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I read a really neat chapter on the Dred Scott decision in William W. Freehling's The Road to Disunion: Secessionists Triumphant 1854-1860 last night. It turns out the most radical and grotesque Supreme Court decision it has yet been possible to make came from committed moderates.
Which, oddly enough, did not surprise me. But I knew very little about these judges in advance so Freehling taught me a fair bit in the course of proving them moderate, Unionist sorts. Only one went South, and he did so very late in the game and found his hometown disowned him. The slaveholders in the majority had freed their slaves, many of them long ago. Taney still kept in touch with his; he thought freedom suited them very nicely.
They figured they would save the Union by settling all questions pertaining to slavery, forever. But they were ultimately Southern slaveholders in mentality, except for a couple from the border North, and saw the solution much the same way that most men of their class and background did: disunion only threatened because abolitionists insisted on provoking slaveholders into extremism. The solution, then, was to require complete capitulation. Only then would the South, on its own and in no great rush but maybe some day, move toward abolition.
That worked out really well, naturally.
I left the books I was reading over a friend's house over the weekend, so I had to start reading new books.
The first one, and my God did it f#!#ing kick ass, was Negroes With Guns by Robert F. Williams. I haven't read this for, oh, I'd say, 20 years when an older comrade pressed a xeroxed copy held together by a rusty staple into my little goblin hands and said, "You better read this, kid."
I recently found a reissued copy in a Libertarian bookshop up in Concord. I even more recently (like, just now when googling stuff) saw that Ann Coulter talked it up a lot after the Trayvon Martin case.
I don't know if the recently issued copy is put out by the Heritage Foundation, funded by the Koch Brothers with a foreward by Karl Rove (which I don't think is true--the foreward, anyway, is by MLK) and I don't care. Anyone interested in these types of things should get out their credit cards and order as many copies as you can afford. I bought two!
There was another part where Williams's local NAACP branch was trying to integrate the public swimming pool. A couple of black children had drowned in the local creeks and the NAACP asked the town to build them a segregated pool. "Too expensive" said the local Town (White Citizens?) Council. So then they asked if one or two days a week could be put aside for the use of black citizens. "Too expensive" they again answered. "How so?" "Well, we'd have to drain and refill the pool each time you used it." (!!!) Interestingly, there was no thought put into draining the pool each time the white folk used it.
Anyway, 120 pages of Armed Black Self-Defense Guards kicking Klan ass until Williams had to flee because North Carolina was sending in the State Police? And he ends up in Cuba, publishing The Crusader (In Exile) and broadcasting to the South on Radio Free Havana?
Yes, please.
Vive le Galt!
Then I started reading White Wolf's Ill Met in Lankhmar, which is also pretty good.
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You lost Corum #5-6? Only a goblin could commit such blasphemy and admit to it in such a deadpan manner!
I didn't lose it. I left it at a friend's. I've actually got it back in my possession already. Not that I have to worry, all he ever does is read Tolkien.
In fact, he narrowly got caught reading Tolkien at work by the district manager and has since started buying books on tape. Guess what he started with? Last he mentioned, he was talking about Tom Bombadil.
Because Tom Bombadil kicks ass.
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I didn't lose it. I left it at a friend's. I've actually got it back in my possession already. Not that I have to worry, all he ever does is read Tolkien.
In fact, he narrowly got caught reading Tolkien at work by the district manager and has since started buying books on tape. Guess what he started with? Last he mentioned, he was talking about Tom Bombadil.
Because Tom Bombadil kicks ass.
I assume you've read this essay, then!
Not in a while.
Hee hee!
Wilderness, by Gerald Hausman and Roger Zelazny: "In 1808, explorer John Colter is forced to run for his life through what today is Yellowstone National Park, pursued by 700 Blackfeet Indians for 150 miles in a deadly game of cat and mouse. Fifteen years later, hunter Hugh Glass, left for dead after being mauled by a bear, manages to crawl more than 100 miles from the Grand Valley to civilization by the Missouri River. The narrative alternates between the two men's stories, which are linked by incredible feats of survival."
