The Last Defender of Camelot

by Roger Zelazny

Paperback, 1980-12

Status

Available

Call number

PS3576 .E43

Publication

Pocket Books (New York, 1980). 1st edition, 1st printing. 308 pages. $2.50.

Description

Now in mass market paperback for the first time--the definitive collection of Zelazny's later works as selected by Hugo and Nebula Award winner Robert Silverberg, who also provides an Introduction to these breathtaking stories.

User reviews

LibraryThing member szarka
Great short stories and also a great paperback cover! (Well, the cover was great in 1980, when I bought mine, anyway.)
LibraryThing member ragwaine
A Thing of Terrible Beauty (Written under the name Harrison Denmark)
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Auto-Da-Fe (Original, mechanical toredor, with cars)
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Comes Now the Power (Emotionally charged, memory transferance & a dying little girl.)
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For A Breath I Tarry (Original, Great Plot, Great development)
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Halfjack (Guy is half human,
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half machine and has to pick between his human babe and his machine babe. Really short, not much to it.)
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Horseman! ()
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Is There a Demon Lover in the House? (Jack the ripper pops into the future and just happens to sit in on a snuff flick. Hilarious.)
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No Award (Not very original and kind of predictable. Not your average Zelzany.)
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Passion Play (Good, kinda funny, ironic, robots make car crash into a ritual after humans are dead.)
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Stand Pat, Ruby Stone (Pretty cool idea, strange mating habits of an insect-like alien species. 3 get married, 2 fight to the death winner eats other one. One is mutilated and used as a nest.)
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The Engine at Heartspring's Center (Cool writing, sounds a little like Logan's Run. Great images.)
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The Game of Blood & Dust ()
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The Last Defender of Camelot (Good, not great- could have beeen a novel about Lancelot's travels through time. Too simple in short story format.)
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The Stainless Steel Leech (Cool, a robot vampire and a real vampire hangout after all humanity is dead.)
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Damnation Alley (This is the original novella Then he wrote the full length story of the same name.)
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He Who Shapes (This is the original novella that won the Nebulla. Then he wrote the full length _The Dream Master_.)
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LibraryThing member nebula61
The back cover describes them as strange and beautiful stories and that's what they are. Some of the best of the best are here but let me vote for "The Engine at Heartspring's Center" a story about a cyborg that you will never forget and "For a Breath I Tarry" a story that will change the way you
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think about computers. The more well-known story "The Stainless Steel Leech" is a must for vampire-fiction lovers.
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LibraryThing member TheDivineOomba
Ah yes - this is definitely a book of its time - semi-mystical writing, tight writing.

As always in an anthology such as this, some stories are better written than others. My favorite was "Damnation Alley" - a story set in apocalyptic America - where an outbreak of disease in Boston needs help from
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Los Angeles, and fast. The only one capable of driving across the country is a convicted, devil may care felon. The story, "For a Breath, I Tarry", is about a machine, trying to understand humanity, after humanity is gone. The writing is a bit over the top, but the story itself is interesting.

Generally, the stories in the collection are short, there a few that I suspect were amazing when they first published, but generally, they didn't really work for today's world.
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LibraryThing member drsabs
Some really great stories. "For a Breath, I Tarry" is my favorite. "Last Defender" also very good.
LibraryThing member antao
(Original Review, 1980-12-12)

"The Last Defender of Camelot" is not really a new Zelazny book, but is a collection of short stories and novelettes from the very beginning of his career til now. I didn't much care for the title story (Merlin, not Lancelot was always my favorite Arthurian character),
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but they're all worth reading unless you have them in other collections. Zelazny likes to put his off-hand heroes in situations that are the stuff of legend, and this gets out of hand cases like "Damnation Alley" where the hero is basically a motorcycle thug (aside: everybody, but everybody smokes a lot in his books. Is he himself a chain smoker?), but usually it's just to let you know that he doesn't take this stuff too seriously. He does take it seriously in "He Who Shapes", the original from which the novel "The Dream Master" was derived, and the best story in the book. But then, I'm a sucker for erudition; other people might find the story pretentious.

You wander through the stores, opening and closing, skimming the blurbs, trying to recall snatches of reviews, attempting to parse out how much of what you've heard was meretricious (Quiz for the day: what does "meretricious" mean? (Hint: it does NOT mean "having merit.")

[2018 EDIT: This review was written at the time as I was running my own personal BBS server. Much of the language of this and other reviews written in 1980 reflect a very particular kind of language: what I call now in retrospect a “BBS language”.]
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LibraryThing member Andy_DiMartino
Great collection of short stories!!!
LibraryThing member threadnsong
Meh. If there is some "urban fantasy" bent to this book it escapes me. The first few very brief stories are brilliant. The Four Horseman especially grabbed my attention and made me glad it was re-printed. But "He Who Shapes" put me to sleep during lunchtime (embarrassing) because it just seemed
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that Zelazny could not really put a point to his endless descriptions or inner thoughts. And "Damnation Alley" - couldn't handle any more destruction in something written under the guise of "adventure story." Have too much of a problem with Man vs. Nature and Nature losing without another thought to upsetting the balance.
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Language

Original language

English

Original publication date

1980

Physical description

308 p.; 6.8 inches

ISBN

0671417738 / 9780671417734
Page: 0.1662 seconds