Fantasy's great multiverse saga — hardboiled, witty and paranoid — which Gygax listed in Appendix N and which inspired the Amber Diceless Roleplaying Game, a milestone in dice-free, drama-driven play.
Overview
The Chronicles of Amber is Roger Zelazny's ten-novel fantasy of a royal family of near-immortals who rule Amber, the one true world, of which all others — including our Earth — are mere Shadows. The princes and princesses of Amber can walk through Shadow, altering details step by step until they reach any world they can imagine, and they spend their long lives plotting against each other for the throne. The first five books, narrated by Prince Corwin, mix high fantasy, science fiction and the cynical voice of a hardboiled detective. The result is one of the most distinctive and influential series of the 1970s.
Origins
Zelazny, already a multiple Hugo and Nebula winner for science fiction, published Nine Princes in Amber with Doubleday in June 1970. The first printing is famously scarce: the publisher accidentally pulped much of it along with remaining copies of his earlier Creatures of Light and Darkness. The first cycle continued with The Guns of Avalon (1972), Sign of the Unicorn (1975), The Hand of Oberon (1976) and The Courts of Chaos (1978). A second cycle, narrated by Corwin's son Merlin, followed: Trumps of Doom (1985), Blood of Amber (1986), Sign of Chaos (1987), Knight of Shadows (1989) and Prince of Chaos (1991). Zelazny also wrote several Amber short stories before his death in 1995.
The story
A man wakes in a private hospital on Earth with no memory and a suspicion that he is being kept drugged. Bluffing his way out, he finds his sister Flora, who assumes he knows more than he does, and slowly pieces together that he is Corwin, a prince of Amber who has lived on Earth for centuries after an earlier defeat. His father, King Oberon, has vanished, and his brother Eric is about to seize the throne. With his brother Random, Corwin journeys through Shadow toward Amber, walks the Pattern — a blazing labyrinth whose traversal restores his memory and power, here in its mirror-image copy in the undersea city of Rebma — and attempts to take the crown by force. He fails, is blinded and imprisoned, and escapes to begin again.
Across the five books the plot widens from a succession struggle into a cosmic conflict. Amber, founded on the Pattern, is the pole of Order; the Courts of Chaos, at the other end of reality, are its opposite. The family's Trumps — tarot-like cards bearing their portraits — let them speak to and summon one another, and nearly every sibling turns out to have a hidden agenda. The Merlin cycle carries the story into a world of computers, sorcery and the Logrus, Chaos's counterpart to the Pattern.
Reception & impact
The series won a devoted following, and Trumps of Doom won the Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel. Gary Gygax listed the Amber series, along with Zelazny's Jack of Shadows, in Appendix N of the 1979 Dungeon Master's Guide, placing Zelazny among the authors who shaped Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. The game's cosmology of many worlds and planes, poised between Law and Chaos, sits comfortably alongside Amber's.
The books also produced one of the most original roleplaying games of the 1990s. Erick Wujcik's Amber Diceless Roleplaying Game (Phage Press, 1991) did away with dice entirely: conflicts were resolved by comparing attributes and by the players' scheming, and character creation began with a competitive "attribute auction" in which players bid points to rank above one another. It became a landmark for designers exploring narrative, drama-driven play and inspired successors such as Lords of Gossamer & Shadow. A computer adventure game of Nine Princes in Amber appeared from Telarium in the mid-1980s, and DC Comics adapted the first two novels in 1996.
Legacy
Amber's walking-through-Shadow gave fantasy a new model of the multiverse, in which worlds are infinite, malleable and ranked by distance from a true center. Its Trumps anticipated countless magical communication devices in games and fiction, and its family of charming, treacherous immortals remains a template for court-intrigue fantasy. John Gregory Betancourt wrote four authorized prequels (2002–05), and in 2016 Skybound Entertainment announced a television adaptation. For roleplayers, the series is best remembered as proof that a game can be about who you trust, not what you roll.
Marginalia
- Doubleday accidentally pulped much of the first printing of Nine Princes in Amber, making the first edition rare.
- Corwin narrates the first five books in a wisecracking first person closer to hardboiled detective fiction than to Tolkien.
- Members of the royal family can walk through infinite 'Shadow' worlds — our Earth among them — by shifting details as they travel.
- The family communicates and travels by tarot-like Trump cards bearing each member's portrait.
- Gary Gygax listed the Amber series and Zelazny's Jack of Shadows in Appendix N (1979).
- Erick Wujcik's Amber Diceless Roleplaying Game (Phage Press, 1991) used no dice at all and began with an 'attribute auction.'
Quick answers
- When was The Chronicles of Amber first published?
- The Chronicles of Amber was first published in 1970–91.
- Who created The Chronicles of Amber?
- The Chronicles of Amber was made by Roger Zelazny (author).
- What kind of work is The Chronicles of Amber?
- The Chronicles of Amber is a book series in the Portal Fantasy and Science Fantasy tradition.
- Why is The Chronicles of Amber important?
- Fantasy's great multiverse saga — hardboiled, witty and paranoid — which Gygax listed in Appendix N and which inspired the Amber Diceless Roleplaying Game, a milestone in dice-free, drama-driven play.