Well, being a Zelazny fan of some years (I first encountered Amber back in 1974), I pushed down my doubts and bought the book Dawn of Amber, by Betancourt. Supposedly authorized by Zelazny’s estate, it’s a pre-quel to the Amber series, beginning before the creation of the Pattern.
I must say I tend to give successor authors the benefit of the doubt. But I found this little effort to be truly execrable. Usually in this type of work, the writer tries to catch at least part of the original author’s style, but that is completely lacking here.
The writer seems to be in a race to accomplish tremendous feats in less than two pages. That’s about what it took to create the pattern, also invent new trumps for it, master all the intricacies of court politics along with the very concept of the Courts of Chaos, demonstrate hand-to-hand combat superiority, master shadow travel, and all too many other things. The Jewel of Judgement gets less than a paragraph, and nothing at all for the Unicorn.
Color me wrathful and vengeance-seeking. And this is just book one of a trilogy!
What makes it worse is that, although his estate may have authorized it, Zelazny himself was very much against the idea of franchizing The Chronicles of Amber like that, and wouldn’t permit it during his lifetime.
I’m avoiding it myself, along with the Dune prequels, which sound worse the more I hear about them, and other fanfic, whether professional or amateur, in general.
I actually didn’t think the Dune pre-quels were all that bad. The writing was sure better (than Dawn of Amber), even if it was pretty non-canon and abandoned the larger visions of author. “Dirk Pitt goes to Dune” is at least readable. This new Amber stuff is not.
I saw the word “Amber” in the title and was thrilled. Then I saw it wasn’t by Zelazny and my heart sank. Wouldn’t touch it with the proverbial ten foot pole. The last couple of Zelazny’s Amber books weren’t up to the best of the series (although even a not-best Amber book is better than most other sci-fi/fantasy series) so I didn’t even want to think about how bad this prequel would be.