Roger Zelazny

Sorry, I'm

just, all of this discussion reminded me of a short story by Roger Zelazny, one of my favorite classic science fiction authors.

Fantastic.

Princes in Amber.

Actually, it might have been right before I got into games.

But someone made an adaptation of Roger Zelazny's Nine Princes and Ambers, the first book in his life.

The first arc is like five books, right? And that's the first book.

And as much as anything growing up, along with Michael Moorcock's Elric series, Roger Zelazny was one of those, along with Ursula K.

Le Guin and Tolkien and all the other people.

You know, 60s New Wave writers and 70s writers and stuff that I loved reading also.

And that is a game that truly has a sense of mystery also.

you know, what is it, Kurosawa's film that has three different tellings of the same story, and you don't know which one is true.

Actually, I was in junior high 'cause it was junior high back then.

I read The Chronicles of Amber by Roger Zelazny.

At the beginning of the first book, our hero Corwin is taking a fake name, which is Carl Corey.

And as a seventh grader, that was so exciting to me, to have a fictional character with my last name.

Essentially, his death seems pretty sad.

Robert Silverberg wrote extensively about this in his column ... reflections in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, and he wrote a tribute to both Roger Zelazny and John Brunner in March 1996, and this was those two died within a couple of months of one another, and they were both quite young.

I believe John Brunner was 60, and Roger Zelazny was just 58.

While he describes Roger Zelazny as a happy man who experienced many triumphs, he portrays a very kind of sad picture of John Brunner.

Brunner had made a convention appearance some years earlier where he pretty much...

Silverberg said it was astonishingly sad, and he basically described how his career had come to an end, and that he was hoping for some proofreading work so he could help pay the bills.

Okay, we're almost through this sucker.

We have two more stories to go, and then I think we're just going to wrap up by maybe going over some general thoughts again.

But she should, because she writes some great stuff.

I have come up with a mechanic that I stole from Roger Zelazny, and I want to know what you think of it.

What I've done is set up a It's like a walking

sigil,

through hike loop.

Okay.

And Roger, Roger Zelazny wrote the nine princes of Amber and the Amber series.

And there's like the, there's the Logros in the chaos realm.

I think I had friends.

I think I had friends in college who, well, actually my parents introduced me to science fiction, but my friends in college introduced me to writers that my parents hadn't introduced me to, like Roger Zelazny and Ursula Le Guin and people like that.

And so they said, we're going to this thing.

And so I was able to go with friends.

That was, okay, my very first convention.

It wasn't a Worldcon.

I was seated next to Roger Zelazny, who was the guest of honor, and we were sitting next to each other at the autograph table, and I found myself completely unable to think of a damn thing to say to him, which was embarrassing.

Just like...

We are entering the deep end of the pool now, the worlds with infinite scales.

We are talking about Roger Zelazny's Chronicles of Amber, Stephen Erickson's Malazan, Book of the Fallen, and Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time.

Let's start with Zelazny because he has one of the most mind-bending conceits I've ever seen in the genre.

Chronicles of Amber flips the entire concept of setting on its head.