I’ve been collecting and reading the Hugo winning SF novels in the order of the awards and I’ve hit a bit of a snag for 1966. That year Zelazny’s novella “…And Call Me Conrad” tied with Frank Herbert’s Dune for the Hugo.
For my collection I have been getting hard cover editions of each work, but Zelazny’s winner is a novella and I can find no sign of it being published in its own volume. Zelazny did go on to expand the story to a novel, This Immortal, but it’s not the exact work that he won for.
So first, does anyone know of a collection available in hardcover that includes the original novella?
Second, should I just go ahead and get This Immortal? Is the novel just an extension past the end of the novella or is the different material throughout it?
I’ve been a fan of Zelazny’s for ages and even named the Offspring ‘Corwin’. Go for “This Immortal” and you’ll get what you want. Have you found a copy of “Here There Be Dragons”? It shows up on Half.com sometimes but usually with a hair raising price. I love the man’s work but his poetry…eh.
As for his posthumous ‘works’? Bleh. Jane Lindskold is no Zalazny.
It’s a simple matter of economics. Novellas don’t sell. Novels do. So there is a long history in the field of novellas being inflated to novel length to make them sell. The original novellas are not reprinted because there is no economic reason to do so, and disincentives - in the form of confusing the reader - to doing so. It’s often true that the original novella is better than the expanded novel, but that’s an aesthetic, not a business, decision.
I can’t find any record of “…and Call Me Conrad” being reprinted in any anthology or collection. This Immortal, however, has been reprinted in seven editions over the years.
A search on BookFinder.com reveals numbers of copies of the Oct. and Nov. issues of F&SF for sale, most under $10.00 including shipping. Not too expensive for a collectible.
First, thank you everyone for you help. It is greatly appreciated. It’s going to come down to having to decide if the permanent copy or winner aspect of this collection I’m building is more important to me (hey, maybe I’ll get both ).
And I thought the $20 I paid for a battered copy of Double Star was painful.
Fortunately for my sanity I’ve been sticking with novels for my first pass and letting the notion of getting the short stories (which are naturally much harder to get) roll around in my head. I’ve read the bulk of the Hugo winning short stories from the early years thanks to some Asimov edited collections, but getting them in hard cover could be tricky.
One of the reasons why I’ve been avoiding the shorter form Hugos for the time being but those Worldcon voters in '66 played a cruel joke on me. Fortunately the Hugos split off the novella category a few years later so this doesn’t happen again.
Just as an addendum about those '66 Worldcon voters; apparently it was not “voters” but one voter.
As the story that I’ve now read goes, a Zelazny fan at that year’s Worldcon with more money than sense decided that they wanted him to get a Hugo. And so they bought many Worldcon memberships just to vote for “Conrad” and the end result was the tie.
I’m not certain if the story is true or not but if I find this person…
1966 is before even my time but since I started going to Worldcons in 1969 and I’ve never heard this story before, I have to wonder if there’s any truth to it.
Things look vastly different in hindsight and people always wonder how Zelazny’s book could have tied with the almighty Dune.
What people forget is that the book was a rewrite of two novels that had previously been serialized in Analog, “Dune World” in 1963-64 and “Prophet of Dune” in 1965. The novel version itself didn’t appear until December of 1965, and then only in a tiny edition from a small press in Philadelphia. It’s doubtful how many of the voters could possibly have read the whole novel when it was nominated.
Analog itself was in a down year. Dune was the only story from the magazine that made the Hugo ballot. If won for best magazine, and had two serials make the ballot, Heinlein’s “The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress” and E. E. Smith’s “Slylark DuQuesne.”
F&SF was having a fantastic year and so was Zelazny. Poul Anderson’s “Marque and Reprisal” made the Hugo ballot and Brian Aldiss’ “The Saliva Tree” won the Nebula for best novella. In 1965 Zelazny also published “The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Feet” in F&SF, which made the Hugo ballot and won the Nebula for best novelette. He had a major short novel, “The Furies,” serialized in Amazing. He also had stories in Galaxy, Fantastic, the Magazine of Horror, and yet another one in F&SF. He was the hottest writer in sf in 1965. And This Immortal conveniently appeared in both an SF Book Club edition and as a 40 cent Ace paperback in 1966 while Dune didn’t appear in paperback until 1967.
So you have a book by a must-read author that everybody has easy access to against a book that’s appeared over a three-year period in a magazine going downhill that not everybody was reading. When you look at it that way, it’s not as shocking that the two could wind up tied.
(Why did they both beat out Moon Is a Harsh Mistress? Because it too was a serialized novel from If, and the last two parts didn’t come out until 1966. It shouldn’t have been on the ballot at all. And it most definitely shouldn’t have been allowed to be on the ballot a second time in 1967, when it did win. If there was funny stuff going on in the balloting I’d point the finger there.)
Hindsight is great but the voters in 1966 didn’t have that luxury.
Hey, I love Random! If I had a male offspring, I would call him Random. “So Childe Random to the dark tower came, yeah, gun in one hand, blade in the other.”
Thanks for giving me some more insight on the period Exapno. I didn’t realize that Dune had the deck stacked against it going in.
I don’t suppose you can you explain how They’d Rather Be Right managed to win in 1955? I’ve read that it was a weak year but a book about how dianetics will make someone into an Objectivist Superman was a bit out there.
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