Amber

The Merlin Connection

When the first book of the Merlin series was released, I reserved a copy through the library and so I had not read it by the next MediaWest*Con. When I got there, the Amber fan club president spotted me and asked if I read the book yet, I admitted that I hadn’t.

“Merlin’s you,” she replied. “Merlin’s a programmer.”

Sure enough, Merlin was a programmer. (Nowadays we’d call ourselves hackers but same difference.)

(I look nothing like Pierce Brosnam: that is, however, how the character was described to the artist by Roger.)

But there was more: I wrote a Merlin story for the fanzine, where I took the scene where he first encounters his father and wrote it from his perspective, and then carried the story on back to the repercussions of his actions back in the Courts of Chaos.

The question is, though, was I the (or maybe part of the) inspiration for Merlin? I will never know, as I never got the opportunity to ask Roger that question. He was to be the Guest of Honor at GenCon in (was it really that long ago?) 1995, and Erick Wujcik (see below) organized a reception for him and invited his Amber players to attend, but Roger died earlier that year: Roger, being the private person he was, never told anyone about his illness. It was a great loss for the SF and Fantasy community.

However, mindful of that connection, I have the Trump of Ghostwheel (which was Merlin’s sentient Trump computer creation) from “The Visual Guide to Castle Amber” hanging on the wall at home.