Has anybody here read Chronicles of Amber, by Roger Zelazny? 
No one seemed to have read it.

13 responses total.

I've never finished them; I got through the first three or four, and then had
to wait too long for the next.  Has he finished the series?

Zelazny died a few years ago.  He wrote the original 5 novella series 
which was published by the Science Fiction Book Club as "The Chronicles 
of Amber", then he wrote a 2nd 5 novel series beginning with "The 
Trumps of Doom", about Corwin's son Merlin.

Both series include a combination of brilliant writing and some very 
original concepts, but also periods where Zelazny was meandering or 
just plain filling space.  The Chronicles of Amber is fabulous 
overall.  It's what one would expect from Zelazny, who was a wonderful 
writer.  The follow-up series is not up to the standards of his best 
work.  But Zelazny was not a writer with an even career.  A lot of his 
books are as bad.  

  I think that's a pretty fair criticism.  

  One series I wish Zelazny would have gone further with was the world
  from the two books "Changeling" and "Madwand".  "Changeling" ranks at
  about the bottom of the Zelazny writing-quality spectrum, but it's
  successor, "Madwand" was so much improved that I'd've liked to have
  read more about the characters.

I have, by the way, read The Chronicles of Amber many times.  When I 
have a few hours and want something familiar that I know I like, 
they're one of my favorite choices.  The books stand up to re-reading.  
Books like that are a treasure.

I own The great book of Amber, which has all 10 of tose novels. It is an
excellent story. I hope they make a movie out of it. But you say Roger Zelazny
is no longer. That would put the authors of 3 of my favorite series out of
5 dead. Let me see if I can list them.
The First Chronicles of Amber - Roger Zelazny
The Lord of The Rings - JRR Tolkein
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
The Living
**********
Harry Potter - J.K. Rowling
His Dark Materials - Phillip Pullman

Your comment seems surprising to me - when I was in college, it
was hard to find someone in my social circle who *hadn't* read
all five (at the time) Amber books!

Well, _Sign_of_the_Unicorn_ was after I left college (the first time), but
I did see _The_Courts_of_Chaos_ in one of the magazines.  I didn't finish it,
so I guess I've read just the first two.

Ah. I was a little girl when the first book came out. Read them all very
quickly as they came out -- while I didn't know a lot of sf fans in
college/after college, all of them I *did* know had read all of the Amber
books. I own the first five, but haven't re-read them in a few years (too many
books, too little time, I guess -- that and the fact that I have to rearrange
all of my books so I can find them!).

Uhm... "Nine Princes in Amber" is from 1970, while "Courts of Chaos" is from
1978.  Kinda hard for me to think of that span as 'very quickly'. ;)

Hey, to me, that's reasonably quick. :-) I am following one series where the
writer left me on a cliffhanger for 20 plus years (she quit publishing to
raise a LARGE family) but I was finally rewarded about eight years ago when
she finally published two more in the series (though it's not OVER, at least
the cliffhanger I was stuck on is semi-resolved). 

I also recall books as coming out much more quickly than they perhaps have
-- it's a factor of the fact that I've been reading for so long and time
collapses as you wane into crone-hood. 

I was thinking you'd picked up paperback reprints, which do come out more
quickly than first editions. ;)

Who left you on the edge of a cliff for twenty years?  Maybe it's something
(else) I'd like to read?

Simon Lang is the penname. You can find the books used, I am sure. "The
Elluvon Gift" is the cliffhanger book. I can't (at the moment) recall what
the others are -- but I read and re-read "The Elluvon Gift" every year for
that twenty years, so have the name engraved in my neurons. :-)

No, I picked up paperback first editions of at least a couple of the early
ones (I know that Nine Princes, at least, came out in paperback...)....

I'm very fond of much of Zelazny's work: his novels _Lord of Light_ and 
_Doorways in the Sand_ are perennial re-readers for me, and his short 
fiction can be superb: "For a Breath I Tarry" is the most heartwarming 
story about humanity I have ever read, and "24 Views of Mt Fuji by 
Hokusai" is gut-wrenching.

But I never liked the Amber books much.  Too much contorted ex-post-
facto explanation.  Nor did I like being left up in the air with 
incompleted plots.  About halfway through the publication of the first 
series, by which time I'd read everything else Zelazny had published, I 
met him.  I told him I would read Amber, but only after he finished 
writing it.  He said that was fine with him.

When I did read it, it seemed to begin fine - I liked Corwin's clever 
attempts to vamp when he didn't know what was going on - but as soon as 
he recovers his memory he ceases bothering to explain things to the 
reader.  The plots get more ornate but less able to carry their burden, 
and the last volume was a damp squib.  Amber as a place seemed a lot 
less real than our supposed shadow-world, and in a fictional "true 
reality" that's fatal.  I never read the second series at all, but I 
kept on reading everything else of Zelazny's.

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