Neil Fein's Blog

Nine Princes in Amber
The Guns of Avalon
Sign of the Unicorn
The Hand of Oberon
The Courts of Chaos
by Roger Zelazny

"I drove along it for awhile, and I saw a road which was much less kept up. I turned onto that one, and later on I hit a dirt road and I tried it, and pretty soon I came to a place that wasn't on the map. It was just a little settlement. There were log cabins there, and horses pulling carts, and it looked physically as if I'd driven back into the 19th century."
Roger Zelazny, from the interview "Forever Amber"

"You can comission assassins. Lay ambushes. Pull close relatives out of your sleeve like concealed weapons."
Mike Carey. "The House of Windowless Rooms", 2000

"Imitation, in a broad sense, is how memes can replicate."
Richard Dawkins, "The Selfish Gene", 1976

As a teenager, I fell in live with the Amber books. Roger Zelazny's descriptions of the reality-bending royal family of Amber, peppered with his military and automotive obsessions, make for a nearly perfect prose saga of a superhero world.

To replace my battered, slim, paperback Amber books, I recently re-bought the Amber books, used, in book club hardcover editions. (One volume containing the first two books, one volume of the last three.) Of course, the series continues, and has been collected as The Great Book of Amber, an unweildy tome reprinting all ten books. But I never read the sequel series when I was young, maybe another five books seemed daunting. (There's a third series coming out now, "Roger Zelazny's Shadows of Amber" by John Betancourt, years after Mr. Zelazny's death.)

The series' first book is, as I remembered, the best. The introduction to Corwin and Random, two of the royal brothers, and Corwin's bid for the throne, is the most exciting story, and that with the most substance. The scene of Corwin walking the Pattern, the maze that confers superhuman powers to travel through the realities, is still tediously wonderful.

It's not until the later books that I remember that Corwin's brothers all have an air of royal, spoiled plywood. While there are of course differences between the siblings, only those needed to the story right now seem like human beings of note, and even then only when they're on-stage. But this is a minor quibble, as this is the story of Corwin, and Dworkin the court magician and family mystery.

Corwin's moments of philisophical thinking and tip-of-the-iceberg planning are welcome breaks in the often relentless pace. Ruminations in the nature of reality go with the territory; the royal family's dogma considers Amber to be the one, true reality, the other planes referred to as "shadows".

I had forgotten the ending, and was a little surprised by a few twists in the last two books. There's room for a sequel, but not an inevitable one. The Amber series makes for fine, fun, and quick reading. Maybe I will start the next series after all.

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