Zelazny, Roger

• Series: The Chronicles of Amber
  • Nine Princes in Amber (7 r)
  • The Guns of Avalon (7 r)
  • Sign of the Unicorn (5 r)
  • The Hand of Oberon (6 r)
  • The Courts of Chaos (4 r)
  • Trumps of Doom (5 r)
  • Blood of Amber (4 r)
  • Sign of Chaos (6 r)

    • There are a couple more books after this that I never got to. The premise of this famous series is that there are a series of worlds connected in sort of an infinite parameter space. Certain people (princes of Amber) can pass between them (for example, up or down the axis of increasing civiliation or decreasing temperature or whatever) and experience life in another world, with Amber being the world that casts all of these shadows. Lots of politics and interesting ideas from the princes about ways to abuse their power in other worlds in order to try to gain the upper hand in Amber. The last three books focus on one of the more ambitious world travellers named Merlin, but I wasn't too impressed after book 6 or so.

• Lord of Light (6)

  • Here's a very unusual story set on a colony world in the very distant future. The original Earth colonists have mostly died off, and those who remain (calling themselves the First) have developed godlike powers and attributes (partly via technology, partly via some unexplained magic). They take on the mantle of a variety of Hindu gods and war amongst themselves over what to do with the inhabitants of their world. The opening 40 pages of this book are extremely confusing, and I found myself having to reread much of it once I was about halfway through the book in order to figure out the time-frame of events. To be honest, you could cut the first few chapters out and have a better book. Still, this is an unusual and interesting story and marginally worth looking for.

• Doorways in the Sand (7)

  • In this novel, the human race is on the verge of major interactions with other civilizations in the galaxy. As a first step, some gifts are exchanged with other cultures, including a "Star Stone", which promptly gets lost. As one who has recently had (illegal) contact with it, a career undergraduate who likes climbing on buildings suddenly finds that a lot of people and aliens are very interested in him. As usual with Zelazny, it is sometimes difficult to separate reality from metaphor as he goes back and forth between them, but that is part of his unusual (and very readable) style. I had a little trouble keeping track of a few of the minor characters and which "sides" they were on, but I really enjoyed the alien characters and the unpredictability of the story.

• Creatures of Light and Darkness (4)

  • In many respects, this novel is similar to "Lord of Light" only much, much stranger, if you can believe that. The story describes a battle of Egyptian gods in the distant future that rages across a series of worlds. It was never quite clear to me whether these were truly gods or simply mortals who had somehow developed god-like powers. I guess my reading was colored by previous Zelazny works where the distinction isn't clear. Anyway, while I'm sure this whole experience works for some people, it was just too off-the-wall to do anything for me. I couldn't really follow the thoughts and motivations of all the different characters, and maybe that's a slam on me that I'm too used to "shallow" works. To me, though, if an author is going to demand that you invest a great deal of mental energy in a book to understand it, there had better be a big payoff. I just didn't see that payoff, so I give it a low number.

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