man awakes in a private sanitarium, forcing himself to emerge from a drugged stupor. He finds he recalls nothing about his past, except that he was in a recent car accident. Encountering resistance from his keepers, he fights and bargains his way to freedom, emerging with two scraps of information: His last name is Corey, and he has a sister.
He visits her house, and his sister Flora accepts him reluctantly. Engaging in cat-and-mouse conversation with Flora, with Corey faking every step of the way, he begins to develop a rudimentary portrait of his life. He is one sibling among many, and they all conspire against each other, in shifting alliances. Secretive scrutiny of an odd Tarot deck depicting his family bring back a few more memories, including Corey's real name: Corwin. Then a brother named Random shows up.
Random throws in his lot with Corwin for a fabulous prize as yet unnamed. Together they set out on a car trip that proves to be an interdimensional pilgrimage. With Random exerting strange powers that Corwin is yet denied, the two men drive across an endlessly mutable landscape, zeroing in on the omphalos of all realities: Amber, where brother Eric has usurped the throne.
Once fully in Amber, they rescue sister Deidre from Eric's henchmen and the three set out for the underwater doppleganger city of Rebma, where Corwin will perform a ritual—walking the Pattern—that will restore his powers and memories. But they are attacked by brother Julian and barely make it.
Corwin succeeds in following the Pattern and emerges fully immortal and potent, ready to challenge Eric for the throne that was once held by their vanished father, Oberon. Allying himself with brother Bleys, Corwin helps to raise a gigantic army from Shadow (every dimension that is not Amber). The pair and their troops assault Amber but lose. Bleys seems to be dead, while Corwin is blinded and imprisoned for years. A chance visit in his cell from Dworkin, the mysterious maker of the Family Tarot, allows Corwin to escape, his sight restored. He sails off back into Shadow, his ambition undimmed.
A link in a long tradition
In 1965, Philip Jose Farmer launched his magnificent World of Tiers series with The Maker of Universes. Robert Wolff, a man of 66 who remembers nothing prior to his 20th year, is drawn through an interdimensional portal, rejuvenated and swept up in a battle among godlike creators. The first edition of the third book in this series, A Private Cosmos (1968) bears a blurb: "I looked forward for over a year to the book you are holding in your hands." The author of this encomium? Roger Zelazny, who felt moved enough to write a four-page introduction to the novel as well.
In the introduction, Zelazny identifies what so intrigues him about Farmer's series: immortality, parallel universes and cutthroat relatives. And there you have the template for Amber as well, which would appear just a few years later. There is probably no more clear-cut instance of homage or of an author springboarding off an idol's example in SF.
Of course, Farmer himself was writing in a long tradition that goes back at least to Burroughs and John Carter. (It's not totally absurd to invoke Narnia here as well, since Farmer's protagonist first sees his fantasy world through a cupboard.) But the piquant, potent archetypes that Farmer added or buffed up—awaking from a pedestrian dream of reality to an exciting hyper-reality filled with murderous competition from siblings—really set the hooks in the reader. Here was an engrossing new template, something always welcome in the genre, and Zelazny would do his best to add to the structure. His series, eventually extending to many volumes (including sequels-by-another-hand from John Betancourt), refined the tropes and provided plenty of byzantine excitement.
The success of Amber was a mixed blessing for Zelazny and his readers. Prior to this, Zelazny was the heart of the American New Wave of SF, writing stories that blended myth, adventure, mature emotions, catchy speculations and a breezy yet poetic style into award-winning signposts toward a new kind of science fiction. With Amber, he moved more into the realm of science fantasy, where magic and swordplay, although rigorously codified, replaced the sands of Mars or the maps of the human mind. Although Corwin's deadly elitist game-playing was gripping, his problems and nature bore little resemblance to Everyman. Something was gained, but something was inevitably lost.
Today, authors such as Charles Stross, with his Family Trade series, and Paul Park, with his A Princess of Roumania (2005), wherein our Earth is but a Shadow of a higher reality, continue to juggle these eternal tropes.