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Go, Blackfeet, go!!
Anyway, as I pack my stuff and get ready for Socialist Summer Camp (believe me, I wouldn't be going if it wasn't for the hawt chick comrade who freaked out when she heard I wasn't attending and then responded to my tentless condition with "Well, you can stay in my tent!" [Waggles eyebrows]), I realize that now I've left my Leiber at my friend's house. I blame the THC.
Anyway, I've got my Corum back, and I think, just to be contrarian, I'll also pack my Bible. Last I read, King David was gettin' up to no good with Bathsheba. F&*&in' David.
Yeah, the communist part of the Bible doesn't show up until the New Testament.
The 1,000 Names by Django Wexler. So far, so very, very good. Now here's hoping it doesn't turn into another Waste of Time.
[Waggles eyebrows]
I'm no expert on goblin anatomy, but I'm pretty sure that's not your eyebrows you're waggling there...
Read her excerpts from the Song of Solomon. Or some Pablo Neruda. Might do the trick ;)
Somebody appears to have offloaded an entire collection of FR novels onto the local hospice shop - 4 for £1, too, so I scooped up as many Elaine Cunninghams as they could sell me (i.e. six). That's me sorted for a while.
Got through The Metal Monster by A. Merrit this afternoon. Interesting read - HP Lovecraft with a sentient robot city rather than nameless horrors from beyond the stars is how I'd describe it (I am not very bright). Slightly over-written, and they liked to emphasise important bits of dialogue by printing them - IN BLOCK CAPITALS! - but pretty solid nonetheless
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I'm reading Asimov's "Foundation" for the first time.
Zeugma was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no women or girls in it, "and what is the use of a book," thought Zeugma, "without women or girls?"
What's the point of anything without girls or women? say I.
Socialist Summer Camp was kind of lame. Oh, I had fun, but on Sunday morning, despite all the talk of armed worker self-defense guards and independent workers mobilizations, we were still victimized by some thief who strolled through our campsite and stole: my beer, my iPod, The Chronicles of Corum, The Unbroken Thread by Ted Grant and the Anniversary Edition of Rise of the Runeplutocrats.
Not only do these losses (particularly the iPod) represent a serious blow to my quality of life (what am I going to do now while throwing boxes around? Listen to classic rock radio?!?), but I was left with nothing to read except The Books of Kings.
The comrades did make the gesture of compensating me for my loss, which I appreciated, but the money was coming from the pledges that all of the other comrades had made the night before, and I didn't wan't to take from that, although, they kept at it and finally convinced me to take $50 to cover the Runelords (which a) wasn't mine; and b) we're supposed to be playing in this coming weekend), but they also threw in a copy of Marx's The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte which I couldn't find last time I looked through my boxes.
Music Video about Books for the nerdz.
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we were still victimized by some thief who strolled through our campsite and stole my beer, my iPod, The Chronicles of Corum...
Admit it, you were so overwhelmed by the pressure to finish this volume that you engineered the theft yourself, doubtless by bribing some other wretched goblin to do the dirty work in exchange for said beer.
I just finished One Hundred Years of Solitude and picked up A Game of Thrones today.
we were still victimized by some thief who strolled through our campsite and stole my beer, my iPod, The Chronicles of Corum...Admit it, you were so overwhelmed by the pressure to finish this volume that you engineered the theft yourself, doubtless by bribing some other wretched goblin to do the dirty work in exchange for said beer.
Racist slander and not at all true.
I knew camping would suck because I would go to bed way before anyone else and wake up at 4 in the morning, hours before anyone else got up.
Anyway, on the first morning, before the theft, I got up to the part where Gaynor the Damned surrounded Corum (newly reunited with Jhary) with Hounds of Kerenos. They escaped, of course, and moved on to Caer Llud, where, armed with a mantle of invisibility, Corum discovered Goffanon the Dwarf and the Wizard C. (Coratin? Collatin? I don't recall at the moment), apparently working for the Fhoi Myore.
