Ambercon Northwest FAQ

2010-11-09T18:02:43+00:00

In my new vein of attempts at unusual con reports, here is a report on what I’ve been doing since last Thursday (since I’ve not been blogging, or even reading twitter, or responding to many emails…) I was at Ambercon Northwest, a gaming convention dedicated to the worlds of Roger Zelazny’s Amber and the Amber Diceless Roleplaying System. It is held at McMenamin’s Edgefield and it is awesome. Only read ahead if you care at all about Amber and/or gaming.

Questions most often asked of me at my first Ambercon Northwest

Questions not asked: I can’t recall fielding any questions about my hair, which is unusual. Even at World Fantasy I got questions about my hair, and out in the workaday world, it’s almost daily.)

Aren’t you a little young for Amber? How’d you get into this?
At the first meeting of my critique group, Dave Goldman prefaced a comparison to Amber with “This would only occur to someone of my generation”, and I had to show him the margin note where I’d written the same thing. I think I’m an honorary member of the sci-fi-reading class of 1971, since the way I read science fiction as a child and even as a teen was to go to my father and ask for a book. Sometimes I even held my hands out in a ritual gesture, waiting to receive the next Science Fiction Book Club hardback. This is why I’m Generation X/Y (cusp!) and my childhood SF favorites were by Asimov, Simak, and Zelazny.

How did you find out about Ambercon?
The fabulous Lee Moyer, illustrator extraordinaire, posted his latest Tarot-inspired T-shirt design for Ambercon Northwest on Facebook. I was immediately mad to know more. Amber? Con? NORTHWEST? (As it happened, Lee ended up coming to ACNW for the first time this year himself, after years of designing their shirts, and we saved the universe together at least once.)

You’re from Portland?
Oh yes.

How did you not know Ambercon existed then?
I DON’T KNOW. I’m starting work on a theory of geek insularity, though, thankee very much!

Which was your favorite game?
(Look of slack-jawed indecision)
I think next year I’ll do even more Amber games. There are non-Amber games that Amberish people would enjoy — mostly using the system or diceless — and those were fab as well, but there’s something about Amber. Still, I didn’t regret signing up for a one, even the one I found out afterwards was a LARP (my first.) That one, trying for a Princess Bride feel, was hilarious.

Are you enjoying your first Ambercon?
Ambercon was a busy, fabulous, full four days of top-notch gaming. I can see why people cross continents and oceans to get to it. I want to come next year, and run games, and stay at Edgefield so I don’t have to drive home every night, and come the next year, and help the organizers out…I’m sort of in love. May all roads always lead to Amber!

A lean, cadaverous figure

2010-10-20T15:35:10+00:00

I’m in the midst of two rereads right now: I’m listening to an audiobook of Mansfield Park and blazing my way through the entirety of The Chronicles of Amber. (So far I’ve noticed the restrained and slightly circumlocutory nature of Austen affecting my personal communications more than Zelazny’s mixture of the sardonic and lyrical.) I’m thoroughly enjoying my return trip through Amber and Chaos, and finding things I don’t remember noticing before.

Take this passage, for example, as Corwin descends into the fastness below Amber:

Twisting and winding through the gloom. The torch and lantern-lit guard station was theatrically stark within it. I reached the floor and headed that way.
“Good evening, Lord Corwin,” said the lean, cadaverous figure who rested against a storage rack, smoking his pipe, grinning around it.
“Good evening, Roger. How are things in the nether world?”
“A rat, a bat, a spider. Nothing much else astir. Peaceful.”
“You enjoy this duty?”
He nodded. “I am writing a philosophical romance shot through with elements of horror and morbidity. I work on those parts down here.”
“Fitting, fitting,” I said. “I’ll be needing a lantern.”
He took one from the rack, brought it to flame from his candle.
“Will it have a happy ending?” I inquired.
He shrugged.
“I’ll be happy.”
“I mean, does good triumph and hero bed heroine? Or do you kill everybody off?”
“That’s hardly fair,” he said.
“Never mind. Maybe I’ll read it one day.”
“Maybe,” he said.
-Roger Zelazny, The Hand of Oberon

I’m not sure how the significance of the dungeon guard’s name escaped me as a teenager and college student (perhaps I did see it, and had just forgotten) but now I find this colloquy very pleasing. Not only does it provide a light beat just where one is needed, but the joke rewards a close reader. It’s not jarring and can even be justified in-universe — if there are (at least) two Lancelots du Lac in the multiverse, why not two toiling authorial Rogers?

I always enjoy meta-discussion of stories within fiction. (“You and I, Sam, are still stuck in the worst places of the story, and it is all too likely that some will say at this point: ‘Shut the book now, dad; we don’t want to read any more.’” – Tolkien) Making fiction is making meaning, and I feel it makes a narrative richer to have the characters realize that, realize how much even they/we are engaged in telling, justifying, framing things as we go about their/our business. Here it’s fascinating, in the midst of a series so varied in texture, setting and moment, to have an idea of how the author sums it up, what he thinks he is about. It’s playful and daring in a way I associate with Zelazny.

It’s enough to tempt you to meet your own main character and tell them what you are presently writing about. (Would you dare? Note that Roger, here, holds a position where in the first book he presumably {SPOILER} guarded the captive Corwin for four years and few of us have dealt more punishment to our characters than Zelazny has to Corwin.) Of course, most of us wouldn’t be so bold and Puckish as to include this exercise in our published works. And as for me, to my regret, it would be rather glaring if I included a bit player named “Felicity”!

Posts tagged with "roger zelazny" - Faerye Net

Ambercon Northwest FAQ

Questions most often asked of me at my first Ambercon Northwest

A lean, cadaverous figure