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Dragonworld (part 2)
Recall when I posted about Preiss/Reaves/Zucker's Dragonworld for Snowflake Challenge? Well, it turns out that I DID have a used copy on hand, acquired at some point in the last 20+ years, and I've now read it. (A process that has been going on for two weeks at least - I took it with me on my trip to see my mom this past couple of weeks and have been reading it a little at a time.)
I enjoyed it, and also feel this might be an entirely unique experience in rereading a book I read a lot as a kid but - as far as I can remember - haven't read since: it's exactly like I remember it. EXACTLY. It has neither been visited by the suck fairy nor has it developed new layers and shades of meaning in the meantime. It's just exactly the book I remember, an absorbing if slightly superficial high fantasy adventure about two warring kingdoms and the rediscovery of long-lost dragons.
(I mean, it is completely possible that I did in fact reread this copy as an adult, which would explain why I remember the basics of the plot so well, but I have no memory of doing so. It was definitely one of those books I read as a kid until I practically had it memorized.)
One thing I found extremely interesting about this book for late-70s epic fantasy is that there's no magic, or at least very little magic. There's magic-adjacent magitech, but it generally has a scientific-ish explanation and is treated like technology rather than magic, such as the stones which, when wet, release gas that is what enables their airships to fly. One of the kingdoms believes the other one is full of evil wizards, but they're not actually any more magical than the other group. The only probably-magic in the whole book is a gemstone that contains the ancestral memories of the dragons, which can be unlocked by a young woman who is sort of vaguely psychic. Beyond that, it's completely nonmagical secondary-world fantasy. It's also lacking fantasy races beyond humans and dragons (although the two main kingdoms vaguely approximate a lot of the traits of dwarves and elves - they are both human, however).
So that was interesting to think about. Another new thing on this read that I doubt I noticed before is that there are clear signs that it was setting up a sequel, such as vague hints about a couple of characters' ~mysterious past~ that is clearly significant but never explained. And it ends with a definite "setting out on new adventures" vibe. But the sequel, as far as I know, never materialized, possibly because Preiss died young, or maybe because illustrated fat fantasy was never that commercially successful.
But in general, even if it took me absolutely forever to finish it, I enjoyed it a lot! The pencil illustrations are very charming - I can see why I loved looking at them as a kid - and the plot and large cast of characters carried me along nicely. I also remember being deeply charmed by the noble, melancholy Last Dragon as a child, and I still am.
I enjoyed it, and also feel this might be an entirely unique experience in rereading a book I read a lot as a kid but - as far as I can remember - haven't read since: it's exactly like I remember it. EXACTLY. It has neither been visited by the suck fairy nor has it developed new layers and shades of meaning in the meantime. It's just exactly the book I remember, an absorbing if slightly superficial high fantasy adventure about two warring kingdoms and the rediscovery of long-lost dragons.
(I mean, it is completely possible that I did in fact reread this copy as an adult, which would explain why I remember the basics of the plot so well, but I have no memory of doing so. It was definitely one of those books I read as a kid until I practically had it memorized.)
One thing I found extremely interesting about this book for late-70s epic fantasy is that there's no magic, or at least very little magic. There's magic-adjacent magitech, but it generally has a scientific-ish explanation and is treated like technology rather than magic, such as the stones which, when wet, release gas that is what enables their airships to fly. One of the kingdoms believes the other one is full of evil wizards, but they're not actually any more magical than the other group. The only probably-magic in the whole book is a gemstone that contains the ancestral memories of the dragons, which can be unlocked by a young woman who is sort of vaguely psychic. Beyond that, it's completely nonmagical secondary-world fantasy. It's also lacking fantasy races beyond humans and dragons (although the two main kingdoms vaguely approximate a lot of the traits of dwarves and elves - they are both human, however).
So that was interesting to think about. Another new thing on this read that I doubt I noticed before is that there are clear signs that it was setting up a sequel, such as vague hints about a couple of characters' ~mysterious past~ that is clearly significant but never explained. And it ends with a definite "setting out on new adventures" vibe. But the sequel, as far as I know, never materialized, possibly because Preiss died young, or maybe because illustrated fat fantasy was never that commercially successful.