And now I'll never know. :(
Anyway, my Bible's still packed away, and I haven't recovered Ill Met in Lankhmar yet, so I guess I'll poke aimlessly through Eugene D. Genovese's The World the Slaveholders Made: Two Essays in Interpretation for a while.
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we were still victimized by some thief who strolled through our campsite and stole my beer, my iPod, The Chronicles of Corum...Admit it, you were so overwhelmed by the pressure to finish this volume that you engineered the theft yourself, doubtless by bribing some other wretched goblin to do the dirty work in exchange for said beer.
...Hic!
[Smacks Dicey]
Just started The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century by Ian Mortimer
Wife just called to let me know that Elmore Leonard died. Sad news.
Eugene D. Genovese's The World the Slaveholders Made: Two Essays in Interpretation
So, I guess this was his second book. His first one was called The Political Economy of Slavery or something like that.
So, the first essay is one of those historigraphical romps like you read in the academic historical journals where professors publish or perish.
Anyway, it was taking into account criticisms of his first book and then comparing slavery in the Southern United States to other American slave societies. So, I'm reading 100 pages about slavery in Brazil, the Spanish possessions, Saint Domingue, the Anglo-Caribbean, etc., and finally, all excited, I get to the States, you know, something I know something about.
"Since I have outlined my argument on the Old South elsewhere, I shall restrict myself to a few observations on the development of this remarkable slaveholding class."
Which I thought was bullshiznit.
Anyway, the second essay is a monograph on George Fitzhugh, whom I recognized from Edmund Wilson's Patriotic Gore. Comrade Samnell probably knows more about him than I, though. Read his blog!
Wife just called to let me know that Elmore Leonard died. Sad news.
:(
Wife just called to let me know that Elmore Leonard died. Sad news.
That is sad news; stupid mortality. :(
Anyway, the second essay is a monograph on George Fitzhugh, whom I recognized from Edmund Wilson's Patriotic Gore. Comrade Samnell probably knows more about him than I, though. Read his blog!
Link added because I'm shameless. :)
According to William W. Freehling's endnotes, Genovese is the best resource on Fitzhugh's ideas. You're probably ahead of me with him. Freehling calls him out for consistently underplaying the racial aspects of slavery, which is not a big shock for a Marxist turned Catholic reactionary. (Full disclosure: On the next page Freehling admits that he wrongly slighted a few topics in his previous volume that Genovese pointed out.)
Anyway, Fitzhugh and a few others wrote themselves into a corner both deliciously ironic and disgusting. If slavery was so awesome for black people, then shouldn't poor whites benefit from it too? That was always in the subtext of a lot of Virginia elites and South Carolina patricians' ideas. Some of the latter would really have preferred enslaving whites to letting the poor ones vote. Almost alone of proslavery propagandists, Fitzhugh was willing to go all the way on that: Yes, they should enslave poor whites! All of them! For freedom!
Of course, Fitzhugh wasn't as rich as he used to be either. But surely a scion of Virginia's best families would be spared all that. Why, with all those white slaves the price would drop and he might be able to buy some more.
Eugene D. Genovese's The World the Slaveholders Made: Two Essays in Interpretation
So, I guess this was his second book. His first one was called The Political Economy of Slavery or something like that.
So, the first essay is one of those historigraphical romps like you read in the academic historical journals where professors publish or perish.
Anyway, it was taking into account criticisms of his first book and then comparing slavery in the Southern United States to other American slave societies. So, I'm reading 100 pages about slavery in Brazil, the Spanish possessions, Saint Domingue, the Anglo-Caribbean, etc., and finally, all excited, I get to the States, you know, something I know something about.
"Since I have outlined my argument on the Old South elsewhere, I shall restrict myself to a few observations on the development of this remarkable slaveholding class."
Which I thought was bullshiznit.
Anyway, the second essay is a monograph on George Fitzhugh, whom I recognized from Edmund Wilson's Patriotic Gore. Comrade Samnell probably knows more about him than I, though. Read his blog!
