Off: Zelazny

[M Holmes]

Andrew A. Apold writes:

> >Andrew A. Apold writes:

> >> >i just read that roger zelazny passed away last year.  rj

> >> I heard a rumor that his son may continue the Amber series...

> >The first Amber series or the crap one?

> Speak for yourself, at first I didn't like the Merlin series as much,
> though I still enjoyed it.  With successive readings, though, I have
> come to appreciate it more, evenso, than much of the first series.
> There is much more subtle forces at work.  Yeah, it bogs down a bit in
> metaphysical dream matters somewhat at times (especially Knight of
> Shadows), but hey, I thought the last one of the first five, 'Courts
> of Chaos', was by far the
>  worst of all ten books.  I've read them all at least a dozen times now.

I was a strong fan of the first series. I'm not usually terribly
interested in swords and sorcery fantasy. The attraction of the Amber
series was that the "magic" technology was reasonably strongly defined
and limited. For me it's kinda like the difference between Superman and
Batman. Superman has insuperable strength, can go back in time and all
sorts of other powers. This makes a realistic and dramatic plot
untenable unless some way can be found to switch off his powers, which
is pretty much why they had to invent krtptonite into the story. To me
the whole thing is unsatisfactory dramatically since we know that if
superman gets beat he could just go back in time later and fix things so
that he didn't. That puts a huge plothole in things from the get-go.

Batman OTOH is merely human with a few limited technological tricks and
so the story doesn't suffer from an inherently poor premise.

The first Amber books kept the magic technologies linked to a vaguely
definded ability to walk through parallel worlds and this was limited to
the Amber world being more "real" than the others. The cards were also a
neat device to keep the political plotting going while providing little
extra power than teleportation.

I agree that the last book in the series was of poorer quality than the
rest of the series.

The second series IMHO suffered from a proliferation of magic
technologies. Eventually there were so many that we were pretty much
back into the superman scenario. Added to this was a tendency to wander
into low-rent metaphysics with dream sequences, visions and acid-trips
used as a somewhat flimsy cover to do so. The political plotting was
also less tight than in the first series.

> If anyone is interested in a good source of info and/or background
> stuff on Amber, I suggest Phage Press's two books, 'Amber DRPG' and
> "Shadow Knight', though sourcebooks for a game they contain excellent
> info and speculation (one section tries to convince us that Bill Roth
> was really Eric (shapeshifting, to boot) all along, as a way to keep
> tabs on Corwyn, and now using it to hold an influential position
> beyond suspicion...

hehe :-)

I'm not a great fan of roleplaying. I always thought that Amber would
make a great board game if someone put in some good design effort.

I also think they could have made a lot of cash by selling an Amber deck
of cards with some kind of rules for a card game. There must be SF
artists out there who could do some incredibly tasty designs for this.

What we really want though is a "Live Chronicles" type Hawkwind album
based on the Amber books. Maybe if we write some lyrics and send 'em to
Brock...