Roger Zelazny eventually wrote ten books in the Amber series; what I’m speaking of here are the original five books about Corwin, Prince of Amber: Nine Princes in Amber, The Guns of Avalon, The Sign of the Unicorn, The Hand of Oberon, and The Courts of Chaos. It’s probably been fifteen years, or possibly even twenty, since I’d last read these, and ya know, they haven’t changed a bit. It was nice to become reacquainted after so long, but somehow it didn’t seem as long as all that while I was reading. It’s as though every single word had been engraved in my brain–I wasn’t so much reading them as remembering them. Consequently, I won’t try to review them as such; when I first encountered them, they were too electric, too mind-blowing for me to be particularly objective now.

If you have any taste for high fantasy, and you’ve not read Zelazny, you owe it to yourself to check out at least these books, and then Lord of Light as well. Finding them might be tricky. There’s an omnibus edition, entitled The Great Book of Amber if I recall correctly, which I think is still available. It also includes the Second Chronicles of Amber, five more books involving Corwin’s son, and is printed on really shoddy paper–at least, the copy I first saw was. It’s too big to read comfortably, and the paper looked like it would start to fragment after a few years. I didn’t buy it.

The copy I read this time is the two volume hardcover edition published the Science Fiction Book Club back in the 1980’s, which I bought used last month. Most of the SFBC editions were cheaply bound, with thin boards and bad paper; this quality of the binding and paper in this one is surprisingly good, and the folks at the used book store told me that it’s much in demand as the only hard cover edition of the Corwin books that’s readily available. Publishers take note!