Isle Of The Dead

Zelazny wrote a few stories about immortals, and Francis Sandow is one of them. He was born in the 20th century and ended up in suspended animation on a spaceship. By the time he was discovered, star-flight technology had advanced far beyond that available when he set out on his journey, and so he woke into a very strange world indeed. The Pei'ans, an alien super race heading for extinction, adopted and mentored Sandow; made him into a 'worldscaper' and an avatar for one of the Pei'ans deities: Shimbo of Darktree, Shrugger of Thunders. The novel steps into Sandow's life when an old enemy lures him to Illyria, a world Sandow created many years before, to force a final confrontation at the Isle of the Dead, which Sandow had constructed based on Arnold Bocklin's painting of the same name. (Check out the painting by Googling it!) Why it's on the list: It's not a long book, but rich in concepts and ideas, and vast in scope. Like Zelazny's Lord of Light it liberally mixes SF with reflections on the possible nature of 'deity'. The novel was nominated for a Nebula in 1969 and won the Prix Apollo in 1972. Read if you like: Zelazny at his best. SF that breezily ignores genre conventions and boundaries.