So Sincere

Nine Princes in Amber (Chronicles of Amber, volume 1)

By Roger Zelazny

11 Jun, 2023

**Because My Tears Are Delicious To You**

20 comments

Support me with a Patreon monthly subscription! — 11 Jun, 2023

**Because My Tears Are Delicious To You**

20 comments

1970’s Nine Princes in Amber is the first volume in Roger Zelazny’s five-part Corwin Cycle, which is part of the ten volume Chronicles of Amber.

Despite amnesia, “Carl Corey” has no problem understanding that he is being overmedicated or that if his minders have someone’s best interests at heart, it’s not his. The patient bullies his way out of the medical facility in which he has been immured, blackmailing the staff into providing him with funds and information.

Destination one: the home of Corey’s alleged sister Evelyn Flaumel. Since she has been footing the bills for his treatment, perhaps she can provide more information.

Evelyn — whose real name is Flora — is as thick as two planks. Corey manages to fake his way through a highly informative conversation. What he learns: his real name is Corwin. He has many siblings: brothers Benedict, Bleys, Brand, Caine, Eric, Gérard, Julian, Random, and sisters Deirdre, Fiona, Flora, and Llewella. One sibling, Eric, sees Corwin as a possible threat.

Random arrives, pursued by hostile, inhuman forces. After vanquishing the enemy with resources Corwin is astonished to learn he has, Random and Corwin take their leave of Flora. Their destination is Amber. To reach it, they travel by mysterious means through a diverse assortment of other-dimensional worlds. The journey ensures that Corwin will play a key role in a violent dynastic struggle.

Corwin and his siblings hail from Amber, the one true city in the one true world. All other realms are mere shadows of Amber. All of the siblings are able to walk from one shadow to another by pure force of will, although other methods exist. Whether the shadows are in a sense real places or only spring into existence when the siblings imagine their destination is an open question.

The crisis facing the family is simple. Their father Oberon having vanished, someone must replace him as King of Amber. Eric is determined to be that King. Eric demands his siblings choose: support him or be dealt with as a threat.

Corwin chooses the second option. He and his brother Bleys will oppose arrogant Eric. Together, they might be able to overcome their usurping brother. Or perhaps Eric’s resources are too great. At least Corwin and Bleys will have company in defeat.

~oOo~

Was this Zelazny’s take on Farmer’s World of Tiers?

One can understand the temptation to publishers to present entire series as hefty omnibuses (omnibi?). Nevertheless, one must wonder why it struck Avon as a good idea to offer a four-in-one omnibus of Amber. The first books are a five-book series. I cannot find a date for the four-in-one, but presumably it was published in the two-year span between 1976’s The Hand of Oberon and 1978’s The Courts of Chaos. Still, publishing timelines being what they are, Avon had to know book five was coming, might have had it in hand, so why not wait¹?

The current omnibus now offers ten books, the original series and the comparatively harmless college-tuition-paying one that followed. There is no sign of the abhorrent prequel series, whose existence you should strike from your memory.

This is where I admit that in addition to being unable to remember the plots of most of the Zelazny books I believe I’ve read², I was never a fan of Amber. Rereading Nine Princes, the reasons for my earlier dislike are clear. I didn’t care for the suggestion that our world is merely a shadow and I dislike feudal slap-fight stories. This book chronicles a dynastic struggle between siblings who offer very little reason to support any of them³. Finally, this book, the first in the series, ends on a giant cliffhanger. It’s best to think of the Corwin Amber books as a novel divided into five parts. Too bad I didn’t know that when I bought Nine Princes in Amber.

I was clearly in the Amber-disdaining minority, as Amber was wildly popular in its day. While the quantity of tie-in products didn’t match those of a film-based property, the number was impressive by novel standards and included the late Erick Wujcik’s remarkable Amber Diceless Roleplaying Game, which I will have to review one of these days.

Amber is also slated for an upcoming television adaptation, which may even get made.

One can see why other people would like this series. Zelazny had a fine grasp of first-person smartass narratives. Selecting as his protagonist an amnesiac facilitated inclueing the readers to the setting. The plot moves at breakneck pace, cramming in events that modern authors might spread out over hundreds of pages rather than the 175 pages that Zelazny actually used⁴.

Nine Princes in Amber is available here (Amazon US), here (Amazon Canada), here (Amazon UK) (as part of an omnibus), here (Apple Books), here (Barnes & Noble), and here (Chapters-Indigo) (also as part of an omnibus).

