Personally, I do like the second sequence up until the last book, where he basically forced it to a conclusion while violating the rule about “a loaded gun shown in act 2 must be accounted for by act 5.” Yes, Merlin is a bit unreasonably powerful, but he’s given opponents of comparable power so while there’s a certain amount of epic-scope creep vs. the originals I think the story isn’t all that unbalanced.
In fact, there’s an element introduced in the fourth book which looked like it should have taken Merlin down a peg – it seemed to be having an interesting set of side effects – but RZ didn’t follow through on that aspect.
Zelazny himself admitted that writing endings was one of his weak points… he liked world-building and adding complications, but getting them all resolved by the end was sometimes difficult and he never really learned to outline (which is the classic tool for making sure everything has been accounted for). Several of his other books that are considered classics suffer from the same problem of becoming a bit incoherent at the end; Lord of Light, for example, has some wonderful ideas and worldbuilding and storytelling and characters but the climactic battle isn’t quite clearly enough drawn to be a completely satisfying conclusion. Still very much worth reading, though.
By the way, NESFA Press recently released a six-volume Zelazny retrospective which includes some of his less-remembered short material, including stories, poetry, early fanzine contributions, articles and so on along with excerpts from a few of the novels. Definitely worth considering if you like his work and didn’t have the luxury of seeing this stuff in the magazines as he developed his skills.
(My only real point of personal peeve with this set is that the afterwords for the stories include glossaries which I found mostly superfluous-to-annoying. I understand that they intended these for, as they put it, the15-year-old readers they once were, but frankly I’d rather they had let the 15yo’s learn to look up the easier ones themselves. Oh well. As they say, the more sophisticated reader can skip these…)
Random was my favorite character in the series. A few of us fans back in the day had an RPG going on with the characters, rather than the exact plot - we behaved as they did, but did different things, and this was before the series ended. It was done in real time, and a private fanzine of ours kept everyone up to date, tho we morphed it considerably. Much backstabbing and trickery involved, with verisimilitude, and at one point I ambushed another character outside of his actual home with a broomhandle Mauser replica I had laying around - Amber gunpowder was in, and another character killed off his girlfriend’s character while IRL they were actually at a midnight showing of ‘The Rocky Horror Picture Show’ - that didn’t go down well.
this series is one of my all-time favorites. also (and especially) Lord of Light, and To Die in Italbar. and funny how you never hear Damnation Alley mentioned any more. i’ve worn out my set of Amber books and repaired them so many times… they are second only to my Tolkien set for that. i liked them all, including the period with Merlin, but it’s true that he sort of wrote himself into a corner. it probably didn’t help that Zelazny’s health (and thus his stamina) were failing towards the end of the books. i actually wrote him an embarrassing, fawning letter in college telling him how much i loved that series and his work, and he sent me back a very nice (handwritten!) postcard thanking me. i treasure that thing. he was a super nice guy, and i’m sorry he isn’t still among us. he deserves to be so much better known.
Amber also makes great material for backbiting and treacherous live roleplay. I was playing Bleys in a wonderful little struggle for the throne only two weeks ago. (Although I’m normally more of a Caine.)
Not for everyone, but so much fun with the right cast.
I think the action was secondary to Merlin’s more personal adventure which was framed as a kind of noir mystery/vision quest. Reconciling with a sibling, confronting a parent, creating life, etc. it all mirrors Corwin’s journey with different character classes.
Merlin had more ‘flashy’ power but not the sort of experiance Corwin’s generation had.
Giving it a very interesting set of problems where you have the older generation that could in a physical fight or even mental battle via trumps pretty well steamroll people and had plans within plans within plans.
And the younger generation that seemed to have more flash but hadn’t yet gained that sort of depth their elders had.
I like Amber more than game of thrones for the simple fact that while it has political undertones with scheming cabals, and stuff… it’s actually interesting and accessable. However if you sit and think about it. Well. To quote TV Tropes:
Big Screwed up Family: You have no idea.
I learned of this series in highschool from our librarian and had borrowed her husband’s books. Zelazny wasa talented writer and tried to mix things up throughout his books (Cat’s Eye features a shapeshifting last of it’s kind creature vs the last of his tradition navijo tracker that captured it. Donnerjack features a potentially having tapped into the collective human subconcious where traditions live virtual reality tht’s trying to invade meatspace where the hroes include Death, an ancient man who lives in a pocket simulation because in there he has more time, and then you have Lord of Light which is very hindu inspired (didn’t like that one to be honest.)
