Interview with Jane Lindskold

Jane Lindskold (b. 1962) is a science-fiction and fantasy writer who had a close relationship with Roger Zelazny, author of The Chronicles of Amber. The two began corresponding in 1988. Her literary study of his work, Roger Zelazny, appeared in 1993. In 1994, Roger left his wife Judy to live with Jane for what ended up being the final year of his life. Roger died in June of 1995.

Jane knew many people in Roger’s life at that time, including: George R. R. Martin (friend and fellow writer), other fellow writers, Kirby McCauley (Roger’s literary agent, whose sister Kay was Jane’s agent), Judy Zelazny, and Roger’s three children (Trent, Devin and Shannon). Jane had a front row seat to the sf-fantasy literary world of the ’80’s and ’90’s. In my quest to fill gaps in my Amber knowledge from that time period, she was the perfect guide.

I’m currently wrapping up my podcast, All Roads Lead to Amber, and plan to cover the Betancourt prequels (the Dawn of Amber series). There was a fair amount of controversy over these books at the time, so I have been eager to learn more about the circumstances that led to their writing and publication. I also wanted to pick Jane’s brain about Amber, in general, and about what might have been going on inside Roger’s head in his later years.

I spoke with her for more than an hour over a video conference. She was incredibly generous with her time and recollections, and I’m honored to carry these memories forward. 

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JK: The prequel to the Amber series, Dawn of Amber, was greenlit after Roger’s death, against his explicit wishes when he was alive. It was published in September 2002, but there was online chatter about it in late 2001 (when George R. R. Martin weighed in with his strong objection). When did you first hear about the project?

JL: Probably when George called me, about the time he started complaining online. 
He phoned me up from whatever con where he’d heard the rumor, and was anxious and miserable and unhappy. And I had to say, "George, I can't do anything.” And that was that.

JK:  What was your own reaction when you learned the project was going forward?

JL: I didn't like it. I was sad. But I also knew there wasn't anything I could do. So why make a hullabaloo? George is a fan first -- he's a fanboy who just happened to become a really great writer. 
So he reacted as a fanboy would. 

JK: Betancourt wrote that "Zelazny's heirs, Zelazny's agent, and a publisher" agreed to the project. Can you clarify how Roger's estate was structured?

JL: It’s a little bit awkward when people talk about the “estate.” 
It sounds so professional and put-together and organized. What you're dealing with here is: Roger had left Judy, roughly a year before he died. She was shocked to find out that he had another relationship going. So, when we talk about the estate, what we're talking about is a woman who is extremely angry. Devin might have been officially an adult by then, but Trent had just gotten out of high school (Roger and I went to his graduation). Shannon was still in high school. 
So the estate is not, you know, well balanced and supportive of the literary legacy of Roger Zelazny. It is an angry woman, and her minor children, two of whom are still completely dependent on her.

JK: Ok, so that’s the “heirs.” The publisher was Byron Preiss, who had overseen the publishing of the Amber comics before Roger died. So in terms of the sequels project, did Preiss reach out to Judy? Or was it her idea to monetize the property?

JL: Well, she was indifferent. She never read any of [Roger’s] work. 
The only time I ever went out with her socially was when I came to New Mexico to interview Roger for the literary biography I was writing. You know, she was surprised at how young I was, and I mentioned that I had had a four year scholarship, so I'd gotten my Master's and PhD done in the four years I had scholarship for. And she says, "Oh, like that character in one of Roger's books." 
And this was a reference to Doorways in the Sand, in which a character stays in college indefinitely (because until he graduates, he can draw on a trust fund). And Roger just kind of winced, like, you know, “boy, did she just show that she knows nothing?” 

Now in all fairness to Judy, Roger did say she encouraged him to give going full-time as a writer a try. He never said whether this was because she believed he could make a living, but she didn't try to stop him from moving away from his secure government job.

JK: So then who was Roger's literary agent at the time of his death? Who was basically handling the Amber property?

JL: His agent was a brother and sister team, Kirby McCauley (d. 2014) and Kay McCauley (d. 2000). And they were actually my agents as well. 
I mostly worked with Kay, and Kirby mostly worked with Roger. And every so often Kay would drop a hint here or there as to what was going on, but she was very, very professional about not discussing one client's business with another. But I think the impression I got from her was, indeed, that Byron Preiss approached Judy, and Judy was happy to take the money. 