1: I am reminded of a DAW Books publication, The Chanur Saga. That’s an omnibus containing The Pride of Chanur (a stand-alone), Chanur’s Venture (Book One of a trilogy), and The Kif Strike Back (Book Two of the trilogy). Of Chanur’s Homecoming, the concluding book of the trilogy, there is no sign. Homecoming was later bundled with Chanur’s Legacy, which was a stand-alone sequel. Homecoming had been published when Saga was assembled. Perhaps the combined page count of books one through four was too hefty for the rudimentary publishing technology a quarter century ago.

2: This ensures I have a never-ending supply of effectively new to me Zelazny books to read.

3: Corwin does at least feel guilty about leading legions of brave shadow-world soldiers to horrible deaths.

4: Publishers of the day were unwilling to publish lengthy SF novels, which may explain why this tale was divided between five volumes.

Comments

Mac089

"the late Erick Wujcik’s remarkable Amber Diceless Roleplaying Game, which I will have to review one of these days" Yes, you should. Most of my exposure to Amber is through playing characters in that game (I think that I've read the Corwin books, but as little of them remains in my memory as in yours. I own the Great Book but have never gotten around to reading books 6-10)

Mad Hamish

It's interesting to see the difference in Flora in Merlin's stories Whether it's a retcon, lack of concern for the character or meant to suggest that a lot of what was shown in the first series was heavily shaped by Corwin's views on things is an interesting question

Jon MeltzerMad Hamish

Corwin is an unreliable narrator, and nowhere near as smart as he thinks he is :-)

-Dsr-

Re: the RPG. It's simultaneously full of clever ideas about roleplaying and appears to be designed to destroy friendships among the players and GM. Good to read, do not recommend actually playing.

Paul Weimer

The RPG is a beast of its own and is much like the board game Diplomacy--its for people who like that sort of thing, and will annoy others no end. Disclaimer: I've run an ADRPG game for a long time but even since the beginning I've had my own house rules.

Tucker McKinnonPaul Weimer

This seems accurate. Amber Diceless was my first GMing experience, and I've run several well-received games. I also have a tendency, whenever I go to refer to the actual rules, to say, out loud, "That's stupid, I'm not doing that" and then spending like ten minutes arguing with the book.

Tim

"Or perhaps Eric’s resources are too great. At"

That's where that section ends when viewed on my phone. Did some text go missing?

EdTim

Apparently so. Text ends that way in the web-laptop-internet world as well.

James NicollEd

Should be fixed now. It's a cut and paste issue that I forget to check for.

Dan Blum

The prequel series is apparently so abhorrent that ISFDB won't even list it - I see just the Corwin series, the Merlin series, and a few stories.

I was warned off the Merlin series by friends who were fans of the Corwin series, so I just read the latter. I would probably have enjoyed it more if I had read it when I was in my teens, the way they did.

Dan BlumDan Blum

Never mind, I see the prequels were not by Zelazny.

Ryk Spoor

Amber is my favorite Zelazny work, but I absolutely admit it is primarily for (A) Corwin's personal voice, and (B) the sensawunda of the Amberverse. I had never encountered that concept or really anything like it before and it blew me away.

The ADRPG is one of my favorites overall, though the specific advice in the book about how to deal with characters and goals is best ignored. I've used its general structure a lot, though.

Robert Carnegie

I like Amber, although clearly its magic and mystery requires huge suspension of disbelief and of critical thought. But Earth isn't the centre of the universe and so it needn't be the centre of the multiverse, and very similar parallel universes don't trouble me much, although the princes' idea that shadow worlds only exist when they wish them into being isn't pleasant. Maybe it says more about them than about us. The matter is more-or-less settled in the later books, whose concepts may have not existed when this first was written, that Amber is a pole of cosmic stability countering the Chaos at the other end of the multiverse, and the Chaos existed first. No, I haven't read the prequels; being warned, I still want to.

Today, people whose psychology I suppose to be similar to that of COVID-19 deniers, like to declare that they're statistically convinced that Earth exists only as a mathematical simulation in some mysterious cosmic computer system. But it exists, cogito ergo sum, if that is how it exists, what of it? Well, some people are looking for the cheat codes. But if our world was found to have bugs like that, wouldn't someone shut it down?

Perhaps I'm desensitised by too many to-be-not-continued first halves of epics, or by superhero wrap-ups of the hero or heroes dashing off to further adventure without us, and perhaps I'm less pleased with what followed this (though I actually read the fourth book first, that being what the lending library had), but this volume didn't seem too incomplete to me. Corwin's schemes have a climax. Then several years pass. Then, like Tennyson's Ulysses (maybe), he's off again. To where, I thought, it doesn't matter.