BTW, the Science Fiction Book Club probably still has the first series of books in a two-volume hardback set. Convenient and cost-effective.
(My biggest complaint about SFBC is that, while I love hardbacks, unless you can get this sort of combined edition they just don’t use shelf space as efficiently as paperbacks do. My other complaints – having to do with the nature of book clubs – can be addressed by working with them to switch you from club mode to catalog mode; I suspect one has to be a member for a while and then threaten to drop the membership before they’ll make that offer.)
Zelazny is definitely one of my favorite authors. I haven’t seen two of my favorites mentioned yet: Doorways In The Sand and Roadmarks.
Oh and I think the reason you never hear of Damnation Alley any more is because of the movie that was made from it :p. It would be nice to see a better production of some of his work.
I’ve never been a gosh-wow fan of Zelazny’s novels or series. His natural metre seemed to lie with short stories or novellas. (Back when I was trying to make a career in scriptwriting, one of my long-term goals was to reach a point where I could option “The Furies” and adapt it for the screen.) The NESFA Press 6-volume set of his shorter works is well worthwhile.
Ugh, why do these doofuses keep publishing all ten books in a single volume? Nobody wants to deal with a 1200+ page bookbrick. It’s already two separate, standalone series. Why wouldn’t you do two volumes?
I think it’s carry-over from the trend toward 500-page paperbacks, which seems to have been an effort to “justify” the fact that paperbacks now cost $8 (or whatever it has gone up to since I last looked).
But I agree. Three novels in one binding seems to be possible without it becoming awkward. Much more than that and it becomes not only harder to handle, but more damage-prone since you’re putting more strain on the binding. Yeah, I grant that my lessabridged dictionary is, as PhasmaFelis put it, a “bookbrick” – but it stays on the shelf or on the lectern and isn’t handled frequently, so it can get away with being a bit of a monster.
PhasmaFelis, long books are not an attempt to justify paperback prices. The single biggest reason for long books is that writers want to write them and readers want to buy and read them. They sell well, and are much read.
As for the Amber Chronicles: I have a longstanding disagreement with Steve Gould, my fellow instructor at Viable Paradise. I hold that Nine Princes in Amber is formally close to perfect. Steve holds that it only approaches formal perfection when paired with The Guns of Avalon.
We have never argued about the advisability of ignoring all the books that follow them.
Actually, you should be blaming me for that comment.
I have no objection to long books. What I object to is that it has seemed to me that the traditional-length novel has been having a harder time selling now that the longer books exist, because the publishers feel they have to demand close to the same price for it and buyers are partly influenced by cost-per-entertainment-duration. My perception may be flat-out wrong, admittedly; Brust’s Taltos books are certainly successful at the older size.
I’ve also seen a few cases where the fact that books are now allowed to run longer has led to editors be more lax with them… and frankly there are some writers who need editors pushing back to keep their writing crisp. (And some whose natural length really is novellas, if there was only more of a market for those.)
There are certainly authors who can sustain high-quality writing in the longer story length, and I applaud that.
As long as authors really are making that decision based on the needs of the story rather than responding to market pressures to consume more shelf space, I’ll withdraw my objections…
… mostly. Above a certain size, I’d really be happier if the book was divided into two or more volumes, simply for binding and handling reasons. LOTR in paperback really should not be a single volume, even if improved binding techniques permitted it. Similarly, I had no problem with paying for the paperback of Cyteen as separate volumes, even though it’s a single continuous story and the price might have been lower if it had been shoved within a single set of covers.
Just one reader’s reactions. Do with it what thou wilt.
(I’m not a writer, at least not of more than short-short/verse material [*]. I reluctantly admit to being a Fan; I’ve been involved in too much fanac to still insist that I Just Read The Stuff.)
[* “Everyone says they want to be a writer. What most of them mean is that they want to have written.”]
Does anyone remember the text-based game for this? Or the even better book he wrote called “Lord of Light”? I have read so much of his stuff, he was an amazing writer.
I even bought the illustrated guide to amber years ago. amazing amazing visualizations
Damnation alley was one of the worst movies ever made. But, that they even made a version of it was awesome. Lord of Light remains to me my favorite book of all time after the hitchhiker’s series
