Nine Princes in Amber
Launched fantasy's definitive parallel-worlds dynasty saga; the Amber books shaped role-playing's multiverse imagination and every squabbling immortal family since.
Book Entry · Fantasy
What is Witch World about?
Simon Tregarth, ex-colonel and hunted man, takes the one exit his pursuers can't follow: the Siege Perilous, which delivers each sitter to the world that fits him. His is Estcarp, ruled by celibate witches whose power answers to true names, under siege by the Kolder — invaders whose soulless technology comes from somewhere else again. Sword, sorcery and science collide as Simon, the witch Jaelithe and Koris of Gorm fight a war on two axes of reality. Norton's matter-of-fact prose makes the strangeness land like reportage.
Why it matters
Hugo-nominated and the launch of one of fantasy's longest-running series; its portal-plus-science-fantasy formula anticipated half the genre's later crossovers.
Where does it sit in the series?
Norton's long-running science-fantasy sequence in which Earth's strays cross into a world of witches, ancient technology and the endless war with the Kolder.
In the Guide from Witch World:
- Witch World (1963)
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