Actually, "Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made", was Genovese's big book iirc. I had that in a graduate class years ago. This book sounds like the counterpoint to it. Genovese passed away in 2012 iirc.
No, Roll, Jordan, Roll was later--Wikipedia link. EDIT: Although, maybe I'm reading your post wrong. R,J,R was, indeed, his big book.
Comrade Samnell--
Haven't read enough of him to comment on the whole race vs. class thing...but here's Gene himself at the end of the Fitzhugh essay:
Spoilered for length
Fitzhugh's work laid bare the class essence of the regime, but no one could fail to recognize that race played a major role in the thinking and action of the Southern ruling class, as well as of the other classes. Stanley M. Elkins, in a critique of a paper I delivered on Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, chided me for attempting to subsume the race question under the general rubric of class rule:
'Which is to be called the tail and which the dog, and which wags what? I am quite willing to grant that race was functional for maintaining the stability of the class system within the white community. But to stop with that is to prevent us from examining the power of race itself and from seeing that the whole notion of race--with its complex of fears, phobias, and tensions rooted in a century and a half of Southern experience--had taken on a life of its own by the 1840's and 1850's. We should be free to see that it was not subsumed under "class" or any other term!'
There is little to disagree with here, if we clear up one point of definition. To say that the race question has to be subsumed under the class question is not to make a mere facade for class exploitation, nor to deny it a life of its own. Rather, it is a matter of arguing that racism restricted the options open to those charged with guarding class interests; that it forced the defense of class power into some channels rather than others; and that it helped form the ideology of the ruling class in such a way as to render it much more rigid than would have been the case without it. It is to argue that race gave shape to class hegemony, not vice versa.
Fitzhugh and his colleagues did not ultimately retreat into Negrophobia because they had become racists; they had never been anything else. They retreated because they could not master the class question. They could not press the logic of their position to include an open call for the enslavement of lower-class Southern whites, because those whites had evolved into an independent class with an elan, tradition, and power at least sufficient to kill those who tried it. This insistence on the priority of class simply affirms that the equation of slavery and white supremacy was a fraud. During the war certain sections of the South defected to the Union side and were bombarded by propaganda that warned of Negro rule, racial equality, and sleeping-with-baby-sister. The gambit did not work. Why should it have? Why should anyone in the South have thought that slavery was necessary to the maintenance of white supremacy?....[Talks about some other dude by the name of Hinton Helper for a couple of sentences]....We ought indeed to take the autonomy of racism seriously, but we ought to do it for the North as well as the South. Had the Southern leaders been willing to convert to another labor system while guaranteeing white supremacy, who in the North, apart from a handful of abolitionist extremists, would have raised objections? The class nature of the slaveholders' ideology, not the commitment to racism, provided the great stumbling block to the evolution of the Southern social and economic system. The defense of slavery in the abstract and the whole body of Fitzhughian thought represented the logical end of that line of thought, rather than a cross section of it. Therein lies its significance, for it lays bare the fundamental nature of Southern society as something to be understood, not as a form of capitalism, much less as a form of feudalism, but as a slave society deformed by internal and external ties to the capitalist world and profoundly flawed by racial caste.
He also gives a shout-out to Freehling's Prelude to Civil War: The Nullification Controversy in South Carolina.
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Re Powers, Drawing of the Dark, one of his early novels, works well enough that you can ignore the fact that a plot point hinges on a grievous misunderstanding of the way the wort method of brewing beer works. I think I like Declare best of his more recent works, but Anubis Gates is one of the tightest-plotted time travel novels I have ever read.
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Finished Asimov's Foundation. I liked it, but I'm not sure I liked it enough to want to read its bajillion prequels and sequels. Some of them weren't even written by him?
So, now I'm trying to figure out what to read next. I'm intrigued by Delany, but I'm not sure if I want to keep with the sci-fi or slip into some Zelazny as discussed on the "Advanced Readings in Dungeons & Dragons" thread.
