Various criminals, Anglophile zealots, government agents and aliens torture, shoot, beat, trick, chase, terrorize, assault telepathically, stalk, and importune Fred in attempts to get him to tell them the location of the stone.
The Whillowhim seek to limit the power of an alliance of newer, less-developed members of the galactic coalition, and its theft would temporarily stop the entry of Earth into the organization.
The star-stone, now identified with the name Speicus, is a sentient, telepathic sociological life-form that can gather and analyze information and make reports using Fred as its host.
Fred Cassidy: A building-climbing, wise-cracking, perennial student is the last known person to have seen the missing star-stone, a unique alien crystalline object of unknown origin and function.
He hires two thugs, Morton Zeemeister and Jamie Buckler, to plan and help carry out the theft of the star-stone during the delivery of a replica and the real stone to the United Nations.
Morton Zeemeister and Jamie Buckler: Sadistic professional criminals are originally employed by Paul Byler and others in his extremist Anglophile group to plan the theft of the star-stone.
Speicus (the star-stone): A sentient telepathic alien life form of unknown origin in the shape of a stone acts as a recorder and data processor of sociological information.
Arriving home Fred sees a news story on television reporting Byler's murder and the odd removal of some of his vital organs.
Later, as he comes slowly into consciousness a voice instructs Fred that he should not permit the aliens to take him to another world where they want to telepathically examine his mind for clues to the whereabouts of the star-stone.
Ted Nadler stops by Fred's hospital room and offers him a position as alien culture specialist for the U.S. legation to the United Nations.
Byler hires Zeemeister and Buckler in their capacity as professional criminals to assist in the substitution of the stones, but they really want the original for themselves for a ransom, Nadler believes.
As Fred enters his hotel room he is seized and raised into the air by the tentacles of an alien telepathic analyst who practices attack therapy.
On the way to the Rhennius machine to have him reversed back to his original state, Speicus warns Fred about an unknown enemy by saying, "Our Snark is a Boojum."
"[13] Richard E. Geis in Science Fiction Review wrote that "at the end I was left vaguely unsatisfied," but the novel had "Zelazny magic; that indefinable stylistic touch that makes him extremely readable.
She described Doorways in the Sand as "a well-written adventure," and "fast enough, interesting enough, to carry any bedtime reader through arbitrary plotting to midnight and the loose-ends-tied-up conclusion.
On the other hand, Algis Budrys in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction wrote that Doorways in the Sand "is one of the first hopeful signs from this author in some time" and "a return toward the power Zelazny once displayed, plus a maturation that runs deeper than witticism."
"[17] Doorways in the Sand has had five English editions with separate ISBN numbers, the last in 1991, and has been translated into German, Bulgarian, Dutch, Russian, Hebrew, Japanese, French, Italian, and Polish.
This novel is probably his most wildly comic work, combining the kind of verbal humor he is known for with ridiculous situations that border on the absurd, and secondary characters whose posings and behavior give an antic flavor to the comedy.
[22]In Doorways in the Sand, as in well as in other Zelazny's novel The Courts of Chaos, the evocations of and homage to Lewis Carroll's works provide many of the gags and mad humor.
[47] Zelazny believed living a long life would make people have great intellectual and perceptual faculties and would produce a good sense of humor.
A long life according to Zelazny would not cause ennui, but rather curiosity, changing and maturing, growing and learning, and lead to knowledge, culture and satisfying experiences.
[49][50] According to Samuel R. Delany, Zelazny believed that "Given all eternity to live, each experience becomes a jewel in the jewel-clutter of life; each moment becomes infinitely fascinating because there is so much more to relate it to.
[53] In Doorways in the Sand Fred has a similar program of studies, not just motivated by a desire to learn, but also to keep money flowing from his cryogenically frozen uncle's trust fund.
During his thirteen years of studies at the university he takes just enough courses in each discipline to not receive a degree according to the mandatory departmental graduation requirements, making him very broadly-educated.
On request, it provides analyses of anything it has encountered directly or peripherally, along with reliability figures, unbiased because it is uniquely alien to all life forms, yet creature-oriented because of the nature of the input mechanism.
In Doorways Zelazny reimagines Alice's looking glass as the Rhennius machine, the device given to man by the aliens that reverses objects into their mirror images.
This vision is the unraveling of a complex personality with special abilities, intelligent, cultured, experienced in many areas, but who is fallible, needing emotional maturity, and who candidly reflects upon the losses in his life.
[59]Fred Cassidy does not appear to be a complex personality, but he has two special abilities: he climbs buildings well because of his acrophlia and he has an extraordinary thirteen-year education in all the departments of the university.
He is intelligent, cultured and experienced due to his education only, fallible, needs emotional maturity and experience, but does not dwell on his life's struggles very much.
"[67] Krulik takes the view that "It's a risky business, but Zelazny has enormous stylistic power, and his strong characterizations are usually able to draw back the reader to the written word after chewing momentarily on the morsel given to him for thought.