But if you take a look at how Roger’s estate was handled, I think the evidence is that unless there was money in it for her, Judy did nothing. Most of his works are out of print. They did not go back into print until Trent developed a friendship with Warren Lapine. Warren is a huge fan of Roger's stuff, and Warren started bringing them back into print.

JK: There's been speculation that other writers were approached about the prequels before Betancourt. Do you know if anyone else was seriously considered?

I don't know if anyone else was approached, though I strongly suspect that Steve Brust might have been, and I know Steve would have refused. 

JK: Neil Gaiman has recounted a conversation where he and Steve Brust suggested an Amber anthology of other-people-writing-Amber-stories, and Roger "puffed on his pipe and said—extremely firmly—that he didn't want anyone else to write Amber stories but him." Were you present for conversations like this? 

JL: Neil's account is accurate. Roger told me about that himself. 
This is the time period when shared-world anthologies and stuff were very common. (Not sure about the pipe… by the time I met Roger, he’d quit smoking.) 
But basically, it was a time when there were a lot of short anthologies, such as Thieves’ World, Heroes in Hell, Borderlands, and others. So it would be a pretty logical thing to ask. 
And when I spoke to Roger, that would have been in about 1989 because I was just finishing up grad school.

JK: I also understand that you yourself proposed writing in the Amber universe much earlier, and Roger declined permission. All in all… what was your clearest understanding about Roger’s feelings toward others writing in Amber, toward the end of his life?

JL: In my case, I figured Roger was done with them. What I suggested to him was something that wouldn't have violated any canon. I would have taken a look at what the sisters were doing, while the guys were dismissing them as incompetent and uninterested. And he wrote back that he was not done with Amber, but thank you very much. But it started our correspondence. But no, I don't think he ever wanted anyone else writing an Amber. 


JK: And why do you think that was? Was it because he had future plans and he was worried people would block him off from doing something? Or was it more personal, like, I just don't want people messing with my stuff? 

JL: I think it was very much he might have had future plans and didn't want to be blocked. 
He did make an agreement with Erick Wujcik for the Amber Diceless Role Playing Game, where fans who were playing in the game could publish -- specifically in the Amberzine -- any of their game diaries. But they could not use any of the main characters. So there might be an unacknowledged kid of Brand, say, but none of the main characters could be used. 

He was very protective of his works. 
He did give two people permission to write in Amber, actually: myself, and his friend from childhood, Carl Yoke. But Carl and I both -- knowing that this had been given with the understanding that Roger assumed he would be around to make sure nothing went sideways -- spoke on the phone and agreed we neither of us would do that. 

JK: When did he give that permission to you and to Carl? 

JL: 
I don't know when with Carl, but me verbally, you know. Or in a letter, I don't even remember. But the fact is that Carl and I knew what Roger really wanted, and we both agreed we weren't going to mess with that. 

JK: So the prequels-- I have read them, it sounds like you haven't. As an Amber fan, I find them barely readable. One reads them as a kind of intellectual exercise. They focus almost exclusively on Oberon and Dworkin and there are no other classic Amber characters. There's all kinds of ways you could imagine prequels going, but -- I was wondering if that was contractual? It sounds like Judy wouldn't have had the wherewithal to say, for example: you can only have these characters and not those characters. 

JL: Kirby would have. I would not be surprised if Kirby deliberately set it up as a prequel with the understanding that it would not in any way involve anything that would go forward from that point. 
So in that way, Roger's works would remain isolated, so that if there were any future interests -- say, comics or movies or whatever -- that there could be a very clear line drawn between the different projects.

JK: 
Yeah, makes sense. 

JL: Kirby was a very good agent. I believe he's the one who created the rights reversion clause that is now standard. So I am absolutely certain he would have done what he could. But an agent can't refuse to do a job. 
If Byron Preiss came and made an offer, and Judy said, "Go for it”, they couldn't say no. You can't. It's their job to do what their client wants. So I'm guessing they did their best to make sure it would not muddle with Roger's work, while at the same time dealing with the offer given to their current client. 

JK: 
Right. But I wonder about the Visual Guide to Castle Amber project. Were you familiar with that one? 
Because that was while Roger was alive, but it’s also pretty terrible (again, from a fan perspective). 
But he seemed okay with it. I mean, I know in the end he blew up the palace as a way of making sure the Visual Guide would be kind of invalidated. I've read about that. But I am still surprised -- like, you read in his letters that he was fairly mercenary about it, trying to make money licensing Amber. And as bad as it was, it was an authorized project.

