The Story So Far

Fred Cassidy has been going to college for the past 13 years and has not gotten a degree yet, because he doesn’t want one. He’s been exploiting a loophole in his uncle’s will, which says that he’s to mooch off an allowance until he gets his degree. Well. Aside from his latest academic adviser pushing him out the door, he has a much bigger problem on his hands, which is that a precious alien artifact called the star-stone has gone missing, and Fred’s the only person who can get it back. Why? Because Fred and his former roommate, Hal, had a replica of the stone, which through a convoluted series of events involving Paul Byler, Fred’s former geology professor, had gotten swapped out with the real thing. Multiple parties want the stone, including a much-angered Paul, a couple of hired goons, and some interplanetary alien cops. Mind you that these aliens are not all of the same race, but rather are members of a coalition of intelligent races that came into contact with humanity and made a deal with us. As part of a non-aggression deal the alien coalition had given the UN a couple artifact, including the stone, while the UN handed over the genuine Mona Lisa and the British Crown Jewels. Of course, since the stone’s gone missing, said non-aggression deal threatens to go down the shitter. Fred finds allies in two alien cops named Ragma and Charv, whom we first meet disguised as mammals out of the Australian outback. There’s another still-friendly but less useful alien in disguise named Sibla, who tries probing Fred’s mind but has a hard time doing so, on account of Fred being drunk. Getting plastered is useful for when you’re up against possibly nefarious telepaths.

Another ally of Fred’s is a mysterious voice that communicates with him inside his head, but only when he’s drunk; on the one hand this might be an elaborate hallucination, but also the presence is coming from somewhere. The presence advises Fred to get a hold of the Rhennius machine, which is the other artifact the alien coalition had given to humanity. Activating the Rhennius machine has something to do with the presence and may be a clue to getting the star-stone. Fred runs into Merimee, an eccentric scientist (like Paul) who’s also an old buddy of Fred’s uncle’s. Turns out the Rhennius machine reverses one’s perceptions, including sight and even taste. Signs appear to be written backward (a neat little typographical trick on Zelazny’s part) and what tasted good before now tastes bad (and vice versa). In what now must seem like a permanent stupor, ironically relieved by drinking copious amounts of alcohol, Fred crashes at Hal’s place after the latter confesses to having a spat with his wife Mary. The problem, the two lads find out, is that Mary has been kidnapped by the aforementioned hired goons. The second installment with a threeway confrontation between Fred/Hal, the goons, and Paul, who has shown up with an agenda of his own. Mary, for someone who probably has little to no idea what’s going on, is taking this all rather well. Meanwhile, Fred takes a bullet to the chest for his troubles, so how he survives this is a good question.

Enhancing Image

When I finished this novel I thought of it as being Zelazny’s beer-and-wine novel, because of how much drinking there is; but at the same time it should be mentioned that there’s ultimately as much casual smoking here as in other ’60s and ’70s Zelazny works. (He eventually quit smoking, but up until the ’80s Zelazny seemed to share the popular French view on smoking.) Doorways in the Sand is less intellectual than some earlier Zelazny novels, and indeed comes off as less sober, not helped by us being stuck in Fred’s shoes the whole time—yes, even during the recap sections. This is the kind of book you would read to see the New Wave’s influence on SF writing in a less demanding and less serious mode. The irony is that because it’s less serious than, say, the average Robert Silverberg novel from around the same time, this novel has aged better than most of its peers. The comedy is of an old-school slapstick sort, including the occasional pun; and while there’s a bit of language, there isn’t much of it, not to mention that there’s also very little in the way of sex stuff, which otherwise reared its head a little too often in novels from the ’70s. Even for 1975 the conceit of the plot is rather old-fashioned, but it’s heightened by Zelazny’s sense of humor and his playing with typography and perspective. Also helping is Fred being one of Zelazny’s more charming protagonists, admittedly having to compete with some of the more insufferable and egotistical protagonists in New Wave-era SF. Fred is a lazy bum who wants to mooch off his uncle’s allowance forever, but at the same time he likes to have fun and he’s not in favor of rubbing his education in people’s faces.

Now as to how Fred survived the end of the last installment, the explanation is basically this: his heart wasn’t in the right place. He was shot in what would have been his heart, but it had accidentally missed. What’s no less miraculous is that not only does Fred survive but he seems to have acquired Wolverine healing powers, since the gaping wound in his chest has healed itself in beyond record time. This has to do with the Rhennius machine, but it also has to do with the stone and where it is. The big twist of the novel is twofold: that the stone is actually sentient, and that it’s been lurking inside Fred during the events of the novel as a symbiote. The star-stone, also called Speicus, is like an organic computer that processes information, hence its ability to communicate with Fred. As to how Fred got the stone inside him in the first place, it has to do with a party and—you guessed it—a little too much drinking. Fred’s only able to recall this happening at all while under a mix of interrogation and the star-stone being “turned on,” (in context it’s one of Zelazny’s classic puns) because he was almost dead drunk at the time. The stone is a benign parasite whose livelihood depends on its host also being alive, hence its working to protect Fred. Bit of a deus ex machina for how Fred is able to survive everything that’s happened to him, but I would mind if it more if it was a more serious story, but thankfully Doorways in the Sand is not a very serious novel. We’re talking about a novel where a guy with a fetish for climbing heights (I’m not kidding) has been getting by as a college undergrad for 13 years because his uncle’s in cold sleep—that is, until said uncle returns from his nap in this installment.

This is a novel about finding an important dingus, but it’s also a novel about education. Doorways in the Sand is not a bildungsroman, namely because Fred is an adult (he’s about thirty years old), but this is still ultimately about a man’s education. Fred is so determined to be a student forever that he almost quite literally has to have his degree (it’s actually a PhD and not a bachelor’s degree, the college finding a loophole to give him a degree without having him properly graduate) and a job handed to him. If this novel is about anything (granted that it certainly is not About Something™, in that it does not ask serious questions or make observations about the human condition), it’s about knocking down the wall between what we think of as “education,” which is really an institution separated from the outside world, and of course said outside world. Fred has to gain some real-world experience in an unusually hard way, which involved nearly getting killed a few times (as I said in a previous installment review, Fred fulfills one of the classic detective tropes by getting the shit beaten out of him), but ultimately this trial-by-combat worked out for him. He has a PhD and a job with the UN, and as he says close to the novel’s end, “The fool delivered the final blow.” Fittingly for a comic novel, the “fool” comes out on top. On a totally surface level, like how one might enjoy gourmet chocolate (just watch those calories), this is one of Zelazny’s most satisfying novels.

A Step Farther Out

In his review of Doorways in the Sand, Spider Robinson expressed mild disappointment with what was then Zelazny’s latest novel while also acknowledging that it was quite good—had nearly anyone else’s name been attached to it. After Zelazny’s run of winning awards and critical appraisal left and right in the ’60s, the ’70s were shakier ground for him, partly because of his Amber series, but also, following the burning-out of the New Wave movement in the early ’70s, Zelazny’s SF no longer seemed so impressive. It’s a shame, because when taken as the somewhat unserious novel that it is, Doorways in the Sand is quite fun. Zelazny himself was fond of it, and if you’re looking for a zany and fast-moving SF-detective novel then it’s easy to see his fondness for it.

See you next time.