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Josh Bisker

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The Great Book of Amber (The Chronicles of Amber, #1-10)

by Roger Zelazny

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Josh Bisker said: " The start of this series is great, but jeezum crow, what was HarperCollins thinking with the format of this edition? They went through all the trouble of getting the rights and printing the thing, but the fifteen-pound tome is physically difficult to The start of this series is great, but jeezum crow, what was HarperCollins thinking with the format of this edition? They went through all the trouble of getting the rights and printing the thing, but the fifteen-pound tome is physically difficult to read, laughably inconvenient to transport, and inexcusably devoid of any kind of supportive structural writing--like an introduction, a foreword, an about the author, an about the series, or even a table of contents!

Wikipedia tells us that the Great Book comprises all ten books of the Amber series, a story told in two five-book cycles that were published between 1967 and 1991 and have come to be regarded as some of the most seminal works of SF ever written. We would have no idea of any of this, however, simply by reading the Great Book of Amber, which begins on its page 1 with page 1 of the first book of Amber (without even a title page!) and screams through until page-the-last, which, you guessed it, is page-the-last of book ten. The Great Book sure was edited with some surprising assumptions about we the reader, but it's hard to peg down just what the thinking was behind it all. Was it that we won't care about knowing when the books came out? That we already know? That knowing more about the books' context will spoil the fun? That we don't care about Zelazny--a nowadays little-known author who was a titan of the SF world, and whose writing retains a glittering vitality and prescience? (Is it not exciting to discover, for example, that Zelazny's first novel tied with Dune for the Hugo award!? His first novel! With DUNE!) There's not even a table of contents to tell you that the next thousand+ pages are really ten books, which are really two sets of five books, and there are no dividers or distinctive decorative elements to distinguish one book from another. I just don't know what anyone was thinking with this book--either how they expected new readers to pick it up, or how they expected anyone to enjoy physically reading it. Why not a two-volume set (or a three-volume with the stories!), even a boxed set, with some cool notes about Zelazny's impact on SF, his history of writing, his other blockbuster award-winning books (he had tons!), and something to make me jazzed up about what I'm about to read? This is a packaging fail for HarperCollins, and a sad one at that; for yet another turn of the glass, these great books are going to be relegated to the "I'll read it later" pile when what awaits is an unforgettable journey into fantasy. ...more "

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"Onto the second series! Book 6!" — May 10, 2011 08:00AM

Apr 08, 2011 07:17AM · see review