(no subject)

[skygiants]

I think I might have read Nine Princes in Amber when I was a teenager, but I remember almost nothing about it from that time. Either way, coming to it as an adult was an extremely funny experience -- Zelazny was I think arguably one of the first sff authors to pilot "my prince of the blood can talk in modern memes if he wants to," which leads to frequent occurrences of dialogue like this:

"You, Lord Corwin, are the only Prince of Amber I might support, save possibly for Benedict. He is gone these twelve years and ten, however, and Lir knows where his bones may lie. Pity."
"I did not know this," I said. "My memory is so screwed up. Please bear with me. I shall miss Benedict, an' he be dead."

Lord Corwin is, of course, one of the great Amnesia Sufferers of fiction. The first part of the book -- where Corwin wakes up with no memory in a New York hospital, immediately breaks out, and proceeds to chutzpah his way through several power plays with his dangerous magical siblings by responding to all their questions with cryptic bullshit variations on 'it's just what you think it is' and 'well, wouldn't you like to know?' -- was the most enjoyable for me by far. I often find fictional amnesiacs who sadly and helplessly tell everyone that they've lost their memory quite boring, but amnesiacs who boldly attempt to bullshit their way through this unfortunate but undoubtedly temporary embarrassment are I think fun and funny and Corwin is really great at it.

Alas, this state of affairs cannot last forever, and eventually we learn more about Corwin and his family and their terrible and violent power struggle for the kingdom of Amber, the only real place in all the multitudinous universes. (We also learn that he composed the words and lyrics to "many popular songs," such as Aupres de ma blonde, which is also very funny to me. This is my OC! He wrote my favorite song! "This seems logical and reasonable to me," announces the fantasy queen to whom he provides this information, which is a thing I'm going to start saying in as many situations as possible.) Corwin teams up with one of his brothers to go to war against another brother. This is less fun for me. The sisters all more or less disappear because this is 1970 and Zelazny does not really seem to be aware that women might sometimes 'play active roles' 'in fiction'. Things go badly, then improve somewhat. I presume there will be many more twists and turns over the course of the many more Amber books, and someday I might even find out about them.

Anyway, all that aside, the actual reason I read it again last month was because E made a convincing argument to me that she thinks it's a foundational text for Diana Wynne Jones' output in the 80s, and it's true that reading Homeward Bounders as a response to Nine Princes in Amber added an extremely funny extra layer to the already-richly-layered Homeward Bounders experience. Oh? We're positing that there's one universe that's realer than all the other universes, and the lords of that universe can just use ordinary less-real people as foot soldiers in their stupid little wars? Well, first of all, fuck that --

Comments

[vcmw]

ok, so first of all: this review is delightful and you make many excellent points and I agree entirely about the first bit being the most delightful
second of all: this series was one of the series I read the most times when I was 10 to 11 and if you ever for some reason do decide to read the rest I will probably follow along with great glee (I have the very controversial opinion of having liked Merlin as a protagonist a bit more than Corwin and the Alice in Wonderland bar scene is just real ridiculous, and it's entirely possible that this is because I was, y'know, 10 at the time, but I also feel like Merlin is such a cyberpunk protagonist)
third of all: now I want to re-read Homeward Bounders with this in mind.

[thegreatratsby]

I ALSO had a preference for Merlin hahaha, I mentioned in a separate comment but he really is like ... lowkey a mary-sue in the most charming way possible. (son of Amber AND Chaos. cool magic rope. the whole ghostwheel thing. is a software developer in san fran for some reason.) I just thought his character voice was more fun to read.

[melita66]

I also preferred Merlin, but my first Amber book was Merlin book 2, Blood of Amber. I had no idea what was going on or any context! It was great! So I read the 3 or 4 Merlin books that were out and at some later point, Corwin's sequence. I thought Corwin was an AH and in fact, thought practically everyone was. I've never reread Corwin's books, but did reread Merlin's at least once.

[thegreatratsby]

Blood of Amber is such a wild place to start, truly thrown in with zero context...yeah I periodically reread Nine Princes but I have never felt the urge to reread any of the other Corwin books lol

[skygiants]

I'm considering it!! they're very quick reads and it is kind of a trip just to see what the heck will happen next

[sovay]

and proceeds to chutzpah his way through several power plays with his dangerous magical siblings

That part does sound extremely DWJ when you summarize it that way. [edit] Also I commend to you Margery Allingham's Traitor's Purse (1941), in which the series character is missing his memory for most of the book. I read it in order of the Campion novels, but sholio actually started with it and thought it worked fine.

(I last read the original 1970–78 Chronicles of Amber in college. Mostly I remember that my favorite character was Random.)

