+++
title = "Nine Princes in Amber (Roger Zelazny, 1970)"
author = ["Michał Sapka"]
date = 2024-07-22T23:21:00+02:00
categories = ["reviews"]
draft = false
weight = 2002
reviewSection = ["Books"]
abstract = "The fastest fantasy book in the wild west"
rating = 4
image = "reviews/covers/nine-princes-in-amber.jpg"
related = ["Chronices of Amber: Corwin cycle"]
relatedName = "Nine Princes in Amber"
aliases = ["/brain-rot/fantasy/chronicles-of-amber/nine-princes-in-amber/"]
+++

That's one confusing novel.

Corwin wakes up in a hospital in New York with amnesia.
But the cover of the book has castles and swords![^fn:1]
Well, as it turns out Corwin is one of nine princes of Amber, the greatest city that has ever been.
It is medieval-Europe, but it is said to be the greatest, so who am I to argue?
He will need to get back there and fight for the crown with his siblings.

That's the basic premise.
What threw me off the guard (except of starting in modern-day NY) is the pace.
I'm no fantasy know-it-all, but it appears that this genre likes to take it's sweet time.
Authors describe every tree by every road[^fn:2].
They love to build their worlds, lore, characters.
Zelazny doesn't care about any of that.
A huge battle where 20 000 people die? A paragraph seems like a proper length.
Magic system? Yeah, let's throw a few sentences here and there.
The main character background, looks and goals? Let's not bother.
This is a short book (my version had just over 200 pages), but with standard wordiness, it could be a thousand pages long leather-bound brick, that would serve as a nice weapon.

This also means that _Nine Princes in Amber_ is extremely shallow.
There is nothing underneath - just a few awful characters, a few OK, and our Corwin.
If there is any subtext, I must have missed it.
And yet, I loved it.
It's pulp, but it goes _so fast_ that I never got tired of it.
It went _so fast_ that I had no time to get bored or lost[^fn:2].
Guess that's why _The Chronicles of Amber_ is one of the most popular Fantasy sagas out there.
It is inoffensive, not challenging in any way, but it's cool.
It knows it, and doesn't pretend it.

I enjoyed it for what it is.
It's the greatest mindless fun I've had in ages.
It's not _hardcore_ fantasy, and this may be why I liked it so much as I did.
If anything, it's _Magnum P.I._ of the genre.

[^fn:1]: or whatever your edition has
[^fn:2]: hello Tolkien