Ah, the new Kim Harrison. I'ma go for that. Or maybe I'll see if it, and the new Anne Bishop, are at the library.

Yay!

Maybe now I can keep track of all the politics.

Dear lord that got confusing just in the first series. Loved it anyway (love Zelazny - Doorways in the Sand is a favorite of mine).

(love Zelazny - Doorways in the Sand is a favorite of mine)

A Night in the Lonesome October. I think I want to be buried with a copy of that book. Or hope that the Library of the Great Beyond has lots of copies.

I remember vividly the experience of reading Nine Princes in Amber for the first time as the story began to open up. Just thrilling.

I also loved Lords of Light and This Immortal and "A Rose for Ecclesiastes" (the story that made his reputation).

(Amych, did you know Zelazny fenced with the epee in college?)

I keep trying to read Zelazny as a writer, watching what he's doing and how, then I get caught up in the prose and have to go back a page or two to look more closely. I want to throw his books at the people who say "never use an adverb" and "said is the only word you should ever use to describe dialogue." Of course, everyone else isn't Zelazny.

edit: I got Great Book of Amber from Barnes & Noble, but couldn't find it in the SF&F section--it was on a "buy two get one free" table that had no other SF&F on it, WTF?--and I said "Do you have other Roger Zelazny books?"

"Who?" the clerk said. "What did he write?"

I named a couple of titles.

"Hm, they must be out of print. Is the one we have his new one?"

It was Lord of Light on their shelf. "No, it's been out for about thirty years."

Fortunately she found Great Book of Amber before I gave her the whole lecture.

I don't recall the reason (perhaps limited libary sci-fi section?), but I read The Guns of Avalon first, then to the end of the original Amber books, and only went back and read Nine Princes in Amber years afterwards. Didn't like it nearly as much, and I can't judge if that was due to the book itself or just me being exposed to the subsequent story at an earlier age.

That's funny, Matt. Because for me Nine Princes in Amber is easily the best of the series and each succeeding book is like a shadow further from the original pattern.

(See what I did there?)

Cute, Hec.

See what I did there?

Hah!

I loved the first Amber series--I got the whole sequence in a two-volume set from the SFBC when I was in high school, so I can't tell you what happened in each individual novel--but I bounced pretty hard off the second one. Merlin just never gelled for me as anything more than a more self-involved knockoff of Corwin.

ION, there's this auction going on to send fans of color to Wiscon this year, and among the items being auctioned is an ARC of Cryo-Burn, the next Vorkosigan novel.

Even the ARC won't be out until the fall, and already my heart is clenching in my chest in fear. This despite the fact that I found Diplomatic Immunity fairly dull and haven't reread it since it came out. But oh, I'm worried about Aral.

Has anyone done any studies in how the long-careered writers have treated women in their books? The various women in Nine Princes are referred to as girls, but in the second Amber series the women are more involved in the intricacies of the plot. I'm curious as to how women achieved more--though I hate the word--agency in the plots of a writer who might have tended to overlook women.