In the last years of his life Roger Zelazny often spoke of the need to rescue the virtual reality concept from the rather scabby literary neighborhood it had come to inhabit. VR, he would say, was (at least potentially) the most wonderful of all human creations; it ought to be more than just a technological background for stories about alienated youth versus vicious megacorporations. I remember talking with him once about how no one had ever really come up to the standard of the very first VR story: Ray Bradbury's "The Veldt," published way back in the fifties in the old Saturday Evening Post.

Donnerjack represents Roger's attempt to write the novel he thought VR deserved. Sadly, he did not live to finish it.

As usual in a Zelazny novel, the premise is easy to state but the plot far too complicated to summarize in a short review. By the 22nd century, there exist what amount to parallel universes: the "real" world, called Verite, and the VR world, Virtu, which has developed a weird reality of its own, populated by self-aware programs and artificial intelligences ranging from brutal hominids to a pantheon of rather nasty gods. People from Verite can cross into Virtu and return, but Verite is off limits to the inhabitants of Virtu—though this law turns out to be full of loopholes, the quest for which, by various entities for various reasons, forms the McGuffin of this novel.

Virtu even has its own Hades, presided over by a personified Death. Here John D'Arcy Donnerjack, one of Virtu's creators, comes in an Orpheus-like search for his lost AI lover Ayradyss. Death agrees to free her in exchange for their first-born son. As procreation between a Verite human and a Virtu AI is supposedly impossible, Donnerjack agrees to the bargain; but after Ayradyss joins him at his Scottish castle in Verite (which shouldn't have been possible either), she becomes pregnant.

Soon after bearing their child, Ayradyss dies. A short time later, after a fight with Death, so does Donnerjack. Their son, Jay Donnerjack, is raised by a robot named Dack, with the help of various beings from Virtu, as well as the castle's resident ghosts. Eventually Jay becomes the key player in a cosmic—or rather intercosmic— conflict between the gods of Virtu, who have expansionist designs on Verite, and a coalition of persons and parties from both worlds.

There is considerable literary tradition for the posthumous collaboration, the attempt to complete a work interrupted by the death of the original author. Usually the collaboration is involuntary, the primary author having no say in who should have the job of finishing the work, or even whether this should be done at all. The finisher-upper may never have known the deceased, may not indeed be a contemporary; many generations of writers have produced endings to Charles Dickens's unfinished The Mystery of Edwin Drood.

(For some reason this sort of thing has been more common in the mystery genre than in speculative fiction. One recalls, however, Fred Pohl's completion of several Cyril Kornbluth stories—or, at a very different level, the Conan tales assembled from notes and fragments found in Robert Howard's effects.)

Some of these efforts rest on very dubious grounds. Robert Parker once published a "completion" of Raymond Chandler's Poodle Springs. Since Chandler had finished only four short chapters when he died, and left no notes or outline or even told anyone where he was going with the story, Poodle Springs was simply a Parker novel spot-welded to Chandler's insubstantial beginning.

A few authors, on the other hand, aware of the imminence of death, have left behind detailed outlines and notes so that their work could be completed as seamlessly as possible, and have even picked and coached their successors. I understand James Jones attempted something of the sort in his final days.

The history of Donnerjack places it between these extremes. Roger Zelazny, in the final stretches of his life, explicitly designated his friend and lover Jane Lindskold as the person he wanted to complete the book; and he talked with her a great deal about his vision, plot, and character and so on. However, he left little in the way of an outline or notes. (Here I think I should stop and declare my own personal interest in this book and its authors. Roger Zelazny was an old and dear friend, to whom my personal and professional debt is incalculable. Jane Lindskold is also a friend. I do know quite a bit about the history of Donnerjack; but the reader may want to allow for possible conflict of emotional interest on the reviewer's part.)

Donnerjack is presented by Avon as, in effect, the penultimate novel by the great Roger Zelazny, with a bit of filling-in and tidying-up by what's-her-name. The back of the dust jacket is taken up by a photo of Roger (a superb one; I confess that when I first picked up the book I broke down and wept like a fool in the public library) while Jane's likeness, about the size of a postage stamp, is hidden inside, on the rear endpaper. Roger's name also appears in slightly more prominent lettering.

All this is deceptive marketing, of a cynical sort. The fact is that only about a third of the published text is the work of Roger Zelazny. Jane Lindskold wrote the rest.

