Bloggers Ola and Piotrek have a conversation about a major fantasy series they deem to be worth a second look
Roger Zelazny’s Chronicles of Amber: the Subtle Architecture of Treason
Piotrek and Ola
Piotrek: We chose Roger Zelazny’s The Chronicles of Amber as our topic for this years Witch Week for two reasons: first, Zelazny’s untimely death in 1996 caused a curious silence around his works, so that he’s no longer a well-known author and his novels have been slowly sliding into oblivion in recent years. He remains an author’s author, mentioned here and there by the new generations as a source of inspiration, but in our opinion he deserves wider recognition. Secondly, The Chronicles of Amber, a series of ten books that can safely be classified as fantasy, though discussions can be had whether it’s epic or urban, or something else altogether, is a wondrously complex latticework of betrayal, double dealing, plots within plots, lethal mysteries and hard-bitten protagonists somewhere between noir detectives and medieval knights.
Ola: Well, there’s a third reason. Both Piotrek and I love Amber, and needed little excuse to return to this fantastic world 😉. Zelazny’s a great author in general, though uneven at times. But his best works are among the best the genre has to offer, and even his mediocre ones boast of unique imagination, propensity for audacious literary experimentation, and sensitivity to language that’s at once precious and highly uncommon. Incidentally, a novel perfect for a Halloween reading, and also containing a lot of treason, backstabbing, and plots to conquer the world, is his A Night in the Lonesome October.
Piotrek: Amber has always been in my top4 of genre literature, with LotR, Dune and Foundation. Among these, Zelazny’s masterpiece is sadly neglected. No pretty hardcover editions, no adaptations … even Foundation is getting one, and it is something rather difficult to adapt — we’ll see how they managed, there are some early voices it’s not a very faithful one. Amber would be just as hard, but what wouldn’t be hard is getting someone to illustrate it and then publishing a new two-volume edition…
So, I think we’ll start with a few spoiler-free paragraphs to introduce the series, and then proceed to all the treachery and stuff. Avoiding spoilers isn’t easy here, as the first novel starts with the main protagonist waking up with amnesia, and the readers learn everything together with him. From the title (Nine Princes in Amber) you know there’s an Amber, and there are princes, but you find yourself reading about a guy on Earth, in a hospital after some accident.
Continue reading “#WitchWeek2021 Day 4: Subtle architecture”
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