 A brief look at the landmark fantasy series of infinite alternate worlds, formidable magic, and a royal family with an incredible talent for scheming. Roger Zelazny (1937 - 1995) made his name with a series of acclaimed works of science fiction in the 1960s, which included the novels This Immortal (1965) and Lord of Light (1967). These earned him the Hugo Award for Best Novel twice inside the space of three years. Critic Algis Budrys said of Zelazny's first story collection that the author was "beginning where other famous people have arrived". This success was all the more striking given that Zelazny was not a full-time writer. For much of the 1960s, he was working as a civil servant for the U.S. Social Security Administration, and his writing time was limited to the evenings. It was only in 1969 that he felt able to leave formal work, and take up writing full-time. Shortly afterwards, he began to publish a lengthy fantasy series which came to be known as The Chronicles of Amber. Eventually extending to ten volumes by 1991, the series began with Nine Princes in Amber (1970). This short novel introduces the small but powerful kingdom of Amber, which is ruled by a dynastic family given to ruthless infighting. The consequences of their sometimes deadly scheming are potentially vast because of the family's unique abilities. Amber is the only true reality; the family can journey between - and perhaps create - an infinite variety of parallel worlds they call "shadows". Nine Princes in Amber is by far the strongest of the first cycle of five books. It introduces Corwin, a prince of Amber who is initially stranded in one of the insubtantial shadows - which happens to be our contemporary Earth. Worse, he is confined to a private hospital and suffers from amnesia. Zelazny uses this well-worn narrative device to cast Corwin as an audience surrogate. Justly paranoid, he bluffs his way to a dawning understanding of the violent family struggle emerging around him. Zelazny's first entry in the series moves at an excitingly fast pace, setting up the framework of the distinctive setting. As his memory gradually returns to him, Corwin proves to be an entertainingly offbeat protagonist. He is cruel, but with a streak of compassion he has picked up during decades spent on Earth. He also has an amusing tendency to deploy Chandleresque hard-boiled dialogue for the same reason. Nine Princes in Amber is rightly seen as a fantasy classic. Unfortunately, the high standard does not last into the four sequels, published over the course of eight years. The Chronicles of Amber grows to seem increasingly haphazard and unplanned. The later entries lack a satisfying structure either as individual novels or as parts of a whole. The third book, Sign of the Unicorn, is largely devoted to a tiresome relitigation of events that occured in the opening instalment. The final entry, The Courts of Chaos, serves mostly to set up the second cycle that Zelazny wrote in the 1980s. In her introduction to Gollancz's recent omnibus edition, Roz Kaveney explains that Zelazny was influenced by his enthusiasm for English renaissance drama and for Philip José Farmer's World of Tiers series (1965 - 1991). Arguably, the author was also indebted to Michael Moorcock's Elric series. Zelazny's characters and settings have numerous similarities to Moorcock's work, but he lacked the British author's ability to sustain interest over the course of a series. On the evidence of the first five books in The Chronicles of Amber, it seems that Zelazny's talents were better applied to one-off stories.
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