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Mar. 3rd, 2025 10:09 pmI 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 --
"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 --
