of several novels, several novel excerpts that were published independently as short works and a few of Zelazny's articles on topics of interest to him.
The order of the volumes will be semi-chronological, generally by publication date. A few works, along with all the unpublished items, will be inserted near other works written at the same time. Most pieces will have forewords and/or afterwords of a literary or biographical nature.
We will commission introductions and/or essays from family, friends and writers who were fans of Roger Zelazny's work. As of this date, Robert Silverberg has contributed a general introduction. One of our editors has written some biographical essays to spread among the volumes.
We hope to package it in a coherent way, so the books will visually form a single set. Michael Whelan has agreed to do the cover painting(s) for us, There will also an extensive bibliography, most likely published separately.
If you possess a story, poem, essay, correspondence from Zelazny or any published work you think may be unique or rare, we would very much like to obtain a copy for potential inclusion in this collection.
Requests
- If anyone knows of a copy of an unpublished Zelazny story named "Checkup", we would like to obtain a copy. It was written in 1975 for a special "children's future" issue of a UNICEF quarterly publication. We have records of it being paid for, but no trace of the story has surfaced.
Contents
We plan to link the tables of contents for each book here, along with two tables containing all known Zelazny titles, sorted by date and by title.