By Dahl Botterill
Roger Zelazny is perhaps best known for his Amber stories, consisting of ten novels released in two 5-volume arcs and a multitude of shorter works linked to the Amber setting. However, Zelazny’s non-Amber books and stories outnumbered the Amber ones, and with very few exceptions didn’t link up to one another either. A winner of many awards over his lifetime, Roger Zelazny was a master of worldbuilding, creating incredible characters and settings, and telling grand tales within the span of a couple hundred pages, only to move on to entirely new ideas with his next book. This ability to bring a world full of wonder to life around the reader is one of my favourite things about Zelazny’s work, and Today We Choose Faces is one of these books.
The novel opens with a mafia enforcer named Angel who has been revived after a couple of centuries of cryogenic sleep. Initially it seems he’s a bit of a conversation piece for the various members of the now legitimate COSA Incorporated, but he eventually learns he’s there to do the same thing he’s done in the past. Trained in modern technology and weaponry, he’s tasked with the assassination of a mad scientist who is causing trouble for his descendants. While Angel is busy with his interplanetary assassination attempt, though, the world destroys itself in a massive war, and he finds himself alone with the mad scientist’s records and technology at his fingertips.
The next portion of the novel jumps forward several generations, where the surviving remnants of humanity live near-utopian lives in a massive trans-spatial indoor facility called the House, where each region (or Room) exists separately on an interplanetary scale, connected by Passages that offer instantaneous transport between Rooms. The House—and by extension the survival of humanity—is in the care of a group of telepathically semi-linked individuals called the Family, the members of which are led by a man named Lange who serves as their “nexus.” Somebody is hunting the Family, and after generations of increasing peace among humanity, nobody is particularly prepared to deal with such a thing. Except, perhaps, the voice inside Lange’s head telling him to “Pull pin seven.”
Today We Choose Faces is book that is filled to overflowing with ideas, and Zelazny uses all of them to great effect. It is a tale of the endless tug-of-war between humanity’s destiny and its fate, but also of cloning, interstellar architecture, psychic self-surgery and mnemonic sacrifice, survival and free will, and so much more. It’s not a long book, but Today We Choose Faces is a thrilling ride while it lasts, filled with more than enough concepts to keep its reader on their toes as they’re dropped into a story that’s already running full tilt towards its own conclusion.