No, Roll, Jordan, Roll was later--Wikipedia link. EDIT: Although, maybe I'm reading your post wrong. R,J,R was, indeed, his big book.Comrade Samnell--
Haven't read enough of him to comment on the whole race vs. class thing...but here's Gene himself at the end of the Fitzhugh essay:
Spoilered for length
** spoiler omitted **...
I wasn't talking sequence, just that it was his major work on slavery, race and class. Not my field, but interesting none the less.
Finished Asimov's Foundation. I liked it, but I'm not sure I liked it enough to want to read its bajillion prequels and sequels. Some of them weren't even written by him?So, now I'm trying to figure out what to read next. I'm intrigued by Delany, but I'm not sure if I want to keep with the sci-fi or slip into some Zelazny as discussed on the "Advanced Readings in Dungeons & Dragons" thread.
I found the original Foundation trilogy interesting, the later books much less so. As for Delany or Zelazny, I'd say Zelazny. The Amber books are what he was probably best known for, but I would recommend "Lord Of Light", "Dilvish the Damned", and "The Changing Land" to anyone who hasn't read them. Dilvish always struck me as a series of RPG type adventures with The Changing Land (which is about Dilvish the Damned) as the culmination. The eponymous Dilvish the Damned is a collection of short stories and a novelette about Dilvish, a half elf of the House of Selar. There are a lot of really good ideas just strewn throughout these stories. And the characters are interesting and well done. Lord of Light is set in the future using Hinduism as a source to draw on with technology advanced enough to be magic. Great stuff.
Yes, as R_Chance said, the ORIGINAL Foundation series is worth finishing. The original series was compiled into three volumes: Foundation, Foundation and Empire, and Second Foundation. (Note that Second Foundation shouldn't be confused with the Second Foundation Trilogy, written by different authors.) Volumes 2 and 3 weren't quite as compelling as volume 1 (or at least, I didn't read volumes 2 and 3 as many times as 1), but volume 3 managed to bring the series to a satisfactory conclusion.
After that, Asimov didn't want to write Foundation material anymore, but fans kept asking for more. Finally, after a couple of decades, someone paid Asimov a lot of money to continue the series, so he wrote some more sequels, starting with Foundation's Edge. This was the worst Foundation novel Asimov ever wrote. It destroyed the whole meaning of the original series. But it won awards, because fans were so hungry for more. Then Asimov moved on with Foundation and Earth, and when he couldn't figure out how to continue the series from there, he went back in time and wrote some prequels, Prelude to Foundation and Forward the Foundation. These books have their moments, and some cleverly written aspects, but they don't have what made the original series, in those 3 old volumes, so brilliant. And I wouldn't suggest bothering with the material by other authors, such as the aforementioned Second Foundation Trilogy.
Moving on, I personally had much more fun reading the Amber series than Lord of Light.
But then, I thought that The Anubis Gates was one of the best fantasy novels I've ever read. I wasn't nearly as impressed with the other Powers novels I've read, such as On Stranger Tides. Clearly, others will disagree with me on that.
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Just started The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, by Haruki Murakami. Enjoying it so far, though I'm less than fifty pages in. Recently I've been reading Houses of the Blooded and its sourcebooks - I think it would make an interesting counterpoint to the Kingmaker campaign I've been playing in for the last year or so.
I would like to me four (five?) The Anubis Gates. It is an absolutely stunning book.
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The Belgariad by David Eddings. A great book, for those who have not read it, i highly recommend it.
No, Roll, Jordan, Roll was later--Wikipedia link. EDIT: Although, maybe I'm reading your post wrong. R,J,R was, indeed, his big book.
Comrade Samnell--
Haven't read enough of him to comment on the whole race vs. class thing...but here's Gene himself at the end of the Fitzhugh essay:
Spoilered for length
** spoiler omitted **...
I read that and went back and reread Freehling's endnote. The relevant section:
Academics arguing over emphasis, eh? :) I take from your quote that Genovese sees race as a constraint on the general class-consciousness, with economic status being the key element. Freehling sees it just the opposite, fundamentally racial with Fitzhugh and, I suppose, Virginia and Carolina patricians, as outliers.
