Appendix N Review: Nine Princes in Amber

A man wakes up in a hospital bed with his legs in a cast and he is repeatedly sedated. He has vague memories of a car accident and nothing else. Discovering his body has healed from whatever injury it sustained, he escapes from the private clinic and seeks out the only lead he has to rediscovering his identity, his sister in New York City.

He is Corwin, son of Oberon, and prince and heir to the fantastic city and kingdom known as Amber. Amber is the city at the heart of all reality, the greatest prize for any conqueror. As Corwin begins to remember his past, he also begins looking to the future. He is a Prince of Amber, and he will fight to claim his birthright.

This is the premise for Roger Zelazny's 1970 novel Nine Princes in Amber. Zelazny used to be a huge name in SF/F during the New Wave era. Winner of multiple Hugo and Nebula awards (back when that meant something) and was a longtime friend of current SF/F elder statesman George R. R. Martin. Zelazny was hugely talented and popular in his lifetime, but after his death in 1995, he dropped immediately from the public consciousness. In his hometown of Euclid, Ohio, the suburb of Cleveland I live in, he's effectively unknown.

That's a damn shame, because Zelazny is outstanding.

Without getting too deep into spoilers because here especially the journey is as important as the destination, Corwin (and the audience) discovers that he's part of a mostly-immortal dysfunctional family with powers that can affect and shape reality the further away from Amber they get. Each has their area of expertise. Julian is a master huntsman. Bleys is a tactician. Ransom is a rascally gambler. And so on and so on. They're all pretty much arrogant bastards, including Corwin himself before his amnesia, but Eric is the worst, and seizes the throne for himself, despite Corwin's best efforts.

Taken as a whole, the book is very much a product of the early 1970s. Dialogue is snappy and full of slang peppered with Shakespearean references while everyone who matters smokes cigarettes. Its Groovy for lack of a better descriptor.

There's a car ride through different realities that takes Corwin and Ransom to the outskirts of Amber. An undersea reflection of Amber called Rebma (get it?????) where Corwin reclaims his memories by walking the Pattern (a Magical/Mathematical Maze) and has a romantic interlude with its green-haired queen. There's a grand military campaign to take Amber from Eric that nearly ends in disaster multiple times (and with staggering casualties) that also nearly succeeds. There is a coronation sequence that displays Corwin at his most defiantly heroic before several years' tortuous imprisonment.

Its only 175 pages long, but it spans years and easily outpaces anything from A Song of Ice and Fire in terms of political intrigue, backstabbing family members, outrageous magic, swordfights, and grand conflict. The squabbles of the Princes of Amber are downright Olympian in their scope, and the prose flows beautifully off the pages.

The rulers of Amber are assholes, but they are magnificent ones, and Corwin, who was once one of the biggest assholes of the family, is given a fresh start and the hints of the beginning of a redemption arc for his character.

The only major nitpick I can put down is that they nameless, effectively faceless grunts that get recruited into Corwin's war are glossed over so much that its hard to feel anything about them dying in droves. They don't matter outside of Corwin occasionally feeling sympathy for their purpose in his ambitions.

Other than that, its a wildly imaginative, colorful, and trippy journey though space and time. Zelazny must have had access to the good acid. Absolutely recommended.