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    The Last Defender of Camelot
    The Last Defender of Camelot
    The Last Defender of Camelot
    Ebook36 pages36 minutes

    The Last Defender of Camelot

    By Roger Zelazny

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    About this ebook

    After the fall of the Table Round, Launcelot DuLac fled England a broken man awaiting death. But death never came for him; instead, cursed, he has continued his search for the Holy Grail down through the ages, seeking a redemption that he fears he will never find. A chance meeting with Morgan LeFay makes him question his curse and his destiny, for Merlin is about to awake and Launcelot will be called on one last time to defend the ideals of King Arthur and the Table Round, because he is the last defender of Camelot.

    By the author of the 'Chronicles of Amber'!

    Roger Zelazny was a science fiction and fantasy writer, a six time Hugo Award winner, and a three time Nebula Award Winner. He published more than forty novels in his lifetime. His first novel 'This Immortal', serialized in 'The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction' under the title '...And Call Me Conrad', won the Hugo Award for best novel. 'Lord of Light', his third novel, also won the Hugo award and was nominated for the Nebula award. He died at age 58 from colon cancer. Zelazny was posthumously inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2010.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWilder Publications, Inc.
    Release dateDec 23, 2019
    ISBN9781515442844
    The Last Defender of Camelot
    Author

    Roger Zelazny

    Roger Zelazny burst onto the SF scene in the early 1960s with a series of dazzling and groundbreaking short stories. He is the winner of six Hugo Awards, including for the novels This Immortal and the classic Lord of Light; he is also the author of the enormously popular Amber series, starting with Nine Princes in Amber. In addition to his Hugos, he went on to win three Nebula Awards over the course of a long and distinguished career. He died on June 14, 1995.

    Read more from Roger Zelazny

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    Reviews for The Last Defender of Camelot

