Keys to December

The Keys to December is Roger Zelazny's haunting posthuman science fiction retelling of the Prometheus myth from the fire-bringer's point of view. Jarry Dark is one of more than twenty-eight thousand genetically altered "Coldworld Catforms," human beings engineered for a frozen planet that was destroyed before they could inherit it. Unsuitable for ordinary human worlds and dependent on artificial environments, Jarry and his people gather their wealth, purchase a new planet, and begin the long work of remaking it into the cold home they were meant to have.

But the world they choose is not empty. As the machines cool the atmosphere and alter the landscape over centuries, the native life begins to change under pressure. Some species die. Others adapt. One small bipedal race, first dismissed as animal, begins to use tools, wear skins, make offerings, and tell stories. Jarry, once only an exile seeking a home for his own people, becomes something else: a god in the eyes of another race, a reluctant protector, and finally a Promethean rebel willing to give fire to those who may otherwise be destroyed.

First published in 1966, The Keys to December is classic Zelazny: compressed, lyrical, tragic, intellectually sharp, and charged with mythic consequence. In a story of terraforming, genetic engineering, exile, grief, and moral reckoning, Zelazny asks what one people may owe another when survival itself becomes an act of conquest. The result is one of his most powerful short works, a science fiction tale of planetary transformation and the terrible burden of becoming someone else's god.