[sholio]

Team Random! ♥ (I actually latched onto him as a side character in the second series, for reasons I couldn't fully explain, and was delighted to find out that he has a nice arc in the original series. I agreed with the point someone made online a long time ago - wildly paraphrasing from memory - that while everyone else is trying to win their version of the game of thrones, Random is learning the thing that none of the rest of them with the possible exception of Corwin ever did learn: how to be a better person.)

[sovay]

I agreed with the point someone made online a long time ago - wildly paraphrasing from memory - that while everyone else is trying to win their version of the game of thrones, Random is learning the thing that none of the rest of them with the possible exception of Corwin ever did learn: how to be a better person.

I like that way of looking at it!

[skygiants]

That does sound compelling -- I was determined to do Campion in order a while back, but stopped dead at Police at the Funeral, so maybe out-of-order would give me a better shot!

(Random was definitely the most interesting character in the first book to me, and also even from his relatively brief appearance has your flags all over him.)

[sovay]

That does sound compelling -- I was determined to do Campion in order a while back, but stopped dead at Police at the Funeral, so maybe out-of-order would give me a better shot!

Police at the Funeral has such a generic title, especially for a Campion novel, that it took me at least a decade and a full re-read to fix it as the one with the book-destroying racism. Skipping ahead from The Crime at Black Dudley (1927) to Sweet Danger (1933) has worked for people of my acquaintance. Traitor's Purse is one of my favorites, though.

(Random was definitely the most interesting character in the first book to me, and also even from his relatively brief appearance has your flags all over him.)

(Hooray.)

[jazzfish]

I have not read the Amber books in probably two decades but this sounds about right.

I also suggest you read The Dying Of Ember (late-eighties parody of Nine Princes and Guns Of Avalon) while Nine Princes remains fresh in your memory.

"Once you start walking the Design, you cannot turn back," said Randy.
"Why not?" I asked.
He shrugged. "I don't know, maybe you can. I'm just trying to make it more scary. It's supposed to be scary."

[skygiants]

asjdfkjd;k thank you that was a great time

[kore]

"Well, first of all, fuck that -- "

Hah, I can def see that!

Zelazny for me remains one of the big writers in the US SF New Wave scene who I adored and practically got by heart growing up, and the sexism and general sixties attitudes make him almost unreadable now. It's not the Suck Fairy exactly, bc the writing doesn't suck. (Sturgeon is another one. Also Silverberg.)

[coffeeandink]

A few years ago, I read *The Magic*, whuch is a collection of Zelazny's novellas from 1961-1967, most of which I'd read ages ago and admired. And yeah, the prose is still gorgeous enough that I'm glad I read it, but oy the sexism and racism and flat ethnic stereotyping.

[skygiants]

I wouldn't say I found Zelazny unreadable at all, but it's definitely one of those things where you just kind of have to draw a box about it and go 'well, my expectations are set at rock bottom on these particular areas and that's just the way it is.'

[landingtree]

That’s a really interesting thought about Diana Wynne Jones! Archer’s Goon makes sense as a response too, the plot being structured around meeting a sequence of larger-than-life wizards who are siblings and who have exactly that toying-with-the-fates-of-others pretension she so hated.

I agree that the best bit of Nine Princes In Amber is the beginning, and I’m convinced - in fact I think I read Zelazny say it in an interview somewhere - he was making it all up as he went along, with as little idea what the people on the playing cards meant as Corwin when they first showed up.

[landofnowhere]

I remember realizing that Archer's Goon was riffing on Amber when A and I were introducing each other to our favorite books! (It was interesting to get his reaction to the DWJ books as a first time reader who had grown up reading a lot of the adult SFF classics.)

[skygiants]

Archer's Goon for SURE, and E thinks probably Time of the Ghost as well, which has a central scene of waking up amnesiac in the hospital and then extended sequences of trying to pretend to your family like you remember perfectly well who you are.

I FULLY believe that Zelazny had no idea where he was going when he began, the structure of the book is so funny and somewhat inexplicable. Let's see how Corwin's gonna get out of this one! Who knows! Not me!

[kate_nepveu]

but who are the other "my prince of the blood can talk in modern memes if he wants to"??!

[landofnowhere]

Gideon the Ninth comes to mind, I don't know what else is out there?

[larryhammer]

Elizabeth Willey's The Well-Favored Man series, especially the prequel The Price of Blood and Honor. Which is all very Amberish.

[skygiants]

I was definitely thinking of it as the 1970s forerunner of GtN!

[princessofgeeks]

Love your review.

I still have Wynne Jones ahead of me in life to read so I feel lucky.

[skygiants]

You definitely are, I wish I still had some unread Joneses!

[lirazel]

I think I also read the first book in high school and I also have no memory of it except that it didn't really work for me? Reading this review does not make me think it would work any better for me now, so I will not pick it up again, but, as always, I thoroughly enjoyed reading what you had to say about it!

