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anthologies, Wheel of Fortune , Warriors of Blood and Dream , Forever After , and The Williamson Effect . Zelazny died in 1995. A noir mystery, The Dead Man’s Brother , was published posthumously in 2009.
    Unlike many of the people who wrote essays for these volumes, I can’t claim to have been a close personal friend of Roger’s. We didn’t see each other often even when he lived in Baltimore, and once he moved to New Mexico, on the other side of the continent, we saw each other even less. We said hello and exchanged a few words at convention room parties, occasionally had drinks at a convention bar along with other writers and fans, once or twice had dinner together, and that was largely it. A few images observed at a little closer range stick in my mind, though, and may give you the flavor of the man. One was the infamous Knob Dinner already described by Kristine Kathryn Rusch in volume 2 of this series. Another was during the early mid-’70s, during a week-long writer’s workshop we called the Guilford Gafia (on the model of the Milford Mafia, bête noire of conservative SF writers and critics), held by Jack C. (“Jay”) Haldeman in his big, rambling, somewhat rundown wooden house in the Guilford section of Baltimore. Jay’s brother Joe Haldeman, Jack Dann, George Alec Effinger, myself, and others came in for these marathon critique sessions. Roger was never part of the formal workshop itself, but in those days he still lived in Baltimore, only a few blocks away, and every once in a while, when the manuscripts were put away and the wine came out, he’d come over and party with us.
    One night we hit the wine bottles particularly hard and began to play an all-night game of poker with a pornographic deck of cards that Ron Bounds had brought back from Germany. They featured a busty blond lady having sex with a rather bemused-looking German Shepherd. Somebody (possibly me) mentioned how the Futurians probably would have taken this opportunity to write a novel during the all-night poker game, using the “hot typewriter” method pioneered by Fred Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth, where one author would write until he got tired, and another would jump in to spell him and keep writing. Of course, we had to do the same thing. A typewriter was broken out, and, taking turns during the poker game, we began to write a pornographic novel to be called either The Trouble With Smegma or Naked Came the Android (there was some argument on this point), following the model of the then-bestselling round-robin novel Naked Came the Stranger . Ultimately, we produced only twenty or thirty pages, and, perhaps fortunately for all concerned, the manuscript has long since been lost. Interestingly, considering the talking dog in The Dream Master , Roger’s section concerned a woman having sex with just such a dog, perhaps unsurprisingly considering the cards we were playing with, a German Shepherd. The two lovers throw themselves suicidally from a window, only to be rescued on the following page by the next writer to sit down at the typewriter. I don’t think I ever saw Roger happier than while writing this piffle. Roger’s usual grin was a shy, almost sly one, flashing out for only a second, but he wore his grin for most of that night and kept collapsing in laughter at silly things that he himself or other people wrote. There could be no doubt that he was having fun . The next day, a bit hung over, he told us sheepishly that his wife had given him hell for wasting all that time writing crap that he was never going to be able to sell—but I think that he found doing so something of a relief, writing for once without worrying about the salability of what he was producing.
    One of the last times I ever saw Roger for any extended period of time was after the 1981 Worldcon in Denver, Colorado. My wife, young son and I and a few friends traveled by car from Denver to Santa Fe for a few days of post-convention vacation. A group of us, including