SF&F encyclopedia (Z-Z)ZACHARY, HUGH Zach HUGHES. ZAGAT, ARTHUR LEO (1895-1949) US writer, extremely prolific in a number of PULP-MAGAZINE genres, publishing about 500 stories; of the relatively few that are sf, several were with Nat SCHACHNER, including ALZ's first, "The Tower of Evil" for Wonder Stories Quarterly in 1930. The 11 tales produced collaboratively before they separated in 1931 were ALZ's best early work. After about 1936, most of his work appeared in Argosy, including the Tomorrow series, set in a NEAR-FUTURE post- HOLOCAUST USA; the 1st tale in the sequence, "Tomorrow" (1939), later appeared in Famous Fantastic Classics 1 (anth 1974). In Drink We Deep (1937 Argosy; 1951) strange subterranean dwellers call a human downwards to them. In Seven Out of Time (1939 Argosy; 1949), his best novel, 7 contemporary humans are studied by people of the future to rediscover the value of emotions. A post-WWII novel, "Slaves of the Lamp" (1946 ASF), was little noticed and did not reach book form, for ALZ had failed to adjust his style and plotting to the demands of the new world. [JC]See also: GENRE SF; INVASION; OPERATOR #5; THRILLING WONDER STORIES. ZAHN, TIMOTHY (1951- ) US writer with a master's degree in physics who came into sudden prominence in the sf field in the 1980s with the rapid release of several books. He had begun publishing sf with "Ernie" for Analog in 1979, and early proved himself an adept and productive creator of the problem-oriented HARD SF characteristic of that magazine. Some better examples of his work are assembled as Cascade Point (coll 1986), Time Bomb and Zahndry Others (coll 1988) and Distant Friends and Others (coll 1992); the title story (1983 ASF) of the 1st of these won a HUGO on its original release, and has also been published as Cascade Point (1988 chap dos). The title of the story, which fascinatingly reveals the outward-looking bent of this early work, refers to a point in space where ships flicker from one star system to the next; at the point of transition, ALTERNATE-WORLD versions of the humans on board ship manifest themselves hauntingly. An experiment designed to elicit more knowledge about humankind from this convergence of differing versions of lives turns out in the event most usefully to reveal methods for making the transition itself more efficient. In work like this, TZ proved himself an exemplary member of the ASF stable.But the rest of the sf world began to take more notice of him after he began to publish novels in 1983 with the 1st vol of the Blackcollar sequence, The Blackcollar (1983), followed by Blackcollar: The Backlash Mission (1986), both tales being set on an Earth dominated by ALIEN invaders and describing the eponymous guerrillas' supernormal feats of resistance against the enemy. The Cobra sequence - Cobra (1985), Cobra Strike (1986), assembled as Cobras Two (omni 1992), plus Cobra Bargain (1988) - located similar military/commando heroes in a galactic venue. A Coming of Age (1985), a singleton of much greater interest, is set on a colony planet where a mutation has given children telekinetic powers, until puberty yanks them back into normality; the plotting is complex and swift, and TZ showed creative awareness as well of the profound issues he was exposing to the light - for any novel in which puberty marks a passing of glory from the Earth is a novel about the human condition as well as, more prosaically, a novel about why children entering puberty begin to read sf. Other novels of interest are Spinneret (1985), Triplet (1987) and Deadman Switch (1988), another tale of considerable underlying complexity, set in a galactic civilization which exploits its retention of the death penalty by using the condemned as pilots to penetrate an area of space that only corpses can navigate. TZ's venues have been at times conventional, and even silly; but again and again he has transformed routine adventure-sf conventions into moral puzzles, without sacrificing a jot of momentum.After several years without any prospect of a new Star Wars movie, TZ was commissioned to write a Star Wars trilogy, comprisingHeir to the Empire * (1991), Dark Force Rising * (1992) and The Last Command* (1993); they carry on from RETURN OF THE JEDI (1983), starting 5 years after the end of that film. [JC]Other works: Warhorse (fixup 1990); the Conquerors trilogy, commencing with Conqueror's Pride (1994).See also: PSI POWERS; SHARED WORLDS; SOCIOLOGY; SUPERMAN. ZAHORSKI, KENNETH J. [r] Marshall B. TYMN. ZAMIATIN, YEVGENY (IVANOVICH) (1884-1937) Russian writer. YZ graduated in naval engineering from St Petersburg Polytechnical Institute, his studies interrupted by participation in the 1905 Revolution as a Bolshevik, prison and deportation (a sentence which was renewed 1911-13). He began writing in 1908, withdrew from active politics, lectured at the Polytechnic Institute until his emigration, ran foul of the Tsarist censor in 1914, and built icebreakers in the UK 1916-17.YZ wrote about 40 volumes of stories, fables, plays, excellent essays and 2 novels. After the October Revolution he became a prominent figure in key