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Snowflake Challenge day 6
We all have a favourite piece of original canon. Maybe that's a particular episode of a show, maybe a specific scene, maybe a whole storyline. Maybe it's one of those but from a movie. Maybe a comic, and you have a favourite piece of art. Maybe it's a chapter or a character in a book, or a song from a musical. Anything goes.
Day 6: Share your favourite piece of original canon.
One? ONE??? That's very optimistic of you, Snowflake Challenge.
There are obviously about a million things I could talk about here, and I could easily get stuck with decision paralysis trying to choose between 10,000 options. I'm not really a forever-faves person; I'm a person who tends to bounce around between different flings of the moment, falling in and out of love with canons at the drop of a hat. I could easily describe one of my favorite scenes from my current loves, but I decided to make it more interesting by trying to think of something I haven't talked about here before.
And what came to mind is the novel Dragonworld by Byron Preiss, Michael Reaves, and Joe Zucker - now available in ebook, apparently! I have no idea how well it's held up, because I haven't reread it since I was probably in my teens or even younger. This is an illustrated fat fantasy novel from my very early childhood that (along with LOTR, comics, and a few other things) was a huge influence on my early writing and art.
I can't imagine I would ever have even tried to read something like this at the age that I read it - the book is 500 pages long! - except that my mom had read it to me first (she read us a lot of adult fantasy when we were very young, including LOTR) and I was also absolutely charmed by the beautiful, magical pencil illustrations. Here's a review that includes one of the illustrations; another review has a dragon image that may have influenced how I draw dragons to this day (and the cover certainly did).
The plot involves two nations going to war over a child's accidental death, and the rediscovery of dragons long thought extinct. Heavy stuff for a young kid (I was probably about 7 the first time I read it on my own, and younger than that when it was read to me) but it was full of charming and evocative details that I still remember all these years later, including magical skyships, a dragon frozen in a glacier, and a form of democracy that involves voting by throwing magical stones into a charmed lake that change the color of the water, and the eventual color determines the outcome of the vote.
As a further twist, our copy had been read to death by small children (me, I am small child) and by the time I was old enough to remember the plot in detail, the last few pages had vanished so I'm not actually sure exactly how it ends. But maybe the best fairy tales are like that.
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I haven't thought of that book in ages! I had a brick-thick paperback that I took home from a used book store. Now I wish it weren't in storage.
(Also I just exploded mentally at the realization that its author was the same guy who did the treasure hunt whose Boston clue was only solved in 2019.)
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(Also I just exploded mentally at the realization that its author was the same guy who did the treasure hunt whose Boston clue was only solved in 2019.)
Details?? I don't think I've heard of this!
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Do it! My copy languishes in storage! I would love to hear how it reads to you now.
Details?? I don't think I've heard of this!
Byron Preiss' The Secret (1982)! It was a Masquerade-style treasure hunt whose clues to the geographical locations of literally buried treasure keys were embedded in the poems and illustrations of the eponymous book. Of the twelve treasures, only two were correctly deciphered and discovered in Preiss' lifetime and they were more than twenty years apart. The third was the Boston treasure, almost fifteen years after his death. The remaining nine treasures are still being sought, even though some of them are now considered lost or inaccessible. Preiss left no apparent master list of the puzzles, clearly not expecting (a) the hunt would take the decades that it did (b) he would die suddenly, although to be fair a lot of people make this mistake much more normally with wills or literary estates and so forth. I'm still hoping more will turn up. In the meantime, I find everything about the situation amazing.
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You're welcome!
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I've never heard of that one; I may have to look for it. The SF/fantasy/other genre mashups of the 70s-80s have such a different feel to the ones now.
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Funny though, I later found another book written by someone else about the same characters, like am authorised tie in, and bought it... and it was dreadful, wouldn't have passed muster as crappiest fanfic. I have no idea why the original author agreed to it.
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