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Time Machine: October 4, 2026 AMAZING NEWS FROM FANDOM: October 4, 2026 Some notes on rereading The Two Towers. Matt’s Reviews: We Were Never Here by Sophia Hannan STEVE’S STUFF – 456 – MOVIE REVIEW – RESIDENT EVIL (2026)
Science Fiction

Matt’s Reviews: The Dream Master By Roger Zelazny

book cover: The Dream Master by Roger Zelazny

 

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Science Fiction Book Club
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ July 1, 2004
  • Edition ‏ : ‎ First Edition
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 179 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0739445316
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0739445310
  • Author : Roger Zelazny

 

The Dream Master By Roger Zelazny feels very much like what it is…a science fiction book written in the mid-1960’s. Set in the future (of the 1990’s?), there are self-driving cars and mutated talking dogs, but those are only secondary to the main story. The main story revolves around a ‘shaper’ who helps guide people through their and his own dream worlds to help them deal with their psychological issues. It is very much a 1960’s series of thoughts about what may influence our mental health. The machines that allow Render, the shaper, to enter and influence others dreams is still just a tool for 1960’s era Freudian and Jungian concepts. But I can’t be too hard on Zelazny for missing predictions of progress while over predicting others.
The core of the plot revolves around Render agreeing to guide and shape the dreams of a woman blind from birth. He allows her to experience ‘sight’ in her dreams. She comes to crave this dream sightedness and she also begins to influence the dreams shapes herself. The shaper and the shaped influence each other in this dreamworld which has further consequences outside in the ‘real’ world.
Zelazny has some beautiful language and his descriptions of dream sequences and other scenarios are rich. I enjoyed the book, but its descriptions of the future seemed very rooted in the time it was written. This is probably true of most future prediction stories, but some of them are more timeless in their roots.
This one’s roots are definitely in the mid-1960’s. The world was about to change and much of that change was going to happen inside of people’s heads. Zelazny describes how some of those changes might happen. I suspect at least part of this book was Zelazny reacting to psychedelics like LSD that were spreading through society at the time. I don’t know if he was a partaker or not, but this seems like a description of the possibilities and the dangers of expanding one’s consciousness.
I would not call it a must read, but it is an interesting read.
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Time Machine: October 4, 2026

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Some notes on rereading The Two Towers.

book cover: We Were Never Here by Sophia Hannan

Matt’s Reviews: We Were Never Here by Sophia Hannan

STEVE’S STUFF – 456 – MOVIE REVIEW – RESIDENT EVIL (2026)

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