In his stories, Roger Zelazny frequently portrayed familiar-seeming worlds with plausible magic systems and/or casually supernatural beings. His novels and short stories often involve characters from myth, depicted in the modern world. Zelazny was also apt to include numerous anachronistic present-day elements, such as cigarette-smoking (see below) and references to various drama classics into his fantasy and science-fiction works. His crisp, minimalistic dialogue also seems to be somewhat influenced by the style of wisecracking hardboiled crime authors, such as Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett. The tension between the ancient and the modern, surreal and familiar was what drove most of his work.
A very frequent motif in Zelazny's work is immortality or people who (have) become gods. The mythological traditions his fiction borrowed from include:
- Classical Greek mythology, in ...And Call Me Conrad
- Hindu mythology, in Lord of Light
- Norse mythology, in The Mask of Loki
- Egyptian mythology and some Greek mythology, in Creatures of Light and Darkness
- Christian mythology, in the novelette A Rose for Ecclesiastes
- Navajo mythology, in Eye of Cat
- Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos (on a more humorous note) in A Night in the Lonesome October
Additionally, elements from Norse, Japanese and Irish mythology, Arthurian legend as well as several references to real history appear in his magnum opus,
The Chronicles of Amber.
Two other personal characteristics that influenced his fiction were his expertise in martial arts and his addiction to tobacco. Zelazny became expert with the épée in college, and thus began a life-long study of several different martial arts, including Karate, Judo, Aikido (which he later taught as well, having gained a black belt), T'ai Chi, Tae Kwon Do, Hapkido, Hsing I, and Pa Kua. In turn, many of his characters ably and knowledgeably use similar skills whilst dispatching their opponents. Zelazny was also a passionate cigarette and pipe smoker (until he quit in the early '80s), so much so, that he made many of his protagonists heavy smokers as well. However, he quit in order to improve his cardiovascular fitness for the martial arts; once he had quit, characters in his later novels and short stories stopped smoking too.
Another characteristic of Zelazny's writing is that many of his protagonists had sufficient familiarity with other languages to be able to quote French, German, Italian or Latin aphorisms when the occasion seemed appropriate (or even inappropriate), although Zelazny himself did not speak any of those languages.
Aside from working with mythological themes, the most common recurring motif of Zelazny's is the "absent father" (or father-figure). Again, this occurs most notably in the Amber novels: in the first Amber series, the main protagonist Corwin searches for his lost, god-like father Oberon while in the second series, it is Corwin himself who is strangely missing. This somewhat Freudian theme runs through almost every Zelazny novel to a smaller or larger degree.
Roadmarks,
Doorways in the Sand,
Changeling,
Madwand,
A Dark Traveling; the short stories "Dismal Light", "Godson", "The Keys to December"; and the
Alien Speedway series all feature main characters who are either searching for or have lost their fathers. Zelazny’s father, Joseph, died unexpectedly in 1962 and never knew his son’s successes as a writer; this event may have triggered Zelazny's unconscious and frequent use of the absent father motif.
He also often experimented with form in his stories. The novel
Doorways in the Sand practices a flashback technique in which most chapters open with a scene, typically involving peril, not implied by the end of the previous chapter. Once the scene is established, the narrator backtracks to the events leading up to it, then follows through to the end of the chapter, whereupon the next chapter jumps ahead to another dramatic
non-sequitur.
In
Roadmarks, a novel about a road system that links all possible times, places and histories, the chapters that feature the main protagonist are all titled "One". Other chapters, entitled "Two", feature secondary characters, including original characters, pulp heroes, and real historical characters. The "One" storyline is fairly linear, whereas the "Two" storyline jumps around in time and sequence. After finishing the manuscript, Zelazny shuffled the "Two" chapters randomly among the "One" chapters in order to emphasize their non-linear nature relative to the storyline.
Creatures of Light and Darkness, featuring characters in the personae of Egyptian gods, uses a narrative voice entirely in the present tense; the final chapter is structured as a play, and several chapters take the form of long poems.
Zelazny also tended to write a short fragment, not intended for publication, as a kind of backstory for a major character, as a way of giving that character a life independent of the particular novel being worked on. At least one "fragment" was published, the short story
Dismal Light, originally a backstory for
Isle of the Dead's Francis Sandow. Sandow himself figures little in
Dismal Light, the main character being his son, who is delaying his escape from an unstable star system in order to force his distant father to come in and ask him personally. While
Isle of the Dead has Sandow living a life of irresponsible luxury as an escape from his personal demons, "Dismal Light" anchors his character as one who will face up to his responsibilities, however reluctantly.
Another common stylistic approach in his novels is the use of
mixed genres, whereby elements of each are combined freely and interchangeably.
Jack of Shadows and
Changeling, for example, revolve around the tensions between the two worlds of magic and technology.
Lord of Light, perhaps one of his most famous works, is written in the classic style of a mythic fantasy, while it is established early in the book that the story itself takes place on a colonized planet.