The Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny

[finarvyn]

Anyone have these? What do you think about them?

For the uninformed, The Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny is a 6-volume (?) set of hardback books, priced at around $30 each. One of the volumes is supposed to contain the Amber short stories, much like Mana From Heaven did.

I haven't bought them becasuse I have a decent Zelazny collection already adn can't decide how much it's worth it to get a few more obscure non-Amber stories, so any feedback on this would be nice.

[finarvyn]

Further information can be found here if you're interested.

These six hardcover volumes contain all of Roger Zelazny's short fiction and poetry that we could find, however obscurely published, along with a number of unpublished works retrieved from Zelazny's archived papers. We also included shorter early versions of several novels, two novel excerpts and a few of Zelazny's articles on topics of interest to him.

There are numerous other novel excerpts (from Creatures of Light and Darkness, Lord of Light, Nine Princes in Amber, Madwand, etc.) published independently as short works that we did not include. We also did not include the many novel serializations (Jack of Shadows, Sign of the Unicorn, etc.)

The only piece of fiction we know of but could not find is an unpublished Zelazny story named "Checkup", which was written in 1975 for a special "children's future" issue of a UNICEF quarterly publication. We have records of it being paid for, but no trace of the story has surfaced.

Zelazny published over 150 non-fiction pieces, ranging from short introductions to other authors' books to lengthier essays that addressed the business and art of creative writing. He also recorded over 60 interviews. Including all of these essays and interviews would have taken up several volumes on their own and so we chose a select few to republish. Many of the remaining essays and interviews were quoted from in the "A Word from Zelazny" sections or in the literary biography, " '...And Call Me Roger': The Literary Life of Roger Zelazny."

[Jason D]

I have the first volume and will be picking up the rest as soon as I'm able.

My RZ collection consists of about three shelf-feet of space, ranging from old dog-eared yellow paperbacks decades old to newer hardcovers. Inevitably, whenever I turn to looking for one of his short stories, I have to pull three or four of them off the shelves.

I'm in the process of restructuring my library from "need to read in any format" to "books I want to have with me for decades, and then pass down to my daughter", and the collected RZ is one of those steps.

[finarvyn]

I have the first volume and will be picking up the rest as soon as I'm able.

Can you describe the book, give general impressions, etc.?

I know that some of this is described on the company's page, but I'd rather hear from a fan who has one before I commit big bucks to buying them.

[Jason D]

Can you describe the book, give general impressions, etc.?

I know that some of this is described on the company's page, but I'd rather hear from a fan who has one before I commit big bucks to buying them.

It has the dimensions of a Sci-Fi Book Club anthology, about 1.5" thick, with a heavy gloss paper dust jacket. The binding is tight, signature-bound, and the acid-free paper is a slight off-white, very high-quality.

The layout is clean, not too close to the inner margins, and the typeface is 10-point Adobe Garamond. (Don't look at me like that... doesn't everyone have a type size ruler?)

There's an illustration of RZ from early in his career as a frontspiece, and some notes on the stories and publication history.

It's much nicer than your traditional off-the-shelf hardcover. It's clearly an edition meant to last, with high-quality craftsmanship.

[weilide]

I have all six volumes. They're generally fun to page through and they have some nice paratext for the stories, with cool anecdotes and such. Additionally, they have a running literary biography of RZ which is good reading, although the author sometimes editorializes more than I would like. In general, there's a commendable effort produce an academically rigorous product, but occasionally they make strange decisions: for example, after each story they have notes for literary references and such, which is fine, but they also gloss vocab that even a reasonably bright high schooler should have no trouble with.

Short answer: if you care enough about RZ to be on this site, it's worth giving at least one volume a try, although you might want to avoid vol one, which has a lot of somewhat unpolished early work.

[finarvyn]

Took the plunge and ordered the whole set. They came in yesterday. I'm still reading the newest Dresden book, so I only had a chance to thumb through them a little, but I like what I see so far...

[Croaker]

I read the first Dresden book. Not bad, not great either, just average IMO (but maybe the translation didn't help) Are the others better or on a par with it?

[Sidrick]

I read the first Dresden book. Not bad, not great either, just average IMO (but maybe the translation didn't help) Are the others better or on a par with it?

They continue to improve.  Storm Front wasn't great, but I'd recommend continuing the series.

[finarvyn]

Yeah, but the new one (Changes; #12 in the series) ends on a cliffhanger and we have to wait a full year to get it resolved. Argh.

In many ways, I think Dresden Files is this generation's Amber. A nice selection of interesting characters, fun and sometimes unexpected plot twists, somewhat sarcastic writing style.

[Jason D]

Yeah, but the new one (Changes; #12 in the series) ends on a cliffhanger and we have to wait a full year to get it resolved. Argh.

In many ways, I think Dresden Files is this generation's Amber. A nice selection of interesting characters, fun and sometimes unexpected plot twists, somewhat sarcastic writing style.

Would that make the Vlad Taltos novels last generation's Amber?

[finarvyn]

Would that make the Vlad Taltos novels last generation's Amber?

I loved the early Taltos books, and felt they were very Amber-like (and Brust would have been an awesome successor to Zelazny if more Amber were to be written) in many ways but honestly I've lost interest in the series several novels ago. (I have the last few sitting unread on my shelf. Perhaps I should give them a go again?)