When to give an author another chance: The Guns of Avalon by Roger Zelazny

I have to be honest: before I discovered the Chronicles of Amber, I had all but given up on Zelazny as an author. All of his stuff that I’d previously attempted to read had won a bunch of major awards, and none of it appealed to me. I honestly couldn’t see what the big deal was, as none of his award-winning books or short stories really hooked or appealed to me. It wasn’t that there was anything specific about his writing that turned me off: I just couldn’t get into any of it.

Looking back, I think that the reason Zelazny’s other stuff won so many awards is because it was too late to award Chronicles of Amber with anything, and the fandom rightfully didn’t want Zelazny to go unrecognized. It’s kind of similar to the way that Final Fantasy 8 launched with a much bigger splash than Final Fantasy 7, even though FF7 is clearly a superior game: the very success of FF7 led to so much recognition (and disappointment) for FF8. Or maybe Chronicles of Amber was just too popular, and the self-appointed snobs behind the Hugos and Nebulas disdained the thought of bowing to the crass, plebian tastes of the unwashed masses… but they still couldn’t snub Zelazny entirely, since that would only discredit themselves, so they picked some of his more “under-appreciated” work. I don’t really know, as I wasn’t alive at the time.

In either case, I really had written off Zelazny as an author. So when I decided, on a whim, to pick up Chronicles of Amber just to see what all the fuss was, I was truly amazed by how good it is. The second book picks up right where the first one left off and drives the story forward, with its own brilliant twists and turns and an ending that raises the stakes even higher. It speaks to the brilliance of Zelazny’s writing that I was just as hooked at the end of Guns of Avalon as I was after the first chapter of Nine Princes in Amber.

So when is it right to give up on an author, and when is it right to give them another chance? I suppose it comes down to two things: the themes that an author chooses to write about, and their style or authorial voice.

There are lots of authors that I will not read, because I cannot stand either of those qualities. For example, I will not read N.K. Jemisin at all, because her authorial voice and writing style personally turns me off, and everything she writes is infused with themes that I find to be nihilistic and pathological. Same with Samuel Delany: there’s a reason why he endorsed NAMBLA, and I’ll leave it at that.

But there are lots of edge cases where I love the author’s voice and style, yet find their themes to be troubling. Piers Anthony and Robert A. Heinlein fall into that camp; when they’re not being dirty old men, I find that I quite enjoy their books. George R.R. Martin is another example: his prose is great, and he really does a fantastic job of immersing you into his world, but his books are so full of nihilism and victimhood that I DNFed A Song of Ice and Fire after the first book.

And then there are the edge cases where I find nothing particularly off-putting about the themes, but for some reason I just can’t get into their writing style. Until I found Chronicles of Amber, Zelazny fell squarely into that camp. Patrick O’Brien also falls into this box: I just couldn’t get into Master and Commander the way I’ve been enjoying the original Hornblower novels, though I will give the Jack Aubrey novels another try. For my wife, I think Orson Scott Card falls into this camp: she really cannot stand how all of his characters sound like a smug and snarky version of the author, rather than characters in their own right. I’m not sure if that holds true for all of his books, but for his later books it certainly seems to.

Perhaps, as a general rule, it’s best not to give up on an author unless both their writing style / storytelling voice and their recurring themes both consistently put you off—and even then, it’s probably a good idea to give them several chances before you write them off entirely. I’ve culled a lot of Heinlein from my shelves and TBR, but I’m not going to totally “cancel” him yet like some of the perpetually offended seem to want to. And as for Zelazny, the Chronicles of Amber is making me think I ought to revisit some of his other stuff that I previously dropped. Maybe there’s something there that I just missed.