Saturday, December 09, 2017
The Chronicles of Shadow — Sequel to the Corwin Cycle
Corwin has come full circle.
Zelazny left our knight errant on a gauzy roadway floating across the abyss toward the dark citadel holding ancestors and ancient enemies of Amber. True, Corwin would put in a cameo appearance in the cycle of books written around the adventures of his son, Merlin, many years later. Yes, that’s true. But that was Merlin’s story. Corwin’s own story concluded in those final pages of The Courts of Chaos, as he left one adventure behind and moved toward another.
It is nice to think that if Roger Zelazny were still with us he would have eventually returned to the two heroes whose adventures he began around the same time and several years later ended around the same time. These would be Dilvish and Corwin. Both are knights, both are on quests — vengeance quests, at least at first. Dilvish seems a bit younger, a little less cynical than Corwin. But this comes as no surprise, as Zelazny began writing about Dilvish in 1964. An excerpt from Nine Princes in Amber appeared in Kallikanzaros, No. 1, June 1967. At least three years separate these two incarnations of the hero who had come to fascinate our young author (he was 27 when the first Dilvish story saw print, 30 when the piece featuring Corwin — “Pattern in Rebma” — was published). Corwin completed his quest in 1978 with the publication of The Courts of Chaos, and Dilvish was almost disappointed to have seen justice finally play out in The Changing Land, which was being sold in bookstores just three years later.
It is nice to think Zelazny would have come back to these characters. Not such a crazy idea, at least in part since one of the authors he admired most — Jack Vance — did the same, revisiting the world portrayed in his The Dying Earth (1950) over thirty years later with Rhialto the Marvellous (1984). Likewise, the novel The Eyes of the Overworld (1966), written about the antihero Cugel, set in the milieu of The Dying Earth, was eventually followed up with the sequel Cugel’s Saga (1983).
Like many fans, I miss Zelazny, miss that voice, miss those heroes. And I always hoped, once he was done writing his Merlin cycle, that he might return to Corwin someday. What I offer here isn’t much, isn’t finished, and is unlikely to ever see publication. But it’s my own take on how the first leg of a follow-up story of Corwin might go. His original quest appeared to end with his arrival in the Courts of Chaos, so it seems logical his next quest would begin there. So where does Random send him once Corwin is ready to re-enter the game? The Courts, of course.
The original Amber series reflected the world of its day. The conflict between Amber and the Courts of Chaos made an effective stand-in for the Cold War. Corwin in certain ways was a science fantasy version of North by Northwest’s Roger Thornhill (and maybe James Bond), who stumbles into the middle of a geopolitical struggle between two superpowers. He is set up by adversaries who assume he is a high-level player in the Great Game. Attempts are made on his life. He adopts an alias, nearly allows the ultimate secret weapon (equivalent to Thornhill’s microfiched MacGuffin) — the Jewel of Judgment — to fall into the wrong hands. And, like Thornhill, he naturally falls for the double agent, Dara.
The Cold War is long over. New problems plague our world. The emergence of a global elite which does not recognize national borders or loyalties, but only cares for its own ravenous self-interests, is at least as dangerous as the tensions once created by the Iron Curtain drawn through the middle of Europe. A nascent feudalism is in the making as income disparity widens to an astronomical distance between the wealthy and everyone else. The unchecked greed of this elite has unleashed a host of environmental disasters upon the planet, culminating in irreversible climate change and reckless degradation of natural resources, even resources as vast as our oceans.
Meanwhile, trust in science and facts has been replaced with a fanatical devotion to cults of personality, ideologies and religions, until events such as the Oklahoma City Bombing, the two attacks on the World Trade Center (the 1993 dry run later followed by the real thing in 2001), and the Friday the 13th Paris Attacks of 2015 are now things the public has come to expect. Fascistic leaders are on the rise all over the globe. The strategy of holding the masses in check through fear has not altered, only the methodology.
Corwin witnesses attacks staged for public benefit in his latest journey, finds the realm of Shadow in disarray and possibly facing something much worse, and finds it is no longer clear who is really running things. Nothing is safe or stable. Ghosts from the past have somehow returned. Who can resist an agency that cares for neither Amber nor Chaos, quite content to have everything ultimately destroyed simply to preserve its power for just a little longer in the name of whatever nonsense it chooses to believe?
It has taken too long to bring Corwin back to the Courts of Chaos. There will most likely not be any more of his story after this. If there is, though, the next installment will be titled: Void in the Courts. Corwin will have to determine through trial and error who can and cannot be trusted in the Courts, and errors will prove costly. But he will finally begin to get an idea of who or what has been pulling the strings, and why. Once he begins to comprehend what he is up against, he may want to just go off somewhere to live out the remainder of his days before it all comes crashing down. It will be very tempting to throw in the towel. If he chooses instead to stick his neck even further out than he already has, he is going to need allies, but as of right now he doesn’t have any. It would be difficult to write, and before scribbling out Three Kings of Chaos I had never written a novel before. So this is probably it.