I do agree that there is no particular reason here to think that Eric isn't a good choice of administrator of the known universe, except that the characters that we're with don't like him, and he doesn't like them.

John Styles

"Feudal slapfighr" should be a book shop section. Also a digest size magazine, Roger Zelazny's Feudal Slapfight Magazine

Gary Farber

I admit my memory is fuzzy on many details after all these decades, and that my tenure at Avon was not until a few years after the publication of the first five books, but I think those five weren't written with obligatory dates in the contract, and that the fifth one was indeed a bit of an unplanned surprise.

But I absolutely could be entirely wrong in that half memory. The main reason I lean in that direction is that the company was extremely emphatic in the contracts for the second five that Roger meet strict deadlines, and that I can say was an absolute fact.

The remaining man alive who would remember the truth about the first five is John Douglas, my former boss.

Ken Burnside

I read the first five Amber books in the SFBC omnibus editions, about the same time I was devouring Dad's Travis McGee collection. I liked them a lot at age 11 or 12. I went on a Zelazny kick and picked up Unicorn Variations from SFBC and a few other books.

I recently tried re-reading some early Travis McGee novels, and found myself exasperated with the miasma of sexism in them. I'm kind of afraid I'll see the same thing if I reread the first five Amber books. Rereading Lords of Light in my late forties made me realize how awful every female portrayal was in that book.

Roger Zelazny picked up RPGing as a hobby late in life; I had the pleasure (at a convention in the early 1990s in Phoenix) of teaching him GURPS, because I was running a one-shot based on Lords of Light, and he was very curious about how we'd do it; I quickly made another character so I could add him to the game.

A lot of people played AmberMUSH in the mid-90s to early 2000s, myself among them, who later went on to prominence as writers or game designers:

Jessica Banks Cam Banks Genevieve Cogman Jim Butcher (me)

And no doubt several others I'm not remembering -- at its peak, AmberMUSH had about 900 unique logins per day, hanging out and chatting/roleplaying using the very simple Amber DTRPG rules with changes all over the place. A lot of us wrote our million words of trunk novel roleplaying there, getting a little bit better every month.

A lot of the early Harry Dresden novels have Easter Eggs from AmberMUSH characters, events, places and other bits and bobs, some of which allude to places I built or administered.

Madeline Bernard

From ~1993-2006 there was an excellent Amber Mailing List and from it rose another author, Elizabeth Bear...

In terms of the sexism, my thought is, at least Zelazny's stuff is all built on a skeleton of noir. So unlike other scifi books of the era, at least the dames can be (sometimes canny) operators with their own plans they're enacting.

Paul Connelly

Zelazny came on the scene pretty much at the same time as New Wave and he was usually considered a New Wave author. And a big aspect of that was that Style Was King, and he had a recognizable style, like contemporaries Samuel R. Delany, J. G. Ballard and Cordwainer Smith. In Zelazny's case the style borrowed heavily from the hard-boiled detective literature crossed with mythic hero sagas, but with both added humor and portentous dialogue mixed together promiscuously. He was flashy. Even more, he was breezy, he moved his stories along quickly and with confidence. He didn't directly reference the hippie subculture that was developing at the same time, but the "hell rides" in the Amber series could easily be seen as drug "trips" by members of that subculture. I'm not sure that younger readers now would find his works appealing, because, without his writing being laden with pop culture references that would be obviously dated, he was still very much an author of his time. Which was my time also. But that time has gone.

Larry Lennhoff

Your footnote about Corwin and his soldiers made me immediately recall the parody Dying of Ember

Monsoons and lightning storms accosted us at every step. There were forces working against us. We slogged through hellish swamps and crawled through infested jungles as densely matted as the hair of a mongrel dog. The Road to Ember was tough indeed, and Erik wasn't making it any easier. We lost fifty thousand men in a sandstorm, and another fifty thousand died as they walked off a cliff that wasn't on the map.

William Stoddard

I liked the Amber Diceless RPG. I used it to run a campaign set in Zimiamvia, a world and a mythos I like rather more than Amber—though I made a couple of tweaks to the rules (has any game master ever run a campaign with no tweaks to the rules?). I've read all the first Amber series, and picked it up again a couple of times, but always with the same effect: I can remember the first volume clearly, and then somewhere in the second volume the story suffers deresolution and from then on I have no idea what's happening. I really regret that this series took off and captured so much of Zelazny's literary energy. My own favorite of his novels, and indeed one of my favorites in all of SF, is Lord of Light, which despite the scattering of dumb jokes has scenes that move me a lot.