literary groups, guru for a whole school of young writers, and editor of an ambitious publishing programme of books from the West; he wrote prefaces for works by Jack LONDON, George Bernard SHAW, H.G. WELLS, etc. From 1921 on he incurred much critical disfavour and some censorship which culminated in a campaign of vilification by the dominant literary faction, especially after My (see below) was published in an emigre journal in 1927. After writing a dignified letter to Stalin, YZ was allowed to go to Paris (retaining his Soviet passport), where he died shunned by both Soviet officialdom and right-wing emigres. My (written 1920, circulated in manuscript; trans Gregory Zilboorg as We 1924 US; first Russian-language book publication 1952 US) deals with the relation between the principles of Revolution (life) and Entropy (death). By incorporating elements of Ostrovityane (written 1917; 1922 chap; trans Sophie Fuller and Julian Sacchi as the title story in Islanders, and The Fisher of Men [coll 1984 chap UK]), a satirical novella he had written about UK philistinism (which features coupons for rationing sex, and the "Taylorite" regulation of every moment of the day), YZ signalled his intention to extrapolate upon the repressive potentials of every centralized state. Committed to the scientific method even in his narrative form, which mimics lab notes, YZ's explanation for why rationalism turns sour is mythical: every belief, when victorious, must turn repressive, as did Christianity. The only irrational elements remaining are the human beings who deviate: these include the narrator - a mathematician and designer of a rocket ship - and the woman who represents an underground resistance. The plot is modelled on an inevitable Fall (for the rebellion inevitably fails), ending in an ironic crucifixion. In YZ's terms, My judges yesterday's UTOPIA, as it becomes an absolutism, in the name of tomorrow's utopia - for the principle of utopia itself is not repudiated; the book is thus not a DYSTOPIA.The expressionistic language of My, which imparts a sense of elegant but humanly charged economy to the text, helps to subsume the protagonist's defeat under the novel's concern for the integration of humanity's science and art (including love). YZ demonstrates that utopia should not be a new religion (albeit of mathematics and space flights) but should represent the dynamic horizon of mankind's developing personality. My is the paradigmatic anti-utopia, prefiguring George ORWELL and Aldous HUXLEY and superseding that tradition of utopianism, from Sir Thomas MORE on, which ignores technology and anthropology. By analysing the distortions of the utopia through the hyperbolic prism of sf, YZ wrote an intensely practical text. It is both a masterpiece of sf and an indispensable book of our epoch. This sense of the book was finally confirmed by YZ's rehabilitation in the USSR in the glasnost year 1988. [DS]Other sf work: "A Story about the Most Important Thing" (1927 Russia; trans Michael Glenny in YZ's The Dragon, coll 1966).About the author: A Soviet Heretic by YZ (1970); Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (1979) by Darko SUVIN; Evgenij Zamjatin (1973 Holland) by Christopher Collins; The Life and Works of Evgenij Zamjatin (1968 US) by Alex M. Shane; "Yevgeny Zamyatin" by Michael Beehler in SubStance 15.2 (1986); "Brave New World", "1984" and "We" (1976) by E.J. Brown; The Shape of Utopia (1970) by R.C. Elliott; Clockwork Worlds (anth 1983) ed Richard D. Erlich et al.; "Imagining the Future: Wells and Zamyatin" by Patrick PARRINDER in H.G. Wells and Modern Science Fiction (anth 1977) ed Suvin; "Three Postrevolutionary Russian Utopian Novels" by Jurij Stridter in The Russian Novel from Pushkin to Pasternak (anth 1983) ed J. Garrarad.See also: CRIME AND PUNISHMENT; HISTORY OF SF; LINGUISTICS; MUSIC; POLITICS; RUSSIA. ZARDOZ Film (1974). John Boorman Productions/20th Century-Fox. Prod/dir/written John Boorman, starring Sean Connery, Charlotte Rampling, Sara Kestelman, John Alderton. 105 mins. Colour.A future society is divided into 2 regions: the Vortex and the Outlands, separated by an impenetrable FORCE FIELD. Within the Vortex live the Eternals, IMMORTAL and given to a decadent aestheticism, while in the Outlands dwell the Brutals, including a group called the Exterminators whose job is to keep the population level down. One of these Exterminators, Zed (Connery), infiltrates the Vortex and his presence catalyses events which destroy both the Immortals and their computer-run society. Zed represents the primal force that brings back to the impotent, static Immortals such old favourites as Emotion, Sex, Fear and Death, releasing them from their artificial world and allowing them to become part of the Natural Scheme of Things again; that is, dead. The film is self-indulgent; its profundity is all on the surface and its oscillation between parody and solemnity is distracting. But Boorman's presentation of old ideas as if they were just new-minted has a certain silly charm, and the film has considerable visual brio, assisted by Geoffrey Unsworth's photography