Kevin's Watch

Anyone read these 10 books, by Roger Zelazny? The first five are centered around Corwin,a prince of Amber, the second five are centered around his son. They were great, probably second only to TC as my fav fantasy.

BTW, my board lordmhoram8.proboards13.com/index.cgi is a Roger Zelazny board! So come on over, if you've read them!!

He didn't mention it, but he also has a general literature discussion forum also going on, with threads about such topics as poetry and theater, and the great moderator is none other than the watch's own Bannor! So please drop in and join the fun!

Silly me!

Wanted to bump this up: Chaos and Amber has just been published! I read it, not exactly Zelazny but damn good.

c'mon folks! Who is your favorite Amberite? Your favorite novel? Personally, the first five Amber novels are my favorite fantasy novels. Period. My favorite Amberite? As indicated by my Trump/avatar, it's Benedict.

Have you read the "Amber - Diceless RPG" book? If offers several various perspectives on the characters and plots in the Amber books. There is a separate book for the last five books called Shadow Knight.

(As a RPG it is not all that hot because it is difficult to deal with the systemless concept.)

I've always wanted to get that. It's like impossible to get, I had thought.

I bought it a long time ago. It might be hard to get now but you could try ebay or something like that. It has some great art. All the elder Amberites are described (a short chapter for each) and they have pictures drawn after the description of their trumps in Nine Princes (I think). In Shadow Knight (The Merlin books supplement) they have cards too, but these seem to be deliberately drawn in a different hand because these come from Merlin's trump deck (which he made himself).

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The ending sucked like a monkey. I estimated that if Roger excluded all the uncessesary parts in Myrlin's story, he would have had enough space to make a decent ending.

Perhaps you are not aware that the author was dying of cancer when he wrote it?

I was not aware of that, but even so I guess Blue Spawn is entitled to his/her opinion.

On a more general note I might venture the opinion that Zelazny is not all that good at endings. I did not really like the ending of the first five chronicles either.

I have noticed that he does a lot of "open endings" in his books...Lord of Light being a prime example...
The one firmly closed ending I can think of off the top of my head is the one to Night from the Lonesome October. I haven't read all that he has written, by any stretch, though...so there might be others...
And of course, everyone here is entitled to their own opinion. Including me.

The ending sucked like a monkey, eh? How about you try dying and writing at the same time!

Actually, I liked the end of the 1st Chronicles. Patternfall over. King is decided. Corwin's on good terms with family members-even Julian and Fiona. Case closed. Or so we think, til Merlin is featured in the second half of the series. In addition, Zelazny wrote 4 or 5 short stories trying to wrap up the series; all of which will be featured in an anthology called "Manna From Heaven." I can't wait til that comes out!

The ending sucked like a monkey

It is sort of hard for me take a comparison of a book's ending and receiving oral sex from a monkey seriously.

Actually, I do know that he was dying as he wrote. I'm simply saying that he could have made a much nicer closure if he removes a lot of unessesarry stuff (I am refering to the last five books). I mean, I was reading the thing with 40 pages left, and I was spazzing like mad because I kept wondering how he would end it with sooooo much stuff still left to explain.

Well....it turned out he doesn't.

Don't get me wrong, I love all of the first five books of Amber Chrons. The first three books made me shiver with every turn of the page it was so good.

If you had used that wording in the first place, I would have no problems with the way you expressed yourself.

As a matter of fact, I do not care for the ending of book 10, either.

However, the five short stories he wrote after the end of book ten shows that some of the things he introduced towards the end, such as the spikards, were going to be important elements of the story had he been able to continue it, along with the characters of Merlin, Corwin, Luke, and Vialle.

Yes, I have heard of the short stories.


P.S. I love Vialle.

Yeah, she's a cool character. Really contributed to Random's maturity by the end of Book 5. Among other things.

I also really liked Dara (was that her name?) before I found out that she was a total bitch.

Yes, her name is Dara. A total bitch? Maybe. Certainly from Corwin's POV. But conisder her...a Chaosite-who happens to be Benedict's descendant. She's told by her countrymen to seduce Corwin and she does so. Too bad Corwin's kind of an asshole (but we still love him!) to her so she leaves him--though she DEFINITELY coulda given him a second chance, she's just too caught up in Chaos. She raised Merlin pretty well I think.