But in general, even if it took me absolutely forever to finish it, I enjoyed it a lot! The pencil illustrations are very charming - I can see why I loved looking at them as a kid - and the plot and large cast of characters carried me along nicely. I also remember being deeply charmed by the noble, melancholy Last Dragon as a child, and I still am.
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Your link seems to go to a (very interesting) Substack post about painting models in the act of conversation!
The only probably-magic in the whole book is a gemstone that contains the ancestral memories of the dragons, which can be unlocked by a young woman who is sort of vaguely psychic. Beyond that, it's completely nonmagical secondary-world fantasy.
That is neat, and not something that I had remembered about the book, and definitely unusual for a secondary world.
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Ahahaha, thank you; fixed! Well, that's definitely not the most embarrassing thing that could potentially have been in my c&p buffer instead of the link I intended. (And it is a very interesting post! I enjoyed it a lot.)
That is neat, and not something that I had remembered about the book, and definitely unusual for a secondary world.
Yeah, I didn't even notice it at the time, but I can think of very few other books like that.
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Lloyd Alexander's Westmark has no magic at all, full stop, despite its Ruritanian countries not belonging to even an alternate history of our Europe, which also didn't occur to me for years. Megan Whalen Turner's classical-to-late-antique-inflected secondary world also has no magic, but does have gods who make themselves known at sometimes ambiguously numinous, sometimes point-blank explicit moments, so falls closer to traditional definitions of fantasy for me. I just remembered that the volcanic home of Carol Kendall's Firelings has no magic, just the odd case of telepathy. I am sure I've read other examples, but nothing else I can pull off the top of my head. I feel like Tanith Lee should have written one, except she put magic in everything.
[edit] It's also neat that your description of Dragonworld sounds like it isn't science fantasy, either—Pern or the World of Two Moons, for example, where the fantasy tropes are scaffolded by various hardnesses of science fiction, starting with "other planets and aliens."
[edit edit] I found the book on the Internet Archive and am looking at it for the first time in decades and oh jeez Amsel is filed somewhere in my brain.
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Yeah, that's the thing that really jumps out at me. Most examples of this that I can think of are taking place in a technically sci-fi setting and at some point you get at least some mask-off sci-fi, just enough to let the reader in on how it fits into the sci-fi universe as we understand it. (It's a far-future colonized planet, it's a post-apocalyptic Earth, etc.) But this book doesn't do that; it would be a perfectly typical Tolkein-derived high fantasy world if it had magic, elves, and dwarves, but it doesn't, and it isn't.
And you're right, Firelings is a great example! I'm struggling to think of others. I'm reasonably confident that the general cross-pollination of sci-fi and fantasy during the 1960s-80s must have led to more, but everything I've thought to check out on Wikipedia turns out to be explicitly sci-fi or magical in ways I'd forgotten about. (Westmark I'm unfamiliar with, aside from having heard of it.)
[edit edit] I found the book on the Internet Archive and am looking at it for the first time in decades and oh jeez Amsel is filed somewhere in my brain.
He's very much in the Bilbo mold (not a fighter, would rather be home with his books) and it made me realize that heroes of that type are relatively rare in modern fantasy.
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I wonder why the genre forked in such a fashion that non-magical secondary worlds became so rare and channeled into stealth sci-fi or alternate history or modern Ruritanias like Orsinia or Hav. It doesn't actually feel inevitable to me.
(Westmark I'm unfamiliar with, aside from having heard of it.)
Highly recommended! One of the series which I read so young, it took me years to sort out how unusual some of it is. Officially YA novels which complicate themselves politically and emotionally as they go, special interests the ethics of war and governance. The ending of the trilogy was an outlier in fantasy of the time and still vanishingly rare in my experience (rot13: gur nobyvgvba bs gur zbanepul juvpu gur urebrf unir sbe nyy guerr obbxf orra svtugvat gb erfgber). I wrote about them a little in 2017. When I looked, Alexander had been open all along about the direct transfer of his experiences in World War II, much of it raw and haunting and difficult for him to revisit. He recovered by writing the much more goofily, melodramatically fun Vesper Holly novels.