JL: There was some level of “I don't love this.” He had mixed feelings about it. For example, he made a passing comment about Corwin looking like--

JK: 
Timothy Dalton? 

JL: Yeah, the new James Bond… and the artist took that literally. There wasn't enough discussion. I don't think Neil Randall was terribly thrilled about that, because I talked to him. I met Roger right about the time the book first came out [Visual Guide was published in 1988] when I went to Lunacon, and the original drawings of the character portraits were there, and I talked to the artist who did the character portraits [Todd Cameraon Hamilton], and he was saying, "Well, Roger told me, so…” But I think that was more a misunderstanding than, you know: I would cast this actor in the role.

JK: I mean, the drawings are sort of a small aspect of Visual Guide. There are the renderings of the actual palace which are not true to the first books. And some of the narrative that gets spun up around the characters; you know, Gerard played football for the University of Alabama, etc. It's all kind of goofy.

JL: Yeah, I think Roger was-- remember, once again, he's sole earner for a family with growing kids. 
He had every hope that his kids would be going to college. So he's looking ahead at future expenses, and also: nothing makes the fans happier than having a new toy to play with. Even if they disagree with it completely.

JK: Yeah.

JL: 
So it's a way to keep Amber vibrant. 

JK: And after that, is there anything else to say about the family dynamics, when it comes to carrying the literary legacy?

JL: Trent [who was a writer] had been handling things, then he became very ill [Trent died in 2025]. So Shannon, I think, has had everything dumped on her shoulders. She loved her dad like crazy. 
If you've ever read her essay in the collection Shadows and Reflections, it's one of the best portraits of the Roger that I knew. You know, so many people write about being Roger's friend [but] didn't know the guy who sang songs as he walked around. They just wanted Roger to be an Amber character. Shannon, though… she loved him for who he was, and I think really regretted that he died when he did. 

Earlier this year, she got in touch with me and asked if she could have copies of a couple of things that she couldn't find … because she had decided the way she wanted to commemorate the 30th anniversary of Rogers's death was to read about him as a person, rather than his stuff. 

JK: Ok, next I really want to pick your brain a little bit about Amber specifically, which would be the most fun for me. I'm a little bit hardcore fanboy myself when it comes to Amber… 

JL: Yeah :)

JK: So you wrote in the introduction to Road to Amber that you had “mixed reactions to Merlin and to Zelazny’s changed conception of Amber.” And I was really delighted to read that from someone who was obviously very close to him, because I feel like I've spent my whole life in a lot of ways, kind of going like, why did he do that? You know -- there's so many fans out there who say: “I like the Merlin series even better; the Merlin series is great.” And I just don’t agree, and I have my reasons. 
But can you elaborate on why you said that? And what did you mean by “changed conception”?

JL: Okay. I really liked the mythic and archetypal feeling of the first Amber books. I like the feeling. I like Corwin. I liked his poetic approach to things. 
I mean, I still think, “I wonder in what shadow silver roses grow?” 

And then all of a sudden [in the Merlin books] we get this shallow, superficial, idiot computer geek. And you just kept waiting for Corwin to come back, and he didn't. And then we had the Courts of Chaos that were anything but. Except with a lot of material that was great for, you know, visual special effects. 
So it just didn't resonate for me. 

One of the places Roger and I connected was that both of us came to science fiction and fantasy through folklore and mythology. You know, I'd read the Iliad and the Odyssey by the time I was nine, because nobody told me I couldn't. 
And I felt like the Merlin books really lost that mythic sense. 

JK: How much do you think was deliberate on his part, versus just missing the mark?

JL: I would not meet him until the project [the Merlin books] was underway, so I can't speak to that. But I think the influences were different. Roger was a different person. 
He was a father, and I think that while the [Corwin] books are very much a son’s look at an absent father, the Merlin books are -- one might almost look at them as the absent father looking at the son. So he was a different person. And his relationship with his dad was very important to him. Like Shannon really adored Roger, Roger adored his father. And his father's death was sudden and really threw him badly. So I think in some ways, the Amber books are colored not only by Roger's interest in Jacobean drama, and a lot of the moods and tropes, but they're colored by a son trying to come to terms with a father he never really got to know. 

JK: Right, his father died in 1965, not long before he started writing Nine Princes. Also, he was in that terrible car crash with his first wife. And then along comes this book that starts with a car crash, and the missing father Oberon.

