Black Gate

I’ve been spending a lot of time with Gary Gygax’s Dungeon Masters Guide recently, as I guide my young players through a wilderness campaign using Outdoor Survival. The DMG is a treasure trove of handy tables, excellent advice, and fascinating tangents — atrociously organized, of course, but that’s part of its charm. Like the most useful book in all fantasy, the Junior Woodchucks Guidebook (seriously — I’d kill for a copy of that book), you can flip pages at random and never know what indispensable tidbit you’ll find.

Appendix N, which lists the great fantasy writers whose collective contributions laid the groundwork for Dungeons and Dragons, is just one of those finds; but it’s one which has received a great deal of attention. Mordicai Knode and Tim Callahan at Tor.com are sampling the work of every author in Appendix N; so far they’ve covered Robert E. Howard, Poul Anderson, Sterling E. Lanier, Fritz Leiber, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Jack Vance.

Last week, Tim turned his attention to Roger Zelazny and The Chronicles of Amber. He wasn’t impressed:

I merely sampled the first book in the series, Nine Princes in Amber, originally published in 1970, and that was more than enough… if the first book in Roger Zelazny’s Amber series is considered any kind of classic, then it must be because the novel is graded on a curve. A curve called “pretty good for an opening novel in a series that gets a whole lot better,” or maybe a curve called, “better than a lot of other, trashier fantasy novels released in 1970, when there was nothing on television but episodes of Marcus Welby and the Flip Wilson Show…”

It’s not that I found Nine Princes in Amber uninteresting; it’s just that I found the novel shockingly discordant and unsatisfying to actually read all the way through. It’s a novel that slams together jokey Hamlet references in the narration with pop psychoanalysis and superhuman beings and shadow realms and dungeons and swords and pistols and Mercedes-Benzes.

Actually, that last sentence is almost exactly how I remember Nine Princes in Amber. Shadow realms and dungeons and swords and pistols and Mercedes-Benzes. Yeah, that pretty much covers it.

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Ah, Appendix N, the gift that keeps on giving. In the years before the Internet, it’s how young readers discovered great fantasy.

Over at Tor.com, Tim Callahan and Mordicai Knode continue with their ambitious and well-researched journey through Gary Gygax’s famous Appendix N, the library of fantasy and SF titles in the back of the Dungeon Master’s Guide. They’ve already covered Fritz Leiber, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Sterling E. Lanier and Robert E. Howard. Here they are on Jack Vance:

Mordicai Knode: Also worth noting that everybody’s favorite evil wizard turned lich turned demigod turned major deity, Vecna, is named after a “Vance” anagram. & while we are pointing out bits and pieces — like the prismatic spray, which is such an amazing piece of writing, such a great turn of phrase, that it inspired a whole range of spells — I want to mention the ioun stones. In Dungeons & Dragons they are these little gemstones that float around your head—I always imagined the Bit from Tron — but in The Dying Earth story that inspired them, the IOUN stones are much more sinister and are gleaned from the center of a dwarf star that has been cut in half by the shrinking edges of the universe. Just let that sink in; that is really an incredible idea… And those sorts of ideas are scattered all over the book, like some pirate with holes in his pocket idly scattered gold doubloons all over it.

Tim Callahan: It’s kind of like, for me anyway, when I was a kid, and I’d read the AD&D Player’s Handbook or Dungeon Master’s Guide and just read through some of the spell names or magic item titles (without reading the descriptions below) and imagine what weird and wonderful things these powers and items could do. Vance reminded me of that world of possibilities, almost on every page.

Read the complete article here.

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