Then again, I said that after finishing Three Kings of Chaos, so who knows?
¶ 11:59 AM
Zelazny left our knight errant on a gauzy roadway floating across the abyss toward the dark citadel holding ancestors and ancient enemies of Amber. True, Corwin would put in a cameo appearance in the cycle of books written around the adventures of his son, Merlin, many years later. Yes, that’s true. But that was Merlin’s story. Corwin’s own story concluded in those final pages of The Courts of Chaos, as he left one adventure behind and moved toward another.
It is nice to think that if Roger Zelazny were still with us he would have eventually returned to the two heroes whose adventures he began around the same time and several years later ended around the same time. These would be Dilvish and Corwin. Both are knights, both are on quests — vengeance quests, at least at first. Dilvish seems a bit younger, a little less cynical than Corwin. But this comes as no surprise, as Zelazny began writing about Dilvish in 1964. An excerpt from Nine Princes in Amber appeared in Kallikanzaros, No. 1, June 1967. At least three years separate these two incarnations of the hero who had come to fascinate our young author (he was 27 when the first Dilvish story saw print, 30 when the piece featuring Corwin — “Pattern in Rebma” — was published). Corwin completed his quest in 1978 with the publication of The Courts of Chaos, and Dilvish was almost disappointed to have seen justice finally play out in The Changing Land, which was being sold in bookstores just three years later.
It is nice to think Zelazny would have come back to these characters. Not such a crazy idea, at least in part since one of the authors he admired most — Jack Vance — did the same, revisiting the world portrayed in his The Dying Earth (1950) over thirty years later with Rhialto the Marvellous (1984). Likewise, the novel The Eyes of the Overworld (1966), written about the antihero Cugel, set in the milieu of The Dying Earth, was eventually followed up with the sequel Cugel’s Saga (1983).
Like many fans, I miss Zelazny, miss that voice, miss those heroes. And I always hoped, once he was done writing his Merlin cycle, that he might return to Corwin someday. What I offer here isn’t much, isn’t finished, and is unlikely to ever see publication. But it’s my own take on how the first leg of a follow-up story of Corwin might go. His original quest appeared to end with his arrival in the Courts of Chaos, so it seems logical his next quest would begin there. So where does Random send him once Corwin is ready to re-enter the game? The Courts, of course.
The original Amber series reflected the world of its day. The conflict between Amber and the Courts of Chaos made an effective stand-in for the Cold War. Corwin in certain ways was a science fantasy version of North by Northwest’s Roger Thornhill (and maybe James Bond), who stumbles into the middle of a geopolitical struggle between two superpowers. He is set up by adversaries who assume he is a high-level player in the Great Game. Attempts are made on his life. He adopts an alias, nearly allows the ultimate secret weapon (equivalent to Thornhill’s microfiched MacGuffin) — the Jewel of Judgment — to fall into the wrong hands. And, like Thornhill, he naturally falls for the double agent, Dara.
The Cold War is long over. New problems plague our world. The emergence of a global elite which does not recognize national borders or loyalties, but only cares for its own ravenous self-interests, is at least as dangerous as the tensions once created by the Iron Curtain drawn through the middle of Europe. A nascent feudalism is in the making as income disparity widens to an astronomical distance between the wealthy and everyone else. The unchecked greed of this elite has unleashed a host of environmental disasters upon the planet, culminating in irreversible climate change and reckless degradation of natural resources, even resources as vast as our oceans.
Meanwhile, trust in science and facts has been replaced with a fanatical devotion to cults of personality, ideologies and religions, until events such as the Oklahoma City Bombing, the two attacks on the World Trade Center (the 1993 dry run later followed by the real thing in 2001), and the Friday the 13th Paris Attacks of 2015 are now things the public has come to expect. Fascistic leaders are on the rise all over the globe. The strategy of holding the masses in check through fear has not altered, only the methodology.
Corwin witnesses attacks staged for public benefit in his latest journey, finds the realm of Shadow in disarray and possibly facing something much worse, and finds it is no longer clear who is really running things. Nothing is safe or stable. Ghosts from the past have somehow returned. Who can resist an agency that cares for neither Amber nor Chaos, quite content to have everything ultimately destroyed simply to preserve its power for just a little longer in the name of whatever nonsense it chooses to believe?
It has taken too long to bring Corwin back to the Courts of Chaos. There will most likely not be any more of his story after this. If there is, though, the next installment will be titled: Void in the Courts. Corwin will have to determine through trial and error who can and cannot be trusted in the Courts, and errors will prove costly. But he will finally begin to get an idea of who or what has been pulling the strings, and why. Once he begins to comprehend what he is up against, he may want to just go off somewhere to live out the remainder of his days before it all comes crashing down. It will be very tempting to throw in the towel. If he chooses instead to stick his neck even further out than he already has, he is going to need allies, but as of right now he doesn’t have any. It would be difficult to write, and before scribbling out Three Kings of Chaos I had never written a novel before. So this is probably it.
Then again, I said that after finishing Three Kings of Chaos, so who knows?
¶ 11:59 AM
