It's fun to see Amber described as internally consistent, but it seemed to me obviously built as an onion of lies and most of that onion was built a layer at a

It's fun to see Amber described as internally consistent, but it seemed to me obviously built as an onion of lies and most of that onion was built a layer at a time seemingly by the seat of the pants for what would be most jarring/weird/fun at the given part of the book where Zelazny thought he needed a big twist and/or gut punch to the current protagonist (and by proxy, the reader). Perhaps that's partly why the attempt by a different author to build prequels failed so spectacularly, too, because it assumed too much the world was internally consistent and so was boring and didn't reveal anything truly new because it wasn't really trying, it was just playing out the obvious consequences for if you believed in some of the consistency of the previous books. I suppose that it didn't really understand the onion it was trying to emulate and that there should have been a lot more lies and a lot less consistency. (ETA: It's also why sadly it felt like the last five books were all gearing up [often literally, new equipment every stage like levels in a videogame] for a war that will now never happen, because we don't know with who and for what reason or why because the lying protagonist wouldn't tell us, probably because Zelazny hadn't yet figured it out either and was waiting for the right moment to strike in the books that would have followed in some other timeline freer from cancer. I do still wonder where those books would have been leading. I don't know the author that could answer that definitively for us other than Zelazny.)