★★★★☆ Zelazny's only long series

Nine Princes in Amber

Roger Zelazny

Roger Zelazny was, in my opinion, one of the greatest fantasy and science fiction writers of all time. He was especially good at short stories, which he enjoyed writing more than novels. Somewhere in his works he admits that he writes more novels than stories because, word for word, novels pay better. He adds that this is not as bad as it sounds, because he also enjoys writing novels. It's OK, Roger! You really don't need to apologize for doing what folks will pay you to do! Most of us live our lives that way.

As you might expect of an author who prefers stories to novels, Zelazny was not a great writer of series. Goodreads lists five series by Zelazny. Now, you're looking at that page and saying, "Wait -- I see eight series listed. No, you do not. You see The Chronicles of Amber (ten novels), three things that are just subsets of The Chronicles of Amber, followed by four much shorter series: one trilogy and three duologies.

And, I am sorry to say, The Chronicles of Amber are not Zelazny's best work. (But let me be clear -- even substandard Zelazny is very, very good.) They can be divided into two subseries, which Goodreads calls The Corwin cycle and The Merlin Cycle.

The Corwin cycle, consisting of five novels published between 1970 and 1978, is about Corwin, one of the Nine Princes in Amber, and his fitful attempts to become king of Amber. It was evident to me that by novel 5, The Courts of Chaos, the series was becoming hard to sustain. Zelazny had revealed all the secrets he had in store when he began, and things (particularly the Hellrides) were getting repetitive.

Zelazny resumed the series in 1985 after a break, with The Merlin Cycle about Corwin's son Merlin. Merlin is more concerned with pure survival than becoming king of anything. Overall I liked the books of The Merlin Cycle better than the Corwin books. Unfortunately, you can't read the Merlin books in isolation -- without the Corwin novels, the Merlin novels won't make much sense.

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