Tor published 36 doubles in total between 1989 and 1991; some, like this one, are a pair of older reprints, some an older work and a newer one (which was often a sequel or prequel by another hand to the earlier work). The two stories in this double, however, are completely unrelated – if there’s a thematic link, I missed it. According to the cover of Home is the Hangman, “He’s back from the stars – and he isn’t happy”, which tells you two things about the title character and manages to get both wrong. A nine-word blurb that is 100% wrong. Quite an achievement. The novella is narrated by a private investigator / security specialist type, who manages to live under the radar because he was a programmer on a project to computerise everyone’s personal details and ensured his own data was not recorded (this may have seemed like a plausible idea in 1968, but in 2016 it makes no sense). This, however, adds almost nothing to the story… which is about an AI which had been built to explore the moons of the outer planets, and has now returned to Earth for reasons unknown. Four people had been involved in “training” the AI and now, a couple of decades later, one runs a store, one is a psychiatrist, one is an engineer and one is a wealthy industrialist. The store-owner is brutally killed and the industrialist thinks the AI was responsible because of something horrible that happened in the past. Think Original Sin. This novella won the Hugo and Nebula and came second in the Locus Award. Zelazny is a well-known name, and a famous genre prose stylist… so I was surprised at how rubbish this was. The prose was bland, the plot obvious, and time had has not been kind to the world-building… But turn the book upside down and flip it about and you get… We, in Some Strange Power’s Employ, Move on a Rigorous Line, which is a pure hit of the pure Delany… and yes, it’s dated quite a bit but it doesn’t matter because with Delany it’s always the late 1960s/early 1970s… and yes, the central premise – giant crawler factories which lay electricity cable, free of charge, to every household on the globe – is bizarrely old-fashioned and weird for 1975… But but but. There are Hells Angels living in an abandoned house in the mountains, and they ride flying bikes. And when one of the crawling factories offers to lay cable to the house (what was wrong with the original utilities infrastructure? Delany never tells us), it breaks apart the biker gang. It’s pretty much nonsense from start to finish but it’s also what a real prose stylist looks like. Reading these two novellas is a bit like reading some sort of writing match between a pair of big names from the late 1960s. Delany wins hands-down, no doubt there; especially since Delany’s novella reads like a product of its time but the Zelazny reads like a story that could have been written at any time but does a piss-poor job of its world-building. So, Delany 1 – Zelazny 0. ( )

Some spoilers follow in the discussion of two novellas about those live apart or invisible from global, technocratic societies.

"Home Is the Hangman": An impressive work solo. This is the last of three stories -- assembled as the fixup novel My Name Is Legion -- involving a troubleshooter who has opted out of having his real identity recorded in the vast computer system that tracks the world in this future. Zelanzy proves why he was a sf master by weaving the ideas of telepresence and artificial intelligence with character and philosophy to produce a unified organic whole. Zelazny deals with guilt, religion, retribution, madness (not so strange for an author who studied psychology and Elizabethean and Jacobean drama in school), parenthood, the social order and the state of those who “dwell apart” (the Hangman in the stars and the narrator apart from society, loving a shadow life of non-existence). I liked the philosophical discussions of hubris and schizophrenia. I especially liked the Hangman reaching consciousness because of guilt (the theological question of sin being a necessary pre-condition to intelligence) and his comments on how guilt sets man apart from other animals because it is the evidence that he knows he is capabler of noble actions that he has not lived up. Guilt creates these impulses. I also liked the Hangman’s ruminations to the narrator on the futility of assigning ourselves guilt for what our presence or absence causes others to do. I also like Zelanzy’s exploration of Karl Mannheim’s description of humanity as either conservative gardeners (given to thinking about side effects, globality) and tinkerers (progressive reformers given to thoughts of modifying society.). I liked the ambiguous ending of the story with the narrator not knowing if he has caused this computer monitored and directed society to change. And I liked the narrator not knowing if he liked the Hangman remembering him amongst the stars. A evocative, poignant, downbeat ending.

“We, in Some Strange Power’s Employ, Move on a Rigorous Line”. The best part of this novella is its odd, very evocative, very memorable title so well suited to the story. This is the story of a group of what are essentially futuristic outlaw bikers who don’t want to join the world order symbolized by Global Power’s electric grid. Delany has a gift for nomenclature that is both natural and symbolically allusive: the Power workers are devils; the bikers (typically Delany romantic outcasts and criminals that left their mark on cyberpunk) are angels; the Power line laying machine is a Gila Monster. Delany even seems to have spent a fair amount of energy thinking out the details of laying out a global power grid. Unfortunately, Delany’s writing makes visualizing his inventions next to impossible -- a paradoxical fact since Delany’s writing is packed with adjectives, some quite evocative but not on the technical aspect. The story’s major flaw was its plot with little payoff after setting up an interesting conflict. I was left with a feeling of “so what?” ( )

This is a Tor SF double, two novellas in one paperback. I've read "Home is the Hangman" by Roger Zelazny before. It is the third & last chronologically in "My Name is Legion" about a man with no name, the top programmer of a world databank who drops out of society. He works as a troubleshooter & this problem is about a robot sent to explore the solar system who is returning home. Its creators hire him to stop it. It's interesting & well written. A lot of neat ideas, but not one of his that I like the best. 3 stars.I'd never read Delany's "We" before. It also has some neat ideas & is well written. What happens to splinter cultures who don't want to participate in the global grid (electric & data)? How do the installation techs feel about hooking up those who don't want to be hooked up? It's as current today as it was when it was written 40 years ago. 4 stars. ( )