and the beautiful Irish settings.The novelization, by Boorman and Bill Stair, is Zardoz * (1974). [JB/PN]See also: CINEMA; HOLOCAUST AND AFTER. ZAREM, LEWIS (? - ) US writer in whose The Green Man from Space (1955) a Martian is discovered on Earth looking for greens, and is taken back home. LZ also wrote nonfiction on aeronautical subjects. [JC] ZARNAY, JOSEF [r] CZECH AND SLOVAK SF. ZAUNER, GEORG [r] GERMANY. ZEBROWSKI, GEORGE (1945- ) Austrian-born writer of Polish descent, in the USA from 1951, one of the first alumni of the CLARION SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS' WORKSHOP to achieve recognition in the sf world. He has lived with Pamela SARGENT for many years. GZ began publishing sf stories with "The Water Sculptor of Station 233" for Infinity One (anth 1970) ed Robert HOSKINS, and remained active as a short-story writer, releasing about 50 titles over the next 2 decades, some of the best being assembled as The Monadic Universe (coll 1977; exp 1985). From 1970 to winter 1974-5 he was editor of the SFWA BULLETIN, and from 1983 to date has served as US editor. His first published novel was the 2nd instalment, in terms of internal chronology, of his Omega Point sequence - comprising Ashes and Stars (1977) and The Omega Point (1972), both revised and assembled along with a previously unpublished 3rd part as The Omega Point Trilogy (omni 1983). Within a SPACE-OPERA frame, a metaphysical drama is enacted, pitting the sole survivors of a destroyed culture - created through GENETIC ENGINEERING, and whose rationale owes something to the theories of the evolutionary theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955)-against the inimical Earth Federation responsible for its elimination; after his father's death, Gorgias finds the eponymous WEAPON, but Omega Point turns out to be fundamentally a focus of transcendental empathy. The Star Web (1975 Canada) is an unambitious space opera, but the 2 star-spanning forms of TRANSPORTATION featured in the text are of interest; revised, the book became the first third of Stranger Suns (1991), a long novel written in the STAPLEDON-esque vein that marks GZ's most highly regarded single work, Macrolife (1979; rev 1990). Though otherwise unconnected, the 2 books share an elevated purposefulness about depicting humanity's future and a tendency to depend on insufficiently plausible lines of plot. Macrolife begins on Earth, but soon departs the home planet for self-sufficient star-travelling SPACE HABITATS, and carries onwards to the end of the Universe; Stranger Suns views with considerable bleakness the opportunities taken - and missed - by humanity when given the chance to use a complex stargate that gives access not only to the Universe as we know it but also to alternate universes ( ALTERNATE WORLDS).GZ has been active since early in his career as an editor, producing Tomorrow Today (anth 1975), an original anthology, and co-editing Faster than Light (anth 1976) with Jack DANN and Human-Machines (anth 1975) with Thomas N. SCORTIA, a collection of whose stories, The Best of Thomas N. Scortia (coll 1981), GZ also ed. In the 1980s he began the SYNERGY series of ORIGINAL ANTHOLOGIES: Synergy: New Science Fiction #1 (anth 1987), #2 (anth 1988), #3 (dated 1988 but 1989) and #4 (anth 1989). Beneath a Red Star: Studies in International Science Fiction (coll 1991) assembled essays on the sf of Eastern Europe. [JC]Other works: 3 short stories for juveniles, Adrift in Space (1974 in Adrift in Space and Other Stories, anth ed Roger ELWOOD; 1979 chap), A Silent Shout (1979 chap) and The Firebird (1979 chap); the Bernal One sequence of juveniles, Sunspacer (1984) and The Stars Will Speak (1985).As Editor: Creations: The Quest for Origins in Story and Science (anth 1983) with Isaac ASIMOV and Martin H. GREENBERG; Nebula Awards 20 (anth 1985); Nebula Awards 21 (anth 1987); Nebula Awards 22 (anth 1988).About the author: The Work of George Zebrowski (last rev 1990) by Jeffrey M. ELLIOT and Robert REGINALD.See also: ASTEROIDS; COSMOLOGY; CYBORGS; ESCHATOLOGY; GENERATION STARSHIPS; NEBULA; RELIGION; SOCIOLOGY. ZEDDIES, ANN TONSOR (1951- ) US writer whose sf novel, Deathgift (1989), though not technically a POCKET-UNIVERSE tale, embodies a fundamental rhythm of constriction and release through the story of a young boy abandoned to the Native-American-like tribes that mediate among the medieval cities which surround them, and who only later discovers that his "world" is a "neutral zone" on a planet torn by interstellar strife. The story unfolds constantly, is very competently managed, and the sequel, Sky Road (1993), intriguingly mixes sf hardware (there are several setpiece battles between natives and the invasive enemy) and a move toward reconciliation (after the revenge-choked thinning of the narrative in volume one) more typical of fantasy. [JC] ZEIGFREID, KARL A John Spencer & Co. house name, erratically spelled Karl Zeigfried on some occasions; John S. GLASBY used the title once, and Tom W. WADE used it twice. It is possible thatBeyond the Galaxy (1953) is by John F. Watt (? - ). For their