Now there is a kind of truth beneath the flakery: Donnerjack is very much Roger's book. The conception, the basic plot, the characters, all were his, and Jane tried conscientiously to write in Roger's distinctive style. It is indeed a measure of her dedication, and a high tribute to her skill, that most reviewers have taken the packaging at face value—or else have frankly admitted that they couldn't tell which parts of the book were written by whom.

But there is more to Jane's contribution than mere clever pastiche. Most posthumous collaborators feel required to imitate the primary author in all respects, even to copying the deceased's faults and failings. And Jane, who had loved Roger, could hardly have been blamed for refusing to admit he had any shortcomings at all.

To her great credit, she not only had the honesty to see Roger's weaknesses as a writer, but the courage to do something about them. The natural tendency in these projects is to treat whatever portion the departed did write as sacrosanct, and write around it for better or worse; but Jane boldly disassembled Roger's beginning chapters and rearranged the whole structure of the novel. This is another reason it is so hard to tell who wrote what; Roger's original text is not printed as an integral whole, but is distributed in hunks and chunks through the present book.

More boldly still, she completely rewrote certain parts, and threw out bits that didn't work. She acted, that is, as a genuine collaborator, not just a posthumous amanuensis—which was exactly what Roger had asked her to do.

And Donnerjack is a better novel because she did. For one major thing, the women are all credible, fully-realized characters—something Roger, bless him, never in his life managed to bring off—and many important scenes are convincingly rendered from their viewpoint. In general, there is a depth of characterization and motive that was often missing, or thinly and flatly handled, in all but the very best of Roger's work.

Jane added something else, too, something unique, though God knows she would have foregone it if she could. Death is a major theme throughout the book—how much of this owed to Roger's growing consciousness of his own mortality, I can only guess— and there are several scenes in which a character has to deal with the death of a loved one. Of this Jane, who had lived with Roger through the last year of his life and had lain beside him night after night knowing that the cancer could claim him at any time, had an all too profound knowledge; and so we have such splendid and terrible passages as:

Ayradyss...heard her new husband stir in his sleep, turned and saw through the window curtain how his arms reached for her and did not find her, saw how he woke to greater awareness and to horrible fear. "Ayra?" he called and his voice carried the bone-shivering terror that only one who has lost a lover to Death can know.

For all that, Donnerjack remains primarily and unmistakably a Zelazny novel. The great big sprawling tale, the razzle-dazzle prose, the countless subplots and sub-subplots that often overwhelm the main story, the piled-up details of the created worlds—as with so many Zelazny books, you keep having to stop and turn back and search the text you've already read, trying to identify this character or that premise, because who the hell can keep track of all this stuff?—classic Roger, all the way. Here's the tough, smart, rather detached hero; the mixture of implausible science and outright magic (best, as usual, to read according to David Letterman's line: "Look, just buy the premise, I promise you'll love the bit"); the hell-for-leather rides through scary places; the great battle scenes, by Wagner out of Peckinpah; even the modern avatars of ancient gods—Babylonian, this time—more technological than divine in nature. This last, by the way, I found rather too self-derivative; recurring themes in an author's work are all very well, but, as Hunter Thompson observed, you're in trouble when you start stealing your own material.

One Zelaznian trademark in short supply—and not everyone will be distressed by this—is the excruciatingly bad joke, to which Roger was addicted. (Did anyone who read Lord of Light fail to groan at, "Then the fit hit the Shan"?) For this Jane can hardly be blamed; it's not something that can be learned or copied—it's either a gift or a character flaw, depending on your viewpoint. Still, there is no shortage of humor, some of it very good.

And at least Jane was kind enough to spare us a couple of Roger's most annoying mannerisms: the use of technical fencing terms, and the tossing-in of words and phrases in French. (Except for the silly "Verite" and "Virtu," which set my teeth on edge every time I read them.)

Readers new to Roger Zelazny's work should not start with Donnerjack; it is not his best book, nor even the best of his many collaborations. Hard-core Zelazny fans will surely like it very much, while people who have been irritated by all the discursiveness and frequently over-the-top prose of his previous novels will be just as irritated by this one. For that matter, this is not a good starting point for the reader interested in Jane Lindskold's fiction; her usual style is quite different.

For everyone else: Donnerjack isn't a great book, as Lord of Light was great. It isn't even in a class with Eye of Cat, or—perhaps a more appropriate comparison—Deus Irae, that he did with Philip Dick. But it's a damned good book, and fun to read; and I think Roger, in whatever real or virtual world his shade may inhabit, has cause to be pleased.