Quote:
Originally Posted by montsnmags
Roger Zelazny? Lord of Light is a recent read (as in, I read it in the last 18 months or so), and I thoroughly enjoyed it. It definitely hit the "Favourites" category. The only reason I haven't started on more of his is because I haven't found a spot to fit them in yet (TBR pile...you know how it is).
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_Lord of Light_ is splendid. It won the 1968 Hugo Award for Best Novel, and is a good representation of Roger's strengths as a writer. He was a superb stylist, and tended to mine myth for materials.
Roger is probably best known for the Amber series -- two series of five books each about the land of Amber and its inhabitants. Amber is the real world, and the city of Amber is the true city All other worlds are reflections of Amber in Shadow. The royal family of Amber have the ability to travel through Shadow, selectively adding and subtracting bits as they "hell ride", till they reach a Shadow that matches their imagining. (It's a minor philosophical question among them as to whether the worlds they travel to already exist, or are created by their efforts to reach them.)
In the first book, Corwin awakens in a hospital on Earth, with no memory of who and what he as. As events progress, we discover he is a Prince of Amber, son of Oberon, the King of Amber. Oberon has disappeared, and a dynastic struggle has broken out within the family over who will replace him. Meanwhile, Amber is under attack by strange beings out of Shadow. Corwin must somehow return to Amber despite the efforts of some of the family to prevent it, and walk the Pattern beneath the royal palace to regain his full memories and abilities, help defeat the forces of Shadow, and perhaps become the new king.
The second series concerns Corey, Corwin's son by a Princess of Chaos, who has become a computer engineer on earth, and constructed a device called Ghostwheel that can scan and map Shadow, leading to encounters with a variety of folks from both Amber and Chaos who wish to gain control of or destroy the device.
Zelazny's poetic style gets full reign in the series, and he's adept at peeling the layers of the onion and revealing that things aren't what you thought they were as the story progresses.
Zelazny might be greatest in shorter lengths. I'm fond of "For a Breath I Tarry", "The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth", and "Damnation Alley" (later padded to novel length and made into a bad film). For a change of pace, look at _Creatures of Light and Darkness_, published after _Lord of Light_. It's another romp through myth, though with Egyptian gods this time. It got championed as a leading example of the "New Wave" in SF, which amused Roger. He'd written it mostly as a literary joke, tossing in every radical writing technique he knew to see what would happen, and was startled at the reception it got from SF fans.
I asked him once whether he had any idea when writing the Amber books that they would be regarded as his magnum opus, and he said no. He felt he had more work equal to or greater than that waiting to be written. Unfortunately, that was largely not to be: he died of liver cancer in 1995.
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Dennis