later BADGER BOOKS line, Spencer used the name for a number of sf novels, mostly by R.L. FANTHORPE (13 titles). [JC] ZELAZNY, ROGER (JOSEPH) (1937- ) US writer, born in Ohio, with an MA from Columbia University in 1962. In 1962-9 he was employed by the Social Security Administration in Cleveland, Ohio, and Baltimore, Maryland; from 1969 he wrote full-time. His arrival in the sf world in 1962, along with Samuel R. DELANY, Thomas M. DISCH and Ursula K. LE GUIN, marked that year as a milestone in what seemed at the time to be the inevitable maturing of sf into a complex and sophisticated literature, whose language might finally match its intermittent hubris. With Delany, Disch and (to a lesser extent) Le Guin - and with Harlan ELLISON goading all and sundry - RZ became a leading and representative figure of the US NEW WAVE, writing stories whose emphasis had shifted from the external world of the hard sciences to the internal worlds explorable through disciplines like PSYCHOLOGY (mostly Jungian), SOCIOLOGY and LINGUISTICS. To a greater extent than any of his colleagues, however, RZ expressed this shift by using mythological structures - some traditional, some new-minted - in his work. It has been argued that in true MYTHOLOGY the voyage into CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGH of the Hero of a Thousand Faces always climaxes in the Eternal Return, so that any 20th-century sf tale which retells a myth incorporates, by so doing, ironies and metaphors highly corrosive of any rhetoric of outward thrust, and mockingly dismissive of the reality of breakthroughs. It may be for this reason that RZ's sf was language-driven, irony-choked, corrosively playful, and - after the early years of his career - intermittent; and that he is now best known for his works of fantasy, in particular the 2 linked sequences making up the ongoing Amber series. The 1st, featuring Corwin, is Nine Princes in Amber (1970), The Guns of Avalon (1972), Sign of the Unicorn (1975), The Hand of Oberon (1976) and The Courts of Chaos (1978), all assembled as The Chronicles of Amber (omni in 2 vols 1979). The 2nd, featuring Corwin's son Merlin, comprises Trumps of Doom (1985), Blood of Amber (1986), Sign of Chaos (1987), Knight of Shadows (1989) and Prince of Chaos (1991). There are 2 pendants, A Rhapsody in Amber (coll 1981 chap) and Roger Zelazny's Visual Guide to Castle Amber (1988) with Neil Randall. Like C.S. LEWIS's Narnia, the land of Amber exists on a plane of greater fundamental reality than Earth, and provides normal reality with its ontological base. Unlike Narnia, however, Amber is the Yin in the Yang of Chaos the father, with consequences very far from Christian, for the Universe so defined is both cyclical and eternally insecure; and Amber itself is dominated by a cabal of squabbling siblings whose quasi-Olympian feudings generate vast cat's-cradles and imperfect nestings of Story, out of which the fabric of lesser realities takes its shape. The Amber books constitute RZ's most substantial edifice, though not his finest work, which is sf. Other fantasies have been lesser.RZ's first published story was "Passion Play" for AMZ in 1962, and for several years he was prolific in shorter forms, for a time using the pseudonym Harrison Denmark when stories piled up in AMZ and Fantastic, and doing his finest work at the novelette/novella length; he assembled the best of this early work as Four for Tomorrow (coll 1967; vt A Rose for Ecclesiastes 1969 UK) and The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth, and Other Stories (coll 1971). The magazine titles of his first 2 books were as well known as their book titles, and the awards given them were attached to the magazine titles. THIS IMMORTAL (1965 FSF as ". . . And Call me Conrad"; exp 1966) won the 1966 HUGO for Best Novel; THE DREAM MASTER (1965 AMZ as "He Who Shapes"; exp 1966) - the magazine version was eventually released as He Who Shapes (1989 dos) - won the 1966 NEBULA for Best Novella; and in the same year The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth (1965 FSF; 1991 chap) won a Nebula for Best Novelette. Taken together, the 3 tales make up a portrait of RZ's central worlds, themes and protagonist, a portrait which would be repeated, with sometimes lessened force, for decades. The VENUS on which "Doors" is set, like most of RZ's worlds to come, is fantastical, densely described, almost entirely "unscientific"; the plot intoxicatingly dashes together myth and literary assonances - in this case Herman MELVILLE's Moby-Dick (1851) - and sex. THIS IMMORTAL takes place in a baroquely described post- HOLOCAUST Earth which has become a kind of theme-park for the ALIEN Vegans; in this shadowy realm of belatedness and human angst, the immortal Conrad Nomikos serves ostensibly as Arts Commissioner but turns out to be in a far more telling sense the curator of the human enterprise, for, despite the US thriller idioms he uses in his personal speech, he closely resembles Herakles - whose Labours the plot of the novel covertly replicates - but is certainly both the Hero of a Thousand Faces and