Novel: This Immortal

Overview
Roger Zelazny's This Immortal follows Conrad, a charismatic and near-immortal denizen of a battered, ecologically altered Earth, who is pressed into service as a guide and cultural interpreter for an alien visitor. Tasked with showing off what remains of human achievement and explaining the convoluted tapestry of Earth's peoples and histories, Conrad moves through ruined cities, mutated landscapes, and fragile enclaves of civilization. His easy wit and battered competence mask a deeper vulnerability tied to his long life and the secrets of his origins.
The novel combines road-story momentum and diplomatic intrigue with a deeply personal investigation of identity. Conrad's relationship with his wife, tender, complicated, and practical, anchors much of the emotional core, while the alien's presence raises questions about how human culture looks through extraterrestrial eyes and how memory and myth survive catastrophe.

Setting
Earth in This Immortal is vividly reconstructed rather than wholly destroyed: familiar monuments lie half-buried, species have hybridized in strange new forms, and pockets of advanced and archaic societies coexist. Radiation-scarred flora and fauna, repurposed technologies, and a cosmopolitan patchwork of survivors give the planet a mythic quality that alternates between comic resilience and bitter ruin. The atmosphere of salvage, improvisation, and faded glory colors every encounter Conrad has with both humans and aliens, making the setting itself a central character.
Zelazny's vision is both lyric and sardonic. He renders landscapes in sharp, sensory prose while allowing humor and contemporary wit to undercut sentimentality. The world is at once a museum and a living community, where old values and new adaptions clash and fuse.

Plot
Conrad is selected to escort and translate for an extraterrestrial diplomat who intends to evaluate Earth's worth and decide whether it should be integrated into a larger interstellar order. Their journey is nominally educational, designed to highlight human creativity, art, and adaptability. As they travel, meetings with artists, technologists, warlords, and cultists disclose the planet's fragmented politics and the contradictions of survival after catastrophe.
Beneath the surface of the diplomatic tour, conspiracy and violence begin to gather. Attempts on Conrad's life force him to deploy decades of experience and a network of uneasy alliances. The mystery escalates into personal revelation: Conrad confronts suppressed memories and the question of what made him effectively immortal. The interplay of public negotiation and private reckoning culminates in tense confrontations where loyalties are tested and the value of Earth is measured not only in resources but in stories, memory, and stubborn humanity.

Themes and Style
Identity, mortality, and cultural translation run through the book. Conrad embodies a paradox: he is ancient enough to carry many histories yet intimate enough to care for the small, ordinary needs of those around him. Zelazny explores how myths and personal histories intertwine, asking whether a single person can represent an entire planet's past and whether immortality is a blessing when it carries weighty responsibility and isolation.
Stylistically, Zelazny blends mythic allusion, sharp dialogue, and episodic adventure. The prose ranges from playful banter to elegiac reflection, and the novel's pacing alternates leisurely cultural digressions with sudden bursts of danger. Humor and melancholy cohabit comfortably, making the reader feel both the absurdity and the nobility of survival.

Legacy
This Immortal is often remembered for its unique mix of speculative worldbuilding and intimate character study. It showcases Zelazny's talent for combining mythic motifs with contemporary voice and for crafting protagonists who are as wry as they are haunted. The novel remains an evocative meditation on what endures after catastrophe: not merely artifacts and technology but stories, relationships, and the capacity to make meaning under damaged skies.