There is no question this was a real labor of love. Not only have all kinds of obscure material been collected here, even a few pieces from zines, but almost all of Zelazny's poems have been included. Interestingly, Zelazny had hoped to become a poet, but realized there was no money in it, and that it was easier breaking into short story writing in the SF/fantasy field (still probably true to this day). Having read some of these poems, I would have to say that was the wise career move.
I don't think I will ever feel quite as fondly about these volumes as The Last Defender of Camelot or Unicorn Variations, which I read as a teenager. I am not sure I ever owned Frost and Fire, whose main claim to fame is that it contained the novella 24 Views of Mt. Fuji, by Hokusai, possibly Zelazny's best late writing (when he had started to do a fair bit of collaborative writing and generally his work wasn't as strong).
While I thought I had read pretty much all of Zelazny, that is clearly not the case, and I missed out on a great number of stories (and apparently I missed out on one illustrated novel -- A Night in the Lonesome October*). I don't feel particularly obligated to rush through and read these in one go, but I think I'll read a few here and there, particularly ones that I liked as a teenager.
I don't have a lot of time to go into what I think makes Zelazny special, other than he worked a lot with myths and didn't just go straight into fantasy, and I respect that. He also was one of the more overtly literary writers** in the SF field, although of course that meant he generally was not up on the hard SF side of things. While they might reject the comparison, I tend to lump Zelazny in with Harlan Ellison and Samuel Delany (and possibly even Philip K. Dick, though he came more directly out of the pulp tradition). He also admitted that the whole Amber series was based on some ideas that he extracted from Philip Jose Farmer's World of Tiers (remember, it isn't stealing if you are simply inspired and build something great from others' work).
Of the novels, my very favorite is Roadmarks, followed by Lord of Light, Eye of Cat and Jack of Shadows. Anyway, I have a very soft spot in my heart for Zelazny, perhaps greater than for any other SF writer active in the 70s and 80s. And even so, I think this 6 volume set is just a bit too much. You'll have to be a fanboy (or fangirl) ahead of time to even consider tracking these books down. But it is still a cool set, and I'm sure I'll get through it all some day.
I especially like the way the cover sort of wraps around the whole set. This is the full cover (by famed illustrator Michael Whelan) as best as I could reconstruct it.
I do like how they gathered up all the afterwards to the stories that Zelazny wrote for his collections, particularly The Last Defender and Unicorn Variations. That is a particularly nice touch. The editorial notes for each story are all contained after Zelazny's afterwards, so they don't interrupt the flow. A good thing too, for some of the stories have a couple of pages of notes! Finally, they have quite a few non-fiction pieces that Zelazny wrote, mostly about the craft of being a writer. It is cool to have these gathered up across the various volumes.
* This, his last novel, has gone out of print, but apparently is being reissued (appropriately enough) this October. I think I'll pick up a copy.
** Zelazny made a real effort to read all the classics of Western literature, and obviously he later studied non-Western religions and mythology (and quite likely literature as well). He was set on this path by a high school teacher who convinced Roger and a close friend to read Ulysses, War and Peace and Remembrance of Things Past as they were the 3 greatest novels of all time -- boy, I just can't seem to escape Proust these days.
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