[skygiants]

asdkjf yeah my memory is mostly limited to 'I can't have liked it that much then or I would have gone on to read the rest, probably.' I think at the time I also maybe enjoyed the beginning and then got annoyed by the battles in the second half.

[sholio]

Amber is one of my "forever reread" series for all its flaws, but I completely agree that the first half of the book is extremely strong, and the second half is forgettable and blah. (TBF the series itself does deal later on with the ethics of moving people around as disposable cannon fodder, but it's always a side note to the protagonist's story.)

[skygiants]

I am sorry, Roger Zelazny, but I am just not interested in all the different ways Corwin found to lose thousands of guys who shouldn't have even been there that day! Go back to mind games with siblings in a big house in New York!

[movingfinger]

I believe Jones is on record as saying Archer's Goon is her response to Nine Princes and the idea of an overpowered, nonhuman family fighting among themselves.

[skygiants]

Yes!! It really draws a line under one of the things I love about DWJ, which is that she looks at a power fantasy and always immediately flips it on its head to start thinking about what it would feel like to be on the other side of it. Dark Lord of Derkholm does this, too.

[thegreatratsby]

dammit I just deleted my comment by accident. explodes. let me know if you have it in your inbox regardless I would love to have it back LOL, if you don't I'll try to retype it.

[thegreatratsby]

okay hold on got it: I grew up on these books because Roger Zelazny was my father's favorite author, which I think says a lot about him, but anyways. I remember hyper-fixating on some of the sisters (Fiona especially, and then a few women from the Merlin cycle of books as well) so they do exist and they are real in there, though rose tinted glasses have probably skewed their actual importance...this makes me want to go re-read, but more importantly, it is making me want to read Homeward Bounders, which I have never read before :b

if you feeling like getting more CoA book content but don't want to slog through more Corwin escapades, you can probably start with book 6. I remember really enjoying Merlin's narrator voice more than Corwin and also Merlin has very ... tbh Mary Sue energy but in really the best way possible ?? like hello look at my OC. he is the child of both Amber AND Chaos. also he has a cool magic rope. also he's a computer scientist and invented a cool magic AI thing. and he's soooo handsome

[skygiants]

I was quite excited to get some sisters early on because I'd heard that Amber was a sausagefest and then they completely disappeared .... I'm sure they'll come back and be relevant eventually! But yes I cannot more highly recommend Homeward Bounders, which is probably my favorite Diana Wynne Jones novel. Brilliant, funny, terribly terribly sad, I love Jamie Hamilton with my entire heart.

(he's a computer scientist?? of course he's a computer scientist, that's incredibly funny.)

[starlady]

The only Zelazny I have read is A Night in the Lonesome October, which has an extremely intriguing premise and pulls it off. The sexism is less noticeable there, even if Z does have Wrong Opinions About John Watson.

[skygiants]

oh fascinating, I'd never heard of this one! I don't think I had any idea what he'd written outside of Amber.

[marginaliana]

You made me want to reread this so I have just checked out the ebook. I encountered it first in my early teens when I went through the used book store's SF section from the front and then back of the alphabet (alas, all ye authors whose names started with M). Mostly I remember that I couldn't keep track of all the family members and who was allied with who and also there was some weird incest-y stuff? Definitely in need of a reread!

[jadelennox]

there is much better zelazny (rose for ecclesiastes, this immortal, a dark travelling, lord of light) but the first amber series is like a weirdo old comfort book, which just ...keeps it in the family.

I feel like the second amber series is where it gets incesty? But I don't recall for sure.

The finale of a dark travelling has been in my head a lot these last several years.

[minutia_r]

Corwin definitely had a thing for his sister Dierdre but also it doesn't get that much page time because Zelazny is just not that interested in women, IIRC

[skygiants]

VALIANT. I tried reading through my library's stacks alphabetically once and only got halfway through the As, lol.

[jadelennox]

i have often though the same thing, tbh!

[skygiants]

DWJ had a WILD creative flowering in the early 80s -- Magicians of Caprona, Time of the Ghost, Homeward Bounders, Witch Week and Archer's Goon all come out between 1980 and 1984 -- and there's an argument to be made that you can see some Amber influence in more than half those books. Lit some kind of fire in her brain!

[blotthis]

you have GOT to stop talking to E your combined powers are increasing my book list beyond endurance

[skygiants]

you're welcome :)))

[meteordust]

The Chronicles of Amber is a forever favourite of mine, but I did first read it (1) as a teenager and (2) in the 1990s, so I often wonder how it would read to someone encountering it today.

It's probably also responsible for my love of amnesia stories. In another universe, there's a version of the series where Corwin never gets his memory back, and has to bluff his way through all of it.

I think I may need to read Homeward Bounders.

[skygiants]

Frankly I would LOVE the version where Corwin has to bluff his way through all five books!!

Homeward Bounders is really, extremely worth the read, IMO.