Which is an interesting argument, honestly. Now I'll have to read some Genovese (I have read a very good paper of his from the 70s.) because it's not like I don't have enough reading to do. :)
Seriously I need to manage time for this better. Freehling's a great historian but a sometimes iffy writer, a pretty common problem in academics, so he's hard to get into and easy to put down. I've been with him for, what, two months? Eeesh.
But this reminded me of another endnote of his:
I have just - belatedly, embarrassingly -- discovered Tim Powers.
Marsh -- Thanks for the review! Added Powers to my Kindle wish list -- hopefully Mrs Gersen will spot it there. (Also added Simmons' Hyperion -- not sure how I missed that one previously).
Academics arguing over emphasis, eh? :) I take from your quote that Genovese sees race as a constraint on the general class-consciousness, with economic status being the key element. Freehling sees it just the opposite, fundamentally racial with Fitzhugh and, I suppose, Virginia and Carolina patricians, as outliers.
Which is an interesting argument, honestly. Now I'll have to read some Genovese (I have read a very good paper of his from the 70s.) because it's not like I don't have enough reading to do. :)
Yeah, I'm not certain. Haven't really read enough of him to say one way or the other. Neither of the essays were really about American slavery per se.
For those comrades who remember Marx's denunciations of "feudal socialists" in The Goblin Manifesto, Fitzhugh was all over that shiznit. He worked out similar theories of labor-value and proletarian impoverishment from the same sources Marx used, loved to use the Utopian Socialists' criticisms of capitalism and even, at one point, called slavery the realization of the socialists' aspirations. Cannibals All! sounds like a pretty interesting read. I'm sure I'll never get around to it, though.
In the meantime, finished The First Book of Kings, but can't quite bring myself to plunge headlong into the second. Hmm...what to read next?
(Leiber is still over a friend's house.)
Something I was wondering, Samnell - did any slaveowners from the Caribbean (Jamaica, for example) migrate to the Southern US after slavery was banned in the British Empire? I would have thought not, but just curious...
From Genovese:
"The danger of slave insurrection remained great. Unlike the United States, the islands had had a long history of massive risings. During the nineteenth century several took place specifically under circumstances in which the blacks thought that local authorities were suppressing news of their emancipation. In 1823, 13,000 rose in Demerara, and in 1831, about 50,000 in Jamaica. Any secessionist coup d'etat by the resident planters threatened to provoke a recapitulation of Saint-Domingue [Haiti]. After the Jamaica rising some planters did establish communication with the United States with a view toward annexation, but the American response was cool, for war with England would certainly have followed. The opposition of the London interests and of the local colored middle class probably would have sufficed to prevent secession; at least the political position of the diehard slaveholders was clearly precarious."
So, not really an answer to your question, but that's what I've (well, Genovese's) got. In general, his thesis is that British slaveholders were mostly absentee who would invest in, say, Jamaican sugar, and, as soon as they made their fortune rush back to ol' Blighty to live it up (Lord Rochester from Jane Eyre?) and, hence, never developed a consciousness distinct from the rest of the British bourgeoisie. When emancipation came (with compensation? I don't recall), they just grumbled a bit, shifted their capital, and went happily about their plutocratic way.
While flipping through the book to find that, I realized there was a whole chapter from the first essay entitled "Class and Race" that I will re-read in light of Comrade Samnell's and Professor Freehling's comments above.
In other news, I started Death's Heretic by Citizen Sutter. I won it at the con I attended recently. Actually, everybody in the PFS room won something. We each went up to a table which was covered in Pathfinder Tales novels and player boons. I couldn't believe how many people were forgoing $10 books in order to get their PFS character, I don't know, a +2 trait bonus to bang hookers or something. The 15-year-old kid I was sitting next to, however, took a bag of candy. "I got the best prize on the table!" he shrieked in glee, stuffing his face and getting an early jump on Type 2 diabetes. [Shakes head] Gamers....
