This Immortal

This Immortal is a science fiction novel by the American writer Roger Zelazny. It was serialized in two parts in 1965 under the title ...And Call Me Conrad, and it shared the 1966 Hugo Award for Best Novel with Frank Herbert's Dune.

The Earth of the book is a demoralised remnant. An atomic catastrophe sent most of the surviving population out to the worlds of the Vega Confederation, and the people who stayed behind live among ruins, altered landscapes and half-abandoned cities. Conrad Nomikos is the commissioner of monuments, a Greek of obscure and possibly very great age who is widely believed to be the model for an old resistance hero.

Conrad is ordered to escort Cort Myshtigo, an official from the Confederation who is touring the planet, and the assignment is unwelcome in a country where the offworlders are resented. The tour turns into a political errand and then a dangerous one, and the novel moves through myth, local politics and a landscape that has been changed twice over while deliberately leaving the narrator's age and history unsettled.