Customer Reviews

Roger Zelazny's Visual Guide to Castle Amber

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I've never understood the "love it or hate it" reaction that so many people have to this book.

Zelazny was interviewed by Randall and Hamilton for the express purpose of creating this little book. He described the people, the places, and the history of Castle Amber in more concrete detail than you get from the 'Amber' novels, and his descriptions were then "fleshed out" a bit with original prose and illustrations to create 'The Visual Guide to Castle Amber.'

Your guide is Flora, one of the characters from Zelazny's 'Amber' series, and her narration takes you on a floor-by-floor tour of the Castle. Each floor and many rooms of the castle are mapped and thoroughly described. There are also Trump illustrations, along with an incomplete family tree (the 'Visual Guide' appeared before all of the 'Amber' novels were published). Quite interesting, fairly well-organized and well-presented, and authorized by Roger himself. What's the fuss?

The way that fans react to this book has always been amusing to me. Depending upon the individual, the 'Visual Guide' is either a foul blasphemy that defiles THAT WHICH IS THE ONE TRUE AMBER, or else it's a definitive "last word" that was so important that Zelazny assumed flesh-and-blood form to deliver it to the unworthy masses.

I look at it this way: The 'Visual Guide' is ONE VIEW of what Amber might be like, informed by Roger Zelazny and expanded by a couple of self-professed Ambermaniacs. I've seen better, I've seen worse. Generally speaking, I like the maps fairly well but most of the Trump illustrations are run-of-the-mill. I enjoyed leafing through this book quite a bit, and I'd say it's worth reading if you're an 'Amber' fan like me, but I don't go back to it time and time again the way I do with Zelazny's fiction.

Taken for what it is, the 'Visual Guide' is a nifty piece of fan art and fiction, no more and no less.

This book is a walk through guide not an actual story, it gave an in depth look into the world of Amber. It icludes character discriptions and backgrounds, timelines geneology and a complete map of castle Amber and the city around it. It also tells the story of the Unicorn and Dworkin, how the Pattern was created, and where the Jewel of Judgement came from. I highly recomend this book to any one that is a fan of Roger Zelaznys fantasy world Amber.

Looking over the past reviews, one would surmise that this book is simply awful. Actually, quite to the contrary. Example: The illustrations are far from crude. In fact, they are well-drawn and very detailed. I think this is similar to the controversy surrounding the "Lord of the Rings" movies coming out. Many fans are crying "Heresy!" because the director's vision doesn't fit their notions of how the characters look and act. ....Read this one, and enjoy, it is rich!

I got this book expecting to read about the secrets of Castle Amber, to put a "face" on the Pattern, and to see some COLOR pictures of the beautiful artwork described in the books. None of that happened. There was no color, only black and white floorplans of everyone's rooms. ZZZ. Worse, they made all the Amberites obsessed with Earth. They made it seem like they were all there all the time, with everyone having a decor drawn from Earth. And worst of all, the authors made no effort to give a picture of the Pattern. I always have a hard time trying to visualize it.

For nonfans, this book is filled with allusions to the other books, so it may pique your interest to read the others. For someone familair with "Corwin's story", it was very very tame.

This book could easily be renamed to "Lots of stuff you might or might not want to have in your Amber roleplaying game."

I was reading through it today to help me work out a new version of Castle Amber for my game, and I feel moved to provide a little more detail than the rest of these reviews have, on why the book gets dubious marks.

The Visual Guide seems to have fallen out of an alternate Amber wherein a prominent character who is normally alive is dead, AND is said to have died in a major first-series event. It was written after the character was confirmed ALIVE in both first and second series.

If it weren't for that glaring inconsistency... well, the quotes sourced to the wrong books are a bit annoying. The author seems to think there is a difference between a phonograph and a gramophone, but encyclopedias were more cumbersome in the 1980s. The uncertainty of where Zelazny's self-insertion character has gone off to (has he got pneumonia, or is he locked up in the dungeons? Or what?) seems more or less intentionally-being-clever.

Some of the "Flora monologue" comes off as humorous, some off-tone. I can write off the apparent obsession with Earth as that character trying to convince the "tourist" they're more important than they actually are.

The fact that the book describes but does not map the dungeons (in fact, it has a map of... staff quarters? ... on the page about the dungeons) is disappointing.

