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PHONE_BOOTH

                                                      January 31, 2003
                                                      February 1, 2003
                                             Rev:     July     2, 2008

A striking thing about Zelazny's
handling of character in works like                   AMBER_GRAINS
"Lord of Light" and the Amber series, is
the creation of god-like characters with              MAKER
a sense of humanity about them... they
come off like regular guys, post-60s
dudes full of hip ironic quips, but when
needed they take on another aspect, they
start speaking in a more formal,
melodramatic mode... and are suddenly        This ties in well with standard
revealed to be dangerous and powerful.       male power fantasies, the
                                             super-hero secret identity.

                                             I may seem to you like I am just
                                             mild-manner geek, but little do
                                             you realize that lurking within
                                             me are the mighty Flames of Doom.

                                                    The sort of thing
                                                    satirized as the
                                                    Walter Mitty syndrome.

                                                                     QUIXAND

A criticism of Zelazny's Amber:

  Amberites are just earth people.
  They should seem greater somehow,
  more alien.  They are in touch              HOLLOW_AMBER
  with the true nature of reality,
  and yet it gains them no insight.

True enough, but consider the problems
if Zelazny had taken the opposite tack.


Writing from the viewpoint of an
alien intelligence is hard, and
writing from the viewpoint of a
*superior* alien intelligence is
nearly impossible.

The *only* way you can do it is to
bluff, to fake it just well enough to
give the reader the vauge impression
that maybe there's something going on
there that's just beyond their grasp.

Doing this for the length of a novel
is very difficult to sustain.

Imagine what it would be like if
Zelazny had Corwin constantly posing
as a Great Deity throughout...  the
risk is that he would degenerate into
burlesque, running around and booming
in a deep voice like a cartoon
Hercules.

So instead, Zelazny came up with this
modulatation approach.  These guys seem                    MODULATED_VOICE
like normal folks, because they *are*
normal folks... but that's not *all*
they are.

This can also be fairly effective
dramatically...  you wait for key
moments in the conflict before
your main character steps out of           E.g. near the end
the phone booth and starts booming         of Zelazny's "Lord
like Hercules.                             of Light"


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