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Aug. 15th, 2007 10:16 amI'm coming to the end of the second series of Amber books, as discussed earlier, and I haven't found them nearly as bad as some of my friends have. Yay for me. First rule of reading: "If you enjoy it, you win."
I think I understand why some people found them less satisfying than the first series. For one thing, as I said in comments, Zelazny had already told his big Platonic-theory-of-forms story in the first books, and by the nature of the things he was dealing with there could be nothing as big (idea-wise) to unveil in the next. Of course, that didn't necessarily matter, as all a lot of the fans (me included) were panting for was more in that setting and with those characters...but it does inevitably lead to a sense of anticlimax if you read it looking for Big Ideas.
The other thing is that whereas the first five books were written separately with longish intervals in between (I remember wondering if The Courts Of Chaos would ever get published, or if it would languish in limbo forever like The Universal Pantograph and yes I am looking at you Mr Panshin), these books are more obviously through-composed, one long story chopped into chunks. Which is a perfectly good way to write, but can lead to the separate volumes feeling like episodes rather than standalone stories, because, well, they are.
One thing I haven't found that was reported is the protagonist becoming a superbeing "who could give God a hard time." I'm in the tenth book and he may have negotiated just about every archetypal symbol in the universe and acquired a very powerful but eevil magic ring tee em, but he's still getting pushed around by his little brother. I mean really. :)
I think I understand why some people found them less satisfying than the first series. For one thing, as I said in comments, Zelazny had already told his big Platonic-theory-of-forms story in the first books, and by the nature of the things he was dealing with there could be nothing as big (idea-wise) to unveil in the next. Of course, that didn't necessarily matter, as all a lot of the fans (me included) were panting for was more in that setting and with those characters...but it does inevitably lead to a sense of anticlimax if you read it looking for Big Ideas.
The other thing is that whereas the first five books were written separately with longish intervals in between (I remember wondering if The Courts Of Chaos would ever get published, or if it would languish in limbo forever like The Universal Pantograph and yes I am looking at you Mr Panshin), these books are more obviously through-composed, one long story chopped into chunks. Which is a perfectly good way to write, but can lead to the separate volumes feeling like episodes rather than standalone stories, because, well, they are.
One thing I haven't found that was reported is the protagonist becoming a superbeing "who could give God a hard time." I'm in the tenth book and he may have negotiated just about every archetypal symbol in the universe and acquired a very powerful but eevil magic ring tee em, but he's still getting pushed around by his little brother. I mean really. :)