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A review by diarmuid
Nine Princes in Amber by Roger Zelazny
Decent book. I actually enjoyed all the stuff up to his duel with Eric the most, all the army stuff didn't really work for me as it had no stakes (and ultimately accomplished nothing other than killing 250,000 dudes). The prison bit was interesting also. But after he starts throwing away life in the army, I start to wonder why I should care about his success or failure. I mean, Eric doesn't seem to do anything worse than him? I guess he might have an extra person or two on his side, and his dad told him he should be king (but only after he'd already made up his mind), but other than that they both have equal claims and a similar lack of scruples. Yes Corwin seems to care _more_ about his army of shadow people than his brothers do, but still not an awful lot. And why does he raise an army when we know from the outset that only a few hundred would actually make it into the city? Surely he'd have been better off trying to convince the people of amber to support him, like that old caretaker he meets in the library.
I'm not sure how he's going to keep the stakes high for another 9 books when everyone is so powerful, like what's to stop Corwin finding a world with sentient T-Rex's who worship him as a god? Surely that'd be a better army than the one he had. Better yet, why not grab a million of them? Nothing stopping him from collecting his army from multiple worlds. Okay, maybe multiple worlds is hard to coordinate. But still, there surely exists a world with a standing army of 1 million highly trained t rex's who worship him as a god!
On the writing, the prose is definitely good, but it has a similar issue to other 70s/80s scifi/fantasy authors like Glen Cook and Gene Wolfe, where the reader is kept at a bit of a distance. I don't know if it's a stylistic choice or just the way people wrote back then. It reads more like a guy is telling the story down in the pub rather than you getting into his head, like "and then I grabbed some guys for the army with my brother. We trained them up, and then we were off! I was in charge of the fleet. Day 1 we lost 500, day 2 400, day 3 560, and so on. It was tough going! Then we hit the worst storm you've ever seen" etc etc. Interestingly, all 3 series are written in 1st person!
I'm not sure how he's going to keep the stakes high for another 9 books when everyone is so powerful, like what's to stop Corwin finding a world with sentient T-Rex's who worship him as a god? Surely that'd be a better army than the one he had. Better yet, why not grab a million of them? Nothing stopping him from collecting his army from multiple worlds. Okay, maybe multiple worlds is hard to coordinate. But still, there surely exists a world with a standing army of 1 million highly trained t rex's who worship him as a god!
On the writing, the prose is definitely good, but it has a similar issue to other 70s/80s scifi/fantasy authors like Glen Cook and Gene Wolfe, where the reader is kept at a bit of a distance. I don't know if it's a stylistic choice or just the way people wrote back then. It reads more like a guy is telling the story down in the pub rather than you getting into his head, like "and then I grabbed some guys for the army with my brother. We trained them up, and then we were off! I was in charge of the fleet. Day 1 we lost 500, day 2 400, day 3 560, and so on. It was tough going! Then we hit the worst storm you've ever seen" etc etc. Interestingly, all 3 series are written in 1st person!