Overall, the inconsistencies and narrative unreliability make this book less useful than it might be. But the Castle maps and floorplans are still pretty useful to a GM, and the genealogy in the back is the generally accepted one, and gives colors and symbols for the characters that are also generally accepted. It's worth having as a reference for that stuff if you don't pay a lot for it.

Oh, I might add: what I have is the 1988 Avon edition. I wonder if there were corrections made in the later publication.

For its purpose, I still feel that this book is quite an okay visual guide to Castle Amber as per title. There does seem to be some strong reactions to this book, especially among Ambermaniacs. I used to approve of it totally as an Ambermaniac. Nowadays I just SEE it for what is is -- one of the really rare source-books for the Worlds of Amber -- to round out the ten Amber novellas [as in "The Great Book of Amber"] and a few other shorter works [as in "Manna from Heaven"] -- all as written by Roger Zelazny directly concerning Amber. I must admit my own Ambermaniac bias -- I only like the Amber story-material written directly by Roger Zelazny -- OR other background source-material, such as this work and "The Complete Amber Sourcebook" -- even if they are not written by Roger Zelazny. Anything else has not interested me much yet.

Now as for "Roger Zelazny's Visual Guide to Castle Amber" -- it would seem that Roger Zelazny did NOT directly work on the final resulting book at least -- so it IS quite a leap to title it so directly as "Roger Zelazny's". But my understanding is that he WAS interviewed and consulted directly and intensely -- including by the four authors for four days at his house -- prior to the creation of "Roger Zelazny's Visual Guide to Castle Amber". The introduction on page seven remarks upon this. The book itself is surely subject to subjective scrutiny, being a subjective interpetation by the four authors and visual artists. It could not be so otherwise, being a VISUAL guide created from the verbal musings of a writer, Roger Zelazny, upon his own previous written Amber material.

As for the visual guide, itself -- MY subjective scrutiny still likes the graphic artwork, diagrams and guide commentary -- much of this being presented in a clever manner from the point-of-view of "Princess Flora" as "your guide" -- which is quite clever as she is likely very social and outgoing -- and therefore likely to know much of the ins-and-outs of the areas and folks of Castle Amber -- even if possibly fuzzy on some details. This visual guide is easy to read and does have good visual aspects -- in MY subjective scrutiny. Objectively -- this modest work remains one of the few available sources of Amber background +++

Steeped in succulent tidbits of Amber lore as this book is, it nevertheless has simply atrocious illustrations, crudely drawn and obvious, committing crimes in black and white thankfully left unsaid in color. Years ago, after eagerly obtaining a copy on its first printing I sadly found my finely spun images of the people and places that cast the shadows I adored in Zelazny's world butchered to such an extent I simply gave it away. Recently however, a new friend's eyes sparkled so at the mere mention of possession of this crude tomb that I must bow to tradition and give this book its due; it has apparently a worthy place in the frugally documented world of Amber. The parts I liked best had to do were descriptions of those places whose location was mutuable, such the Hall of Mirrors.

Some detail on the layouts and structure of the most used setting in the Amber world. For afficionados only.

Castle Amber is just, that, a castle, so you woulud almost have to be interested in castles or castle design to be keen enough to get this, if not an Amber freak.

This book is formatted as a walk-through tour of the castle, with some discussion of major characters. I bought the first edition in 1988, and eagerly started reading it for its promised "revelations." Instead, I found it to be a HUGE disappointment. Anyone who is "into" Zelazny's Amber novels will cringe at the vast number of errors in this book and the insipid illustrations. Although Zelazny is listed as first author, he seems to have had next to nothing to do with the contents of this book, and he certainly didn't write the banal text. Errors run the gamut from maps that are at odds with the text in Zelazny's books, to listing as dead a character who isn't, to making ludicrous claims, such as non-royals going mad if they view the Pattern (an artifact central to the Amber novels). The illustrations disagree with the original text. There are major conceptual errors, such as describing part of Amber as "almost" an archetype, when it is by definition *the* archetype. The authors used a character from the novels as a tour guide, and then crudely mishandle her persona in their writing. The only good thing about this book is the encouragement it may offer would-be writers: if something this bad and sloppy can get published, then almost anything can. If you are interested in this book's topic, *The Complete Amber Sourcebook* is a much better choice, despite a few errors.