the Trickster who mocks the high road of myth, redeemer and road-runner both. Under various names, this basic figure crops up in most of RZ's later books: wisecracking, melancholic, romantic, sentimental, lonely, metamorphosing into higher states whenever necessary to cope with the plot, and in almost every sense an astonishingly sophisticated wish-fulfilment.In THE DREAM MASTER - for one of the few times in his career - RZ presented the counter-myth, the story of the metamorphosis which fails, the transcendence which collapses back into the mortal world. In THIS IMMORTAL, RS had already evinced a tendency to side, perhaps a little too openly, with complexly gifted, vain, dominating, immortal protagonists, and, as THE DREAM MASTER begins, his treatment of psychiatrist Charles Render seems no different. Render is eminent in the new field of neuroparticipant psychiatry, in which the healer actually enters the mindspace of his patient - which is laid out like a Jungian tournament of the cohorts of the self - and takes therapeutic action from within this VIRTUAL REALITY. But Render becomes hubristic, and when he enters the mind of a congenitally blind woman, who is both extremely intelligent and insane, his attempts to cope with her intricate madness from within gradually expose his own deficiencies as a person, and he becomes subtly and terrifyingly trapped in a highly plausible psychic cul-de-sac. All the sf apparatus of the story, and its sometimes overly baroque manner, were integrated into RZ's once-only unveiling of the nature of a human hero who could not perform the moult into immortality.After these triumphs, LORD OF LIGHT (1967), which won a 1968 Hugo, could have seemed anticlimactic, but it is in fact his most sustained single tale, richly conceived and plotted, exhilarating throughout its considerable length. Some of the crew of a human colony ship, which has deposited its settlers on a livable world, have made use of advanced technology to ensconce themselves in the role of gods, selecting those of the Hindu pantheon as models. But where there is Hinduism, the Buddha - in the shape of the protagonist Sam - must follow; and his liberation of the humans of the planet, who are mortal descendants of the original settlers, takes on aspects of both Prometheus and Coyote the Trickster. At points, Sam may seem just another of RZ's stable of slangy, raunchy, over-loved immortals; but the end effect of the book is liberating, wise, lucid.None of RZ's subsequent sf quite achieved the metaphorical aptness of his first 3 novels, but Isle of the Dead (1969) and Creatures of Light and Darkness (1969) both embody complex plots, mythic resonance and a fluent intensity of language. Damnation Alley (1969), a darker and coarser tale, depicts a post-holocaust motor-cycle-trek across a vicious USA; it was filmed with many changes as DAMNATION ALLEY (1977). Jack of Shadows (1971), though set on a planet which keeps one face always to its sun, has all the tonality and dream-like plotting of a fantasy: a fine one.From the mid-1970s on, RZ's work maintained a certain consistency, and always threatened to explode in the mind's eye; but did not quite do so. Deus Irae (1976), with Philip K. DICK, is uneasy. Doorways in the Sand (1976) is a delightfully complicated chase tale, involving a MCGUFFIN and an entire galactic community. My Name is Legion (fixup 1976) - which included the Hugo- and Nebula-winning Home is the Hangman (1975 ASF; 1990 chap dos) - puts into definitive form the Chandleresque version of the RZ HERO. Roadmarks (1979) engrossingly fleshes out the notion that the turnings off a metaphysical freeway might constitute turnings in time not space. The Last Defender of Camelot (1980 chap), which became the title story of The Last Defender of Camelot (coll 1980; with 4 stories added, exp 1981), Unicorn Variations (coll 1983), which included the Hugo-winning "Unicorn Variation" (1981), and Frost and Fire (coll 1989) - which contained "24 Views of Mount Fuji" (1985) and "Permafrost" (1986), both Hugo-winners - represent competent later short stories. Eye of Cat (1982) is a proficient sf thriller with a striking alien and some effective Navajo venues. Had it not been for the romantic sublimities of his first years, RZ's career might have been seen as triumphant.He is not, however, regarded as a writer whose later works have fulfilled his promise, and it may be that he has suffered the inevitable price of writing at the peak of intensity and conviction when young: that he may already have put into definitive form the heart of what exercises him as a man and as a writer. The plummets into INNER SPACE, the sensitized baroque intricacy of his rendering of the immortal longings of men who all too easily slip into secret-guardian routines, the rush into metamorphosis: all have had their cost. Though his Amber books and some other fantasies (see listing below) exhibit a sustained freshness, RZ's sf readership has been left with the inspired facility of an extremely intelligent writer who does not desperately need to utter another word. [JC]Other works: Today We