Review: “The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth” by Roger Zelazny

Thumbs up for The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth by Roger Zelazny. Science fiction/fantasy short stories.

First, let’s get this out of our way: if you can’t deal with dated gender roles or the fact that Zelazny’s characters all chain-smoke, move along. But you will be missing out on some of the most beautiful, strange, and unique science fiction ever written. As in any anthology, The Doors of His Face has some hits and some misses. But the hits can be devastating.

The time of terrible winds was still upon the land, as the world fought back against the fields of the machines. At night, great clouds of real estate smoothed and sculpted the stands of stone, and when the winds departed the desert would shimmer as if fresh-painted and the stones would stand like flames within the morning and its singing. After the sun came up into the sky and hung there for a time, the winds would begin again and a dun-colored fog would curtain the day. When the morning winds departed, Jarry and Sanza would stare out across the Deadland through the east window of the installation, for that was their favorite—the one on the third floor—where the stone that looked like a gnarly Normform waved to them, and they would lie upon the green couch they had moved up from the first floor, and would sometimes make love as they listened for the winds to rise again, or Sanza would sing and Jarry would write in the log or read back through it, the scribblings of friends and unknowns through the centuries, and they would purr often but never laugh, because they did not know how.
—from “The Keys to December”