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There's a very odd POV shift right at the end of Death's Heretic. It wasn't enough to make me stop suspending my disbelief (if that's actually a requirement for readers, which I doubt). I'm just pointing it out because it is the very last paragraph of the whole novel, and it shifts to a character whom I didn't notice that close-3rd POV being on before. Frankly, I wasn't sure where Sutter was going with it.
Yes, as R_Chance said, the ORIGINAL Foundation series is worth finishing. The original series was compiled into three volumes: Foundation, Foundation and Empire, and Second Foundation. (Note that Second Foundation shouldn't be confused with the Second Foundation Trilogy, written by different authors.) Volumes 2 and 3 weren't quite as compelling as volume 1 (or at least, I didn't read volumes 2 and 3 as many times as 1), but volume 3 managed to bring the series to a satisfactory conclusion.
I loved Foundation and Empire. The other two were quite good as well. And yes, the later books were, imo, pretty mediocre.
After that, Asimov didn't want to write Foundation material anymore, but fans kept asking for more. Finally, after a couple of decades, someone paid Asimov a lot of money to continue the series, so he wrote some more sequels, starting with Foundation's Edge. This was the worst Foundation novel Asimov ever wrote. It destroyed the whole meaning of the original series. But it won awards, because fans were so hungry for more. Then Asimov moved on with Foundation and Earth, and when he couldn't figure out how to continue the series from there, he went back in time and wrote some prequels, Prelude to Foundation and Forward the Foundation. These books have their moments, and some cleverly written aspects, but they don't have what made the original series, in those 3 old volumes, so brilliant. And I wouldn't suggest bothering with the material by other authors, such as the aforementioned Second Foundation Trilogy.
Success can certainly have it's drawbacks as many authors have found out...
Moving on, I personally had much more fun reading the Amber series than Lord of Light.
Don't get me wrong, I loved Nine Princes in Amber and it's immediate sequels, but for me the Amber books that came later were not quite as good as the first couple. The Dilvish stories would make good D&D adventures. If the game fiction written could come near this I'd be an addict. The first time I read Lord of Light it didn't grab me as much as most Zelazny books, but a re-read later made it a favorite. Time certainly effects one view of a book :)
But then, I thought that The Anubis Gates was one of the best fantasy novels I've ever read. I wasn't nearly as impressed with the other Powers novels I've read, such as On Stranger Tides. Clearly, others will disagree with me on that.
I picked up The Drawing of the Dark in 1979/80 and loved it. I like his other books, but not quite as much.
There's a very odd POV shift right at the end of Death's Heretic. It wasn't enough to make me stop suspending my disbelief (if that's actually a requirement for readers, which I doubt). I'm just pointing it out because it is the very last paragraph of the whole novel, and it shifts to a character whom I didn't notice that close-3rd POV being on before. Frankly, I wasn't sure where Sutter was going with it.
Well, nowhere near the last paragraph, but, I must say, I can't remember the last time I read a "gamer novel" with so many prostitutes.
I applaud. In fact, I wonder if we could get WoTC to go back and retrofit, say, the Driz'zt books or DragonLance with more whores.
Maybe it's the sun flower orchid, maybe it's the vice, but I keep picturing Salim as looking like Bogie in The Big Sleep.
Don't get me wrong, I loved Nine Princes in Amber and it's immediate sequels, but for me the Amber books that came later were not quite as good as the first couple.
Yes. The original Amber series came to a conclusion with book 5. Then Zelazny wrote a second 5-book Amber series. The second series was inferior to the first. You'd be hard-pressed to find anyone who likes the second series better.
To be sure, when Zelazny started the second series, it was a more ambitious project. This time around, the author clearly knew from the start who the secret villains were, and who made which secret murder attempt and why. Unfortunately, by the time he wrote the sequels, he seemed to have gotten bored of the old mysteries, and mentioned the culprits as a kind of a by-the-way, while emphasizing the new subplots that seemed to excite him more.
And the last 2 books were really dumb, introducing elements that just didn't work.
Still, the Amber books were fun enough to make me read the first series three times, and the second series twice.