Nine Princes in Amber was his first essay into Fantasy itself, though as events were to demonstrate, this was to be very much Fantasy-with-feet-of-clay. Both conjured up myth into a form of superficial Fantasy that was nevertheless grounded upon futuristic science. Two of his novels – the Hugo-winning Lord of Light and the experimental Creatures of Light and Darkness – revolved around characters who formed panthea of Gods, Hindu and Egyptian respectively. Thus far, Zelazny had definitely been a Science Fiction writer. I’ll come back to this point later in this series. He was established, he was feted, he made a living, not typical among SF writers, and especially not those who had been around for less than ten years. He had won two Hugo Awards for Best Novel and two Nebula Awards (Best Novella – shared – and Best Novelette, in the Award’s first year). Indeed, I get the impression, from how things progress, that Zelazny didn’t have a lot of ideas about how the story was going to end and was, for the first two books at least, making it up as he was going along.īy this point, Zelazny had been a professional writer since 1962, and a full-time writer since 1969. It would end up being the first in a sequence of five, forming the first Amber Chronicles, though I’ve long since held the conviction that Zelazny, who had only published his first novel four years earlier, had nothing like so grandiose a story in mind when he wrote this book.

Published in 1970, Nine Princes in Amber was Roger Zelazny’s seventh novel and his first non-standalone.

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Nine princes in amber by roger zelazny