The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth by Roger Zelazny

He beholdeth all high things: he is a king over all the children of pride.ĥ. Pride and romance are complicating factors indeed, subtle challenges as embedded as any hooks in the depths of our characters:ģ4. Canst thou put an hook into his nose? or bore his jaw through with a thorn? Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook? or his tongue with a cord which thou lettest down?Ģ. The huge fishing raft Tensquare is nicely realized, but to attempt such a monstrous quarry is asking a lot even of advanced ocean-going engineering:ġ. Out of his mouth go burning lamps, and sparks of fire leap out. Who can open the doors of his face? his teeth are terrible round about.ġ9. Some deep-sea fish are fishers themselves with their luminescent lures, and leviathan perhaps the most dangerous fisher of all:ġ4. This is a story of a sea-hunt, the latest attempt to fish up one of the true leviathans of the Venusian deeps but the theme itself is ancient, as is the overt challenge - so I will sketch this by extending the title reference with some other pertinent Biblical verses. Shake the bottle for a gray colloid, then watch it whiten a little more. First, there are erratic curdles of white, then streamers. Dawn is like dumping milk into an inkwell. On the coasts, you can never tell where the sea ends and the sky begins. Venus at night is a field of sable waters. Further along I will contrast the two stories.

Both are award winners and multiply reprinted. In this aspect it is a kind of companion piece to Zelazny's first-written science-fiction story, 'A Rose for Ecclesiastes' (published 1963), which is set on the tolerably hospitable and inhabited desert Mars of earlier astronomy and science fiction. That is, it's an adventure story set on the oceanic Venus which pre-NASA space opera, like pre-NASA astronomy, guessed was hidden under that planet's perpetual cloud cover. 'The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth' is a deliberately anachronistic science-fiction novelet by Roger Zelazny. The Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny, Vol. The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth

The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth - Roger Zelazny

The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth by Roger Zelazny