Nine Princes in Amber (Chronicles of Amber, volume 1) by Roger Zelazny

[james_davis_nicoll]

Can an amnesiac bluff his way to a throne?

Nine Princes in Amber (Chronicles of Amber, volume 1) by Roger Zelazny

Comments

[eagle]

I am also in the Amber-disdaining minority. I didn't encounter these as a teenager, read all five books of the Corwin series as an adult, and came away mystified by what people saw in them. The world-building feels random and incoherent, Corwin is an ass, and the drug-trip-style descriptions are irritating rather than sense-of-wonder producing.

Maybe they would have been more interesting if I hadn't already read oodles of alternate world and hidden power stories that I thought used the tropes better (and which, admittedly, were mostly written later).

[patrick_morris_miller]

It wouldn't be the first time that a watershed work in the genre just wasn't very good. (I'm looking at you, H. P. Lovecraft.)