Choose Faces (1973); To Die in Italbar (1973), featuring Francis Sandow, the protagonist of Isle of the Dead; Poems (coll 1974 chap); Bridge of Ashes (1976); The Illustrated Zelazny (graph coll 1978; rev vt The Authorized Illustrated Book of Roger Zelazny 1979); the Changing Land sequence, comprising The Bells of Shoredan (1966 Fantastic; 1979 chap), The Changing Land (1981) and Dilvish, the Damned (coll of linked stories 1982); For a Breath I Tarry (1966 NW; 1980 chap); When Pussywillows Last in the Catyard Bloomed (coll 1980 chap), poetry; the Wizard World sequence, comprising Changeling (1980) and Madwand (1981), both assembled as Wizard World (omni 1989); Today We Choose Faces/Bridge of Ashes (omni 1981); To Spin is Miracle Cat (coll 1981), poems; Coils (1982) with Fred SABERHAGEN; A Dark Traveling (1987), a juvenile; The Black Throne (1990) with Saberhagen, a RECURSIVE fantasy starring Edgar Allan POE; The Mask of Loki (1990) with Thomas T. THOMAS; The Graveyard Heart (1964 AMZ; 1990 chap dos); Bring Me the Head of Prince Charming (1991) with Robert SHECKLEY; Gone to Earth (coll dated 1991 but 1992); Flare (1992) with Thomas, describing a deadly solar flare; Way Up High (1992 chap); Here There be Dragons (1992 chap); A Night in the Lonesome October (1993); If at Faust You Don't Succeed (1993) with Robert Sheckley; Wilderness (1994) with Gerald Hausman, associational.As Editor: Nebula Award Stories Three (anth 1968).About the author: "Faust & Archimedes" in The Jewel-Hinged Jaw: Notes on the Language of Science Fiction (coll 1977) by Samuel R. DELANY; Introduction by Ormond Seavey to the 1976 GREGG PRESS printing of THE DREAM MASTER; Roger Zelazny (1980) by Carl B. YOKE; Roger Zelazny: A Primary and Secondary Bibliography (1980) by Joseph L. Sanders; A Checklist of Roger Zelazny (1990 chap) by Christopher P. STEPHENS.See also: ACE BOOKS; AMAZING STORIES; ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION; COMICS; CRIME AND PUNISHMENT; CYBERNETICS; ESCHATOLOGY; ESP; FANTASY; GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION; GAMES AND SPORTS; GODS AND DEMONS; GOTHIC SF; IMMORTALITY; ISAAC ASIMOV'S SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINE; The MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION ; MARS; MATTER TRANSMISSION; MESSIAHS; MUSIC; OMNI; PARALLEL WORLDS; PARANOIA; PARASITISM AND SYMBIOSIS; PSI POWERS; REINCARNATION; RELIGION; ROBOTS; SCIENCE FANTASY; SUPERMAN; SUPERNATURAL CREATURES; TERRAFORMING; UNDER THE SEA. ZERO POPULATION GROWTH Z.P.G. ZERWICK, CHLOE (1923- ) US writer and editor who collaborated with Harrison BROWN (whom see for details) on The Cassiopeia Affair (1968). [JC] ZETFORD, TULLY Kenneth BULMER. ZHURAVLYOVA, VALENTINA [r] Genrikh ALTOV. ZIESING, MARK V. [r] MARK V. ZIESING. ZIFF-DAVIS US magazine-publishing house, based in Chicago until 1950, then New York. It entered the sf field in 1938 when it bought AMAZING STORIES from Teck Publishing Corp, New York, the 1st Z-D issue being April 1938, ed Raymond A. PALMER under Bernard G. Davis (the Davis of Ziff-Davis) as editor-in-chief. Under Palmer and later Howard BROWNE, AMZ was the most juvenile and lurid of the pulp SF MAGAZINES. The Z-D stable was expanded in May 1939 with the founding of a new title, FANTASTIC ADVENTURES, also lurid. Local Chicago writers, many of them hacks, churned out material for Z-D at immense speed, and often under the huge variety of house names that characterized these magazines and made them a bibliographer's nightmare: Chester S. GEIER, David Wright O'BRIEN, Rog PHILLIPS, Leroy YERXA and many others whose work was hardly known outside the Z-D publications. Covers were colourful, to the say the least, J. Allen ST. JOHN being especially notable in this regard; Robert FUQUA was also a regular cover artist and Rod RUTH drew many interior illustrations.As the pulp era drew to a close in the 1950s, many sf magazines failed, and others converted to the DIGEST format, as AMZ did in 1953. By then Z-D had founded a new digest magazine, FANTASTIC, in 1952. This covered similar ground to Fantastic Adventures, which it absorbed in 1953. The only sf/fantasy addition to the stable thereafter was the short-lived DREAM WORLD, ed Paul W. FAIRMAN, in 1957, though Z-D did publish occasional COMICS titles, like Space Patrol in 1952. Stories created by factory-production techniques continued in the new digest magazines, now based in New York; Robert SILVERBERG was one who learned his craft in the 1950s by being slotted into the assembly line. Both AMZ and Fantastic improved enormously under the editorship of Cele GOLDSMITH 1958-65, but it was too late. Bernard G. Davis had left in the 1950s, and fiction magazines were becoming anomalies in the Z-D line-up, now largely concentrated (because of the potential for advertising revenue) on specialist nonfiction magazines like Popular Photography and Popular Electronics. Fantastic and AMZ were sold in 1965 to Sol Cohen's Ultimate Publishing Co., where he made a good thing for years recycling Z-D backlist stories in new magazines, as well as continuing the 2 main titles. The newly