He's very much in the Bilbo mold (not a fighter, would rather be home with his books) and it made me realize that heroes of that type are relatively rare in modern fantasy.
I think you're right and again I'm not sure why they should have fallen out of fashion, since it is an appealing type and not incompatible with narrative agency. Patricia A. McKillip's Song for the Basilisk (1998) has a particularly good one, a middle-aged sole survivor of an aristocratic massacre who after one abortive effort in his youth to return to the city of his birth and take revenge like a traditional hero settled instead for a quietly sustained life as a music teacher and only gets pulled back into the politics of his past because his son who knows nothing about his father's history gets old enough to hare off to the city and involve himself in the next generation of its struggle for justice and the protagonist goes after him in order to try to prevent the kid from getting himself idealistically killed and thus naturally arrives in a situation so ironically far-fetched, the court musician commissioned for the upcoming jubilee has no difficulty accidentally mirroring it with a grand opera. (The process by which the composition of the opera bass-ackwardly meanders its way around to approximating reality is worth the price of admission.) It isn't a recent novel unless compared with the era of Dragonworld, however, so may prove rather than dispute the point.
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Same! And I actually have worldbuilding for a few different nonmagical secondary worlds in my teenage notebooks. I don't think I realized it was unusual at the time. (In fact I've thought about resurrecting a few of those .... perhaps I will.)
I think you're right and again I'm not sure why they should have fallen out of fashion, since it is an appealing type and not incompatible with narrative agency.
I know! And there are certainly popular characters along those lines (Giles, anyone?). I think the failure mode - aside from the character type simply working against the pop cultural mold of what a hero in an action adventure setting is supposed to be like - might be that it's a lot harder to get a character to go out and do Heroing if they really don't want to do it, so you could easily end up with a passive character being jerked along by events, unless you-the-writer have a good handle on what you're doing with them. (The place where I feel like I still see a lot of this type of protagonist is in paranormal women's fiction, cozy mystery and similar, and there definitely are plenty of them who are more victims of their plot than active agents in it.)
I think I get it in the sense that people who read action fantasy want to be vicariously swept up in it, and following a protagonist who actively doesn't like what the reader wants most could be a tough sell. I still think you can do it! I want more of it! You just need to give them a good reason to go out in the world, something they want more than books and comfort, and then you have a great character arc in the making.
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You should! It is obviously an underserved market!
(The place where I feel like I still see a lot of this type of protagonist is in paranormal women's fiction, cozy mystery and similar, and there definitely are plenty of them who are more victims of their plot than active agents in it.)
That's a really interesting survival and makes me think of the subgenre of thrillers that Eric Ambler pioneered, where the protagonists are ordinary people into whose lives espionage suddenly crashes. Mary Stewart's novels of romantic suspense generally work this way, too. And a lot of noir just happens to people, and sometimes they become active agents in what is happening, and sometimes they are just working to survive it, which is fair for an anxiety-based genre, but I agree with your point that where adventures are concerned, at some point the character should become invested rather than merely involved.
You just need to give them a good reason to go out in the world, something they want more than books and comfort, and then you have a great character arc in the making.
I had not really remembered and liked Amsel's slow discovery that he does feel commitments to other people, starting with his unexpected attachment to a single child and ending with his even less expected sense of belonging to humanity—which he characteristically wants to study at some future date—and the way it turns on responsibility more than any other emotion.
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Ooh, definitely unusual. I was about to say I'd had that with Ballet Shoes, except actually I hadn't clocked the lesbian couple as a kid.
It sounds really interesting!
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I had a variation on that for years, where I remembered how Diana Wynne Jones' A Tale of Time City (1988) ended, but my paperback's cover and last pages had fallen off and it never seemed worth getting another copy out of the library just to read the ending, so I would re-read up to where it stopped and take the rest in memory.