    4/5

    120 ratings8 reviews

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    • 2/5
      Meh. If there is some "urban fantasy" bent to this book it escapes me. The first few very brief stories are brilliant. The Four Horseman especially grabbed my attention and made me glad it was re-printed. But "He Who Shapes" put me to sleep during lunchtime (embarrassing) because it just seemed that Zelazny could not really put a point to his endless descriptions or inner thoughts. And "Damnation Alley" - couldn't handle any more destruction in something written under the guise of "adventure story." Have too much of a problem with Man vs. Nature and Nature losing without another thought to upsetting the balance.
    • 4/5
      Great collection of short stories!!!
    • 2/5
      (Original Review, 1980-12-12)"The Last Defender of Camelot" is not really a new Zelazny book, but is a collection of short stories and novelettes from the very beginning of his career til now. I didn't much care for the title story (Merlin, not Lancelot was always my favorite Arthurian character), but they're all worth reading unless you have them in other collections. Zelazny likes to put his off-hand heroes in situations that are the stuff of legend, and this gets out of hand cases like "Damnation Alley" where the hero is basically a motorcycle thug (aside: everybody, but everybody smokes a lot in his books. Is he himself a chain smoker?), but usually it's just to let you know that he doesn't take this stuff too seriously. He does take it seriously in "He Who Shapes", the original from which the novel "The Dream Master" was derived, and the best story in the book. But then, I'm a sucker for erudition; other people might find the story pretentious.You wander through the stores, opening and closing, skimming the blurbs, trying to recall snatches of reviews, attempting to parse out how much of what you've heard was meretricious (Quiz for the day: what does "meretricious" mean? (Hint: it does NOT mean "having merit.")[2018 EDIT: This review was written at the time as I was running my own personal BBS server. Much of the language of this and other reviews written in 1980 reflect a very particular kind of language: what I call now in retrospect a “BBS language”.]
    • 3/5
      Ah yes - this is definitely a book of its time - semi-mystical writing, tight writing.As always in an anthology such as this, some stories are better written than others. My favorite was "Damnation Alley" - a story set in apocalyptic America - where an outbreak of disease in Boston needs help from Los Angeles, and fast. The only one capable of driving across the country is a convicted, devil may care felon. The story, "For a Breath, I Tarry", is about a machine, trying to understand humanity, after humanity is gone. The writing is a bit over the top, but the story itself is interesting.Generally, the stories in the collection are short, there a few that I suspect were amazing when they first published, but generally, they didn't really work for today's world.
    • 5/5
      Some really great stories. "For a Breath, I Tarry" is my favorite. "Last Defender" also very good.
    • 5/5
      The back cover describes them as strange and beautiful stories and that's what they are. Some of the best of the best are here but let me vote for "The Engine at Heartspring's Center" a story about a cyborg that you will never forget and "For a Breath I Tarry" a story that will change the way you think about computers. The more well-known story "The Stainless Steel Leech" is a must for vampire-fiction lovers.
    • 4/5
      A Thing of Terrible Beauty (Written under the name Harrison Denmark)-Auto-Da-Fe (Original, mechanical toredor, with cars)-Comes Now the Power (Emotionally charged, memory transferance & a dying little girl.)-For A Breath I Tarry (Original, Great Plot, Great development)-Halfjack (Guy is half human, half machine and has to pick between his human babe and his machine babe. Really short, not much to it.)-Horseman! ()-Is There a Demon Lover in the House? (Jack the ripper pops into the future and just happens to sit in on a snuff flick. Hilarious.)-No Award (Not very original and kind of predictable. Not your average Zelzany.)-Passion Play (Good, kinda funny, ironic, robots make car crash into a ritual after humans are dead.)-Stand Pat, Ruby Stone (Pretty cool idea, strange mating habits of an insect-like alien species. 3 get married, 2 fight to the death winner eats other one. One is mutilated and used as a nest.)-The Engine at Heartspring's Center (Cool writing, sounds a little like Logan's Run. Great images.)-The Game of Blood & Dust ()-The Last Defender of Camelot (Good, not great- could have beeen a novel about Lancelot's travels through time. Too simple in short story format.)-The Stainless Steel Leech (Cool, a robot vampire and a real vampire hangout after all humanity is dead.)-Damnation Alley (This is the original novella Then he wrote the full length story of the same name.)-He Who Shapes (This is the original novella that won the Nebulla. Then he wrote the full length _The Dream Master_.)
    • 5/5
      Great short stories and also a great paperback cover! (Well, the cover was great in 1980, when I bought mine, anyway.)

    Book preview

    The Last Defender of Camelot - Roger Zelazny

    The Last Defender of

    Camelot

    By Roger Zelazny

    ©2020 Amber Limited

    Cover Image © Can Stock Photo/rolffimages/grandfailure

    The Last Defender of Camelot is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, locales or institutions is entirely coincidental.

    All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission except for brief quotations for review purposes only.

    ISBN 13: 978-1-5154-4284-4

    frontispiece

    The Last Defender of Camelot

    The three muggers who stopped him that October night in San Francisco did not anticipate much resistance from the old man, despite his size. He was well-dressed, and that was sufficient.

    The first approached him with his hand extended. The other two hung back a few paces.

    Just give me your wallet and your watch, the mugger said. You’ll save yourself a lot of trouble.

    The old man’s grip shifted on his walking stick. His shoulders straightened. His shock of white hair tossed as he turned his head to regard the other.

    Why don’t you come and take them?

    The mugger began another step but he never completed it. The stick was almost invisible in the speed of its swinging. It struck him on the left temple and he fell.

    Without pausing, the old man caught the stick by its middle with his left hand, advanced and drove it into the belly of the next nearest man. Then, with an upward hook as the man doubled, he caught him in the softness beneath the jaw, behind the chin, with its point. As the man fell, he clubbed him with its butt on the back of the neck.

    The third man had reached out and caught the old man’s upper arm by then. Dropping the stick, the old man seized the mugger’s shirtfront with his left hand, his belt with his right, raised him from the ground until he held him at arm’s length above his head and slammed him against the side of the building to his right, releasing him as he did so.

    He adjusted his apparel, ran a hand through his hair and retrieved his walking stick. For a moment he regarded the three fallen forms, then shrugged

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