this post was submitted on 11 Apr 2026
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I'd love to have a new Amber Chronicles.
I liked the earlier books the most, the ones that focused on Corwin, where the scale tended to be kept smaller, not universe-shattering stuff, but felt that the whole thing was a fun read.
That's the first five books, the ones I said I liked better, too. For me, one of the reasons is that magic is mostly constrained to walking through shadows and using trumps. Corwyn mostly deals with his problems by training through solutions and deleting with people. In the second series, there's a broader type of magic, and Merlin uses it to deal with his problems.
Also, at least for the first half of the second series, Merlin is naive and easily manipulated, which I realize is intentional, but it's frustrating.
Yeah, that's also a good point. What bugged me was in part was something common to fiction, where each story tends to get "bigger" and higher stakes, and at the end of the series plot, the universe winds up at stake. But...there's another issue in that Merlin's magic is far more versatile. It makes for something of a deus ex machina, where the author can pull some new magic mechanism out of a hat to resolve issues or advance the plot, and I didn't like that as much as the much-more-limited toolbox that Corwin had.
Like, to have a good story, one has to have conflict to resolve. If you're Superman, that conflict pretty much has to resolve around Kryptonite or something like that. It limits the kinds of conflicts that the story can do. If you can only shadow-walk, as with Corwin
certainly a potent ability
but can only do so with physical movement and a set of landmarks that you can see and so forth, there are ways in which it can be restricted. But if you can, say, call up an intelligent portal virtually anywhere that's near-omniscient and can transport things anywhere, well, that alone kind of limits the sort of things that you can run into that are real challenges to overcome. And that's just one of the tools in Merlin's toolbox.
Yeah...though to be fair, if the comparison is Corwin...a lot of the first book is just talking about how able he is to deal with situations and be cunning and see through intrigue even under extreme handicaps, like his damaged memory and with almost no information about what's going on. That's a high bar to follow.
Yeah, exactly - makes things a bit too easy.
Oh, I get it - like I said, I know it was an intentional choice by Zelazny. Merlin is young, where Corwin was hundreds of years old. He's a different char, and there's goodness in that. But I also found it annoying in a main character.