{"id":1065,"date":"2021-05-05T21:13:26","date_gmt":"2021-05-05T21:13:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/?p=1065"},"modified":"2021-05-20T13:10:25","modified_gmt":"2021-05-20T13:10:25","slug":"the-man-who-loved-the-faioli-by-roger-zelazny","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/?p=1065","title":{"rendered":"The Man Who Loved the Faioli by Roger Zelazny"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The Man Who Loved the Faioli<\/em><\/strong> by Roger Zelazny (Galax<\/em>y, June 1967) begins with John Auden coming across a weeping Faioli in the Canyon of the Dead. As he watches, her \u201cflickering wings of light\u201d disappear and reveal a human girl sitting there. Initially she is not aware of him:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then he knew that it was true, the things that are said of the Faioli\u2014that they see only the living and never the dead, and that they are formed into the loveliest women in the entire universe. Being dead himself, John Auden debated the consequences of becoming a living man once again, for a time.
The Faioli were known to come to a man the month before his death\u2014those rare men who still died\u2014and to live with such a man for that final month of his existence, rendering to him every pleasure that it is possible for a human being to know, so that on the day when the kiss of death is delivered, which sucks the remaining life from his body, that man accepts it\u2014no, seeks it!\u2014with desire and with grace. For such is the power of the Faioli among all creatures that there is nothing more to be desired after such knowledge.  p. 169 (World\u2019s Best Science Fiction 1968<\/em>, edited by Donald A. Wollheim & Terry Carr)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Auden then presses a button under his armpit and comes alive again, and the Faoili, called Sythia, can now see him. They talk, and then the pair go through the Canyon of the Dead and the Valley of Bones to where Auden lives. They eat, and then become lovers.
During the following month a robot ship arrives with the bodies of some of the few people who are still mortal. But Auden knows that he isn\u2019t, and that he is deceiving her.
Eventually their time comes to an end. He tells her that he is already dead, and explains the control switch that stops him living and allows an \u201celectro-chemical system\u201d to take over the operation of his body. Sythia touches the button and he disappears from her view.
This is a stylishly written story and is a pleasant enough read if you don\u2019t think about what is going on. But it makes little sense; we never find out explicitly why Auden is \u201cdead\u201d (or more accurately not alive in the human sense); we don\u2019t know why Sythia can\u2019t see him when he is \u201cdead\u201d; and we don\u2019t know what the Faioli are, or why they do what they do. It all rather reads like some sort of unintelligible SF myth, and this isn\u2019t helped by the writer adding this penultimate line: \u201cthe moral may be that life (and perhaps love also) is stronger than that which it contains, but never that which contains it.\u201d
Pleasant filler.
** (Average). 2,850 words.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Man Who Loved the Faioli by Roger Zelazny (Galaxy, June 1967) begins with John Auden coming across a weeping Faioli in the Canyon of the Dead. As he watches, her \u201cflickering wings of light\u201d disappear and reveal a human girl sitting there. Initially she is not aware of him: Then he knew that it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[10,17,203,15,12],"class_list":["post-1065","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-roger-zelazny","tag-10","tag-17","tag-galaxy","tag-roger-zelazny","tag-short-story"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1065","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1065"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1065\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1223,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1065\/revisions\/1223"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1065"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1065"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1065"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}