married Goldsmith stayed with Z-D to work on Modern Bride. Bernard Davis's son Joel went on to form his own publishing company, Davis Publications, which founded ISAAC ASIMOV'S SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINE and later bought ASF. The Davis sf dynasty, therefore, continued, in a much different guise, until 1992, when Dell Magazines bought both journals. [PN] ZILLIG, WERNER [r] GERMANY. ZIMMER, PAUL EDWIN (1943- ) US writer, brother of Marion Zimmer BRADLEY, with whom he wrote his first sf, the 2nd vol of the Survivors sequence, The Survivors (1979), a somewhat congested sf adventure. A series by PEZ alone, the Dark Border sequence - The Lost Prince (1982), King Chondo's Ride (1982) and A Gathering of Heroes (1987) - is fantasy, as are his singletons Woman of the Elfmounds (dated 1979 but 1980), Blood of the Colyn Muir (1988) with Jon DeCles, and Ingulf the Mad (1989). [JC] ZINDELL, DAVID (1952- ) US writer with a degree in mathematics who began publishing sf with "The Dreamer's Sleep" for Fantasy Book in 1984, though his career properly began when he won the WRITERS OF THE FUTURE CONTEST with "Shanidar" (1985). His 1st novel was the long and remarkable Neverness (1988), an extremely ambitious example of the tale of cosmogony (a tale - usually containing some plot mixture of SPACE OPERA and PLANETARY ROMANCE- whose protagonist's life leads to an encounter with questions about the origins, the ontological nature and the end of the Galaxy or Universe). The young protagonist has all the necessary complexity and drivenness to occupy centre-stage "cosmogony opera"; indeed, as he recollects his cruel and ornate life at a distance of some years, Mallory Ringess may for some readers too much resemble the Severian of Gene WOLFE's The Book of the New Sun (1980-83), though he does eventually establish his own chilly selfhood. The planet in which the city of Neverness nestles is drawn with a long-breathed relish reminiscent of Wolfe's own model, Jack VANCE; the growth to manhood of Ringess in this environment is expressed with cold ornateness, an assiduous attention to character and a sense of immanent significance. As space-pilot in the Order of Mystic Mathematicians and Other Seekers of the Ineffable Flame, Ringess eventually becomes involved in a search for the Elder Eddas which bear messages of import about reality; encounters an entity whose brain is composed of moon-sized ganglia; betrays, comes to understand, and saves himself; and penetrates the eons-deep secrets of the nature of things. The author of Neverness is romantic, ambitious, and skilled.Full understanding of DZ's immense second novel - whose first 2 instalments may or may not constitute the entire story - awaits its full publication. The first volume, The Broken God (1993 UK), carries on the overall project outlined in Neverness, primarily through the viewpoint of Ringess's son. The recomplications and innovations of the tale are consistent with those adumbrated in the earlier book, which serves as a kind of prelude. A second volume, The Wild (1995 UK), is projected. [JC]See also: BIG DUMB OBJECTS; COMMUNICATIONS; DEVOLUTION; FASTER THAN LIGHT; GODS AND DEMONS; MATHEMATICS; MUSIC; PSEUDO-SCIENCE. ZINOVIEV, ALEXANDER (1922- ) Russian writer whose Ziyayushchie Vysoty (1976 Switzerland; trans Gordon Clough as The Yawning Heights 1979 US) clearly models the closed DYSTOPIAN society at its heart upon the gerontocracy which then dominated the USSR. [JC] ZITRA VSTANU A OPARIM SE CAJEM (vt Tomorrow I'll Wake up and Scald Myself with Tea) Film (1977). Filmove studio Barrandov. Dir Jindrich Polak, starring Petr Kostka, Jiri Sovak, Vladimir Mensik, Vlastimil Brodsky. Screenplay Polak, Milos Macourek, based on a story by Josef NESVADBA. 90 mins. Colour.Not widely known in the West (although it has been given a UK tv showing), this Czech production is one of the most sophisticated TIME-TRAVEL films yet made, written by a team whose members all have ample sf experience ( CZECH AND SLOVAK SF). The insanely convoluted comic story, with a richer use of TIME PARADOXES than is ever seen in Western sf cinema, involves going back in time to give the H-bomb to Hitler. Though farcical, it throws up interesting questions of causality. Polak also dir IKARIE XB-1 (1963), and Macourek, who has been involved with many of the best Czech sf comedies, codir KDO CHCE ZABIT JESSII? (1965). [PN] ZIVKOVIC, ZORAN (1948- ) Yugoslav sf publisher and researcher, based in Belgrade. He received his doctorate at Belgrade University in 1982; a version of his dissertation, "The Appearance of Science Fiction as a Genre of Artistic Prose", was published in his Savremenici buducnosti ["Contemporaries of the Future"] (anth 1983) along with some of the stories he discusses. He has translated about 50 sf books and published more than 100 under his Polaris imprint, the first privately owned sf publishing house (founded 1982) in YUGOSLAVIA. Zvezdani ekran ["The Starry Screen"] (1984) is a book about sf cinema, based on the tv series of the same title which he wrote and hosted. His most ambitious work is the 2-vol