JL: Yes, and he told me that he was already beginning to have second thoughts about that first marriage, but, you know, he'd been told to go ahead, so he did. But yes, his dad's death hit him hard, and I think the Corwin books are very colored by the theme of a father, and a son trying to understand the father he never would get to know. 
And Corwin does, indirectly, when he finds out that Oberon had been Ganelon. But by the time he wrote the first of the Merlin books, we're dealing with a whole different universe. He's not over it, but he's dealt with it.


And by then he also had fans asking lots of questions. That does influence a writer, even if only not to follow what everybody is telling you. I'm sure that when Roger started the Merlin books, he had had lots of people telling him what he should do. And he was probably pretty determined that he was not going to do what anybody told him to do. 

JK: Going back to the mythical quality of Amber. For you, how did the world change between the Corwin books and the Merlin books? 
Like, beyond, the character that didn't resonate? 

JL: How easy it was to travel in Shadow. You know, in the Amber books, reaching Amber is nearly impossible. By the Merlin books, people seem to have commuter rail passes. I think you mentioned in one of your essays the fact that, you know, Earth is this unimportant, nowhere shadow, and now it seems everybody has some sort of link to our Earth and our timeline. That didn't ever work for me. 
I mean, later, he kind of found a wiggle room around it… that if an Amberite lives in a shadow long enough, they begin to generate a stronger reality. But… yeah, that didn't work. 

Walking the pattern seemed to be way too easy. 

JK: Everybody can just make Trumps now… 

JL: Everybody makes Trumps, as opposed to them being these rare, strange things. Yeah, I didn't like any of that. 
I liked when it was strange, and mystic, and hard. 

JK: And then, so as far as the women go, I'd love to hear your idea about what the sisters would have been doing? 

JL: I can't remember in detail, but I would have definitely-- when Bleys goes off the cliffs and falls into the ocean, isn't it logical that Llewella would have been the one to pull him out? I would have really liked to bring Llewella into the foreground, instead of this mournful sort of demi-mermaid. Make her a more potent and powerful character. Fiona: there was a huge amount of potential with her. And I think Roger himself began to give Flora…. show that she's been hiding behind the dumb blonde mask as a means of manipulating people and events. So that's the kind of thing I wanted to do, basically. 

JK: Related -- do you feel like he got better at writing the female characters in the Merlin series, or do you feel like it was more the same? 

JL: 
I think he got better. He wasn't a misogynist, he was just a man of his generation. 
I don't know if you read the literary biography I wrote of him -- oh boy did his male fans get mad at me! Questioning the great man. 
Dear God. You know, Roger never minded. I think Roger liked it. 

JK: What do you know about the TV series, if anything? 


JL: I know nothing. I'd love to see it done. Since Roger let there be several comic books, the Amber role playing game, the Visual Guide to Castle Amber… I feel like he would not have had any problem with a TV series or movie adaptation, especially if it remained relatively true to the soul of his work. I don't think he’d have any problem with things being updated in terms of, say, people smoking less, or maybe a little bit more racial diversity among Oberon's children. 
I don't think that would have bothered him at all, as long as the story is the same. So I'd love to see it done. I'd love to see his work out there. 
I'd love to see if a new generation could get attached to it … or whether it's past its sell-by date. I just don't know.

JK: Well, I'm hopeful as well. 
I think there are a lot of fans who have a visceral reaction like: no, no, no, that would be horrible. But as someone who's kind of a purist and, you know, does get very worked up about things that I don't think are true to the original … I agree 100% with you. I would like to see it, even if it's updated. Because at least it would drive people to read the books again, and keep it alive. 
And I do think it would be hard to do. It's a first person narrative, so much of it takes place in Corwin's head, and maybe they just can't find the right way in. 

JL: It would almost be inevitable that it would have to be told out of sequence. Because it would be so claustrophobic to just be Corwin muddling about. I think it would be a lot of fun to have visuals of various people's versions of the car accident. 

JK: 
Yes! I think that's absolutely the heart and soul of it. I would start with the car accident; it'd be a great opening. Then, like modern murder mysteries, or heist movies, where you think it went one way, and then they go back and they play the whole sequence now that some new piece of information that's come to light… like, I was hiding the jewel in my pocket the whole time... It does have a kind of whodunit feel, you know?

JL: Roger loved that kind of mystery.

JK: Well, I think our time is up. This has been so special. 
I really, really appreciate it. 

JL: I'm always happy to keep Roger's legacy green. Bye!