Off: Re: HW:Damnation Alley film on BBC tonight

[M Holmes]

Arin Komins writes:

> :>It's been a while since I've read the book, but I don't remember him
> :>(The character, not the tennis player) ever being called Roscoe - his
> :>name was Hell Tanner.
> :
> :Ah... OK. I'm sure someone said it was Roscoe earlier in this thread. If not,
> :then there's no coincidence to explain! Haven't read the book, or anything
> :else by Zelazny: what's a good one to start with?
>
> Lord of Light (just uniformly good, imho)
>
> (or if you want more fluffy reading, try the Amber Chronicles (beginning
> with Nine Princes in Amber)).

The Amber stories are great. It's a kind of fantasy I Claudius but with
a magic system that is reasonably limited. The trick here is to ensure
that you read the first Amber series and not the second one, which
introduces all sorts of new magic systems and buggers up the best
feature of the first stories. They are:

Nine Princes in Amber
The Guns of Avalon
Sign of the Unicorn
The Hand of Oberon
The Courts of Chaos

The basic plot is that a guy wakes up in hospital with no memory. He
slowly realises that he's one of Nine Princes from the central
probability world called "Amber" by its denizens. The King is posted
missing and the Princes are tooling up to fight for the throne. They can
cross probability worlds by mentally manipulating scenery to match where
they're going. Earth just happens to be a favourite of a few of them.
The magic system is based primarily on a tarot deck featuring the
princes, princesses and a few key sites in Amber. These facilitate
telepathic communication and teleportation. The rest of it is based
around royal politics and raising armies from some local probability
worlds in order to make a play for the throne. It's swords and sorcery
because gunpowder doesn't explode in Amber.

It's not great writing but the main characters are reasonably well drawn
for SF and the plotlines are pretty good. It'd make for a much better
film series than almost all of the fantasy that has been filmed.

FoFP