Enciklopedija naucne fantastike ["Encyclopedia of Science Fiction"] (1990). He wrote the YUGOSLAVIA entry in this volume. [PN] ZOLA, EMILE (EDOUARD CHARLES ANTOINE) (1840-1902) French writer whose long and intense Rougon-Macquart sequence of Naturalist novels (1871-93) includes tales like Nana (1880; trans E.A. Vizetelly 1884 UK), for which he was once notorious. EZ is of sf interest for Verite (1903; trans E.A. Vizetelly as Truth 1903 UK), the 3rd vol of his unfinished Les Quatre Evangiles ["The Four Evangelists"] quartet, which was planned to espouse a kind of Tolstoyan socialism. The action in Truth extends to 1980, and there are hints of advanced TECHNOLOGIES. [JC] ZOLINE, PAMELA Working name of US painter and writer Pamela Lifton-Zoline (1941- ), in the UK 1963-86. She illustrated, in a collage-derived style, several stories for NW in the late 1960s, including the magazine publication of Thomas M. DISCH's CAMP CONCENTRATION (1968 UK). Her debut sf story, "The Heat Death of the Universe" (1967 NW), is a finely structured application of the concept of ENTROPY to the life of a US housewife, through whose perceptions its rise is experienced literally. The story appeared in PZ's 1st collection, Busy About the Tree of Life and Other Stories (coll 1988 UK; vt THE HEAT DEATH OF THE UNIVERSE AND OTHER STORIES 1988 US); the long story which gives its title to the UK edn is also sf. With John T. SLADEK, PZ ed both issues of and contributed to Ronald Reagan: The Magazine of Poetry (1968); other contributors included Disch and J.G. BALLARD. In Telluride, Colorado, she has since 1986 written, designed and produced sf plays for the Muddbutt Mystery Theatre. [JC]Other works: Annika and the Wolves (1985 chap US), a children's fantasy.See also: COSMOLOGY; OULIPO. ZOMBIE(S) DAWN OF THE DEAD. ZONE TROOPERS Film (1985). Altar/Empire. Executive prod Charles BAND. Dir Danny Bilson, starring Tim Thomerson, Timothy Van Patten, Art La Fleur, Biff Maynard. Screenplay Bilson, Paul DeMeo. 86 mins. Colour.This curious, small, honest film is as close as the cinema has ever got to the flavour of pulp sf. Three GIs and a war correspondent are trapped behind German lines in Italy in 1944. In between repeated clashes with Germans they befriend a BEM - female, we later learn - from a crashed spaceship, whom the Germans wish to interrogate. All is played straight and gung-ho, catching delightfully the tone of 1940s war films. The film ends appropriately with a shot of a (phony) PULP-MAGAZINE cover, Fantastic Fiction. [PN] ZOOL, M.H. Group pseudonym used by members of the Oxford University Speculative Fiction Group for the Bloomsbury Good Reading Guide to Science Fiction and Fantasy (1989), a compact and knowledgeable biographical and bibliographical dictionary whose usefulness would have been considerably enhanced had its authors been granted more space. "M. H. Zool" stands for Massed Hordes of Zool, a recurring phrase found in "Time Warriors of Zool" (1979) by William Bains, a narrative - distributed in mimeographed form only - which memorializes the Oxford SF Group in spoof recursive terms. The main editors/authors involved in the Bloomsbury book were Neal Tringham (1966- ), Ivan Towlson (1967- ) and Mo Holkar (1967- ). Both Tringham, as writer of several entries, and Holkar, as coordinator of entries from other members of the Speculative Fiction Group (not all of them part of the original Zool enterprise), participated in this encyclopedia, as did Zool participants Tim Adye (1964- ), Matthew Bishop (1968- ), Adrian Cox (1968- ) and Penelope Heal (1970- ); other members of the Zool enterprise included John Bray, Malcolm Cohen, Paul Cray, Melanie Dymond, Paul Marrow and Simon McLeish. [JC] Z.P.G. (vt Zero Population Growth UK) Film (1971). Sagittarius/Paramount. Dir Michael Campus, starring Oliver Reed, Geraldine Chaplin, Diane Cilento, Don Gordon. Screenplay Max EHRLICH, Frank DeFelitta. 97 mins. Colour.This film was a product of a period when, not before time, the question of OVERPOPULATION had almost overnight become a matter much publicized by the media, books like Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb (1968) had become bestsellers, and the Club of Rome was about to publish a very alarmist report in The Limits to Growth (1972). "Zero population growth" is a term which refers to a situation where the population of a society remains steady, neither increasing nor decreasing. But the screenwriters of Z.P.G. assume, absurdly, that it means nobody having any children at all during the 30-year period of a world government's ban. A married couple defy the edict and have a baby secretly. They are betrayed by a jealous neighbour, but escape the authorities by descending into a sewer. Where they escape to is not explained. The novelization is The Edict * (1971) by Ehrlich. [JB/PN] ZSCHOKKE, HEINRICH [r] GERMANY. ZSOLDOS, PEER [r] HUNGARY. ZUpsAWSKI, JERZY (1874-1915) Polish playwright, poet and novelist, of sf interest for his untranslated trilogy about the colonization of the MOON: Na Srebrnym Globie ["On Silver Globe"] (1901), Zwycie ZWIKIEWICZ, WIKTOR [r] POLAND. |