The novel “Elegy for Angels and Dogs” by Walter Jon Williams was published for the first time in 1990.

A group of noble people and rich industrialists, all immortal, are the Party Set, a group taking part to a tour across the solar system to have parties in which panoramas that include planets and moons are the background to entertainment that also includes new drugs. Ordinary people can only watch those parties from afar to be updated on what immortals are up to.

Even in an apparently idyllic situation within a group of people who are supposed to represent the peak of humanity, crimes are committed. In that situation, a murder can have unpredictable repercussions.

In 1964, Roger Zelazny published the novella “The Graveyard Heart”, in which he introduced this sort of decadent elite of people who spend their time in parties around the solar system. Actually, these people spend most of their lives in cryogenic stasis waking up for the parties. This situation makes this elite increasingly alienated from the rest of humanity.

Many years later, Martin Greenberg, who specialized in anthology production, asked Walter Jon Williams to write a sequel to “The Graveyard Heart” because at the time he was an emerging young writer who had been compared to a writer who was a recognized master of science fiction and fantasy. Williams didn’t think he was writing in Zelazny’s style, and at the beginning of his career he was considered mainly a cyperbunk writer.

Eventually, Walter Jon Williams wrote “Elegy for Angels and Dogs” also to prove that his style was not similar to Zelazny’s by developing a story with the same setting in his own way and reusing some characters from “The Graveyard Heart”. This sequel contains some direct references to the original novella, but can easily be read as a standalone work.

In “Elegy for Angels and Dogs”, Walter Jon Williams continues the story of this elite of the future distant from ordinary people in the Party Set that is a sort of future version of Olympus in which the ancient Greek gods resided. The author got inspired by real aristocratic families to the point that Prince Lamoral belongs to the Thurn und Taxis family, which actually exists. Unlike the ancient gods, these noble and rich people of the future are watched, albeit from a distance, by ordinary people, as is also the case today for the rich and famous. In that future, even ordinary people are affected by what happens in those glitzy and decadent parties.

Roger Zelazny had already explored the dark side of that elite in “The Heart is a Tomb”. Walter Jon Williams takes up the idea that, even among those immortals, murders can be committed. Behind the facade of aristocratic superiority, the characters remain human beings, with their negative sides. For this reason, even when they’re noble and rich, they can turn out to be mean and petty.

“Elegy for Angels and Dogs” is really short, so much so that in some sources it’s indicated as a novella and not as a novel. Some consider it to be among Walter Jon Williams’ masterpieces, but the author had the advantage of building upon what Roger Zelazny created. Regardless of these considerations, I recommend reading it.