RDF/RSS Feed
Atom Feed
One of the topics UK Editor suggested for a blog post for the Orbit Books site was “favorite fantasy dragons” with a lead-in to Kings of the North. Those of you around in the great burgeoning of SF/F in the late 1960s and 1970s will remember that “dragons” were fairly common. Some belonged to older mythologies and some had been softened and tamed and made almost bland.
But at the time I was writing the original Paks story-that-became-a-book and didn’t stop there, I “knew” (in the way writers do know) that my fantasy world contained dragons in principle, but that they would not be active in the story. It wasn’t about dragons. So I put them in the past and shut the door on them.
In five long books (counting the Gird & Luap books) dragons were merely legend. I did write part of a short story in which a dragon appeared, but it died. Gird was at the Battle of Blackbone Hill, and Blackbone Hill was part of the legend of dragons, but no dragons or sign of them appeared. So fine…no dragons. Only the memory of dragons, the legends of dragons and the marvelous Camwyn Dragonmaster in his gold armor with his gleaming sword. Children were named for Camwyn whose parents and grandparents for generations had never seen so much as a single scale of dragon or whiff of dragon-smoke. Everyone knew that once there had been dragons, and now there weren’t (thanks to Camwyn) so telling tales of dragons was perfectly safe.
Then came the invitation to write a story for The Dragon Quintet, edited by Marvin Kaye. The question of dragon reproduction had occurred to me years before (not how other people’s dragons reproduced, but how the Paksworld dragons had done it) and so, in a story-time set before Gird, and a story called “Judgment,” a naive young man going home to the village with his future father-in-law finds a dragon egg lying there untended. And then another one.
That dragon was not quite what I expected. Still, that was then, and (in that universe) safely some considerable distance in the past. This was not a story-world in which dragons (without specific invitation and a contract urging me on) were going to turn up in the book. The books already had “a gracious plenty,” as a friend of my mother’s used to say, of creatures and complications. We didn’t need no steenkin’ dragons.
Dragons, however, are not obedient to human planning. I was happily galloping along in the late autumn, the last months, of Kings’ chronology, when the nature of something mentioned by someone I’d never seen before became clear to me–because I’d seen it before, in “Judgment.” The sputtering of “But-but-but…!!” in my brain should’ve been audible to any telepath within a light year. And the next thing I knew, there was a dragon in the book. And I was a very nervous writer…because in common thought, a fantasy book with a dragon in it is a very different book from the same one without a dragon in it and–to many people–less worthy. Especially if written by a woman.
I mentioned to Editor that a dragon had come into the book. “Oh, great,” said Editor. “I love dragons.” No chance of evicting dragon after that, even if dragon had not, in the meantime, dug claws into the story’s structure and begun to merge with it. Plot daemon was cackling with glee.
So now you know. There is a dragon in this book. And the next…
Comment by MaryW — March 7, 2011 @ 11:35 am
Wonderful! I love dragons. Now I know that a lot of things will be a surprise. Perfect.
Comment by Carolyn Rau — March 7, 2011 @ 1:21 pm
I am really glad you can get stuff like this out of your head and into a book. That I can read. (Yes, that makes me glad I can read) Also, it is really fun reading about how it blooms in your head (or whatever it does). And happy birthday. For the other post.
Thank you for sharing.
Comment by elizabeth — March 7, 2011 @ 3:00 pm
I’m glad you enjoy it.
Comment by Rolv — March 7, 2011 @ 3:33 pm
Good news. I’m been sort of waiting for the dragons to emerge even since the hints given in Kolobia, it seemed more or less inevigable that at some moment, they would have their glorious return.
Looking eagerly forward to Kings, as to anything new in my all time #2 favourite fantasy world (next only to Middle Earth …)
Comment by Dave Ring — March 7, 2011 @ 9:57 pm
Defining dragons: Tolkien’s Smaug (illustrating the wicked subtlety of dragonly conversation), le Guin’s Yevaud (showing how a wizard — or author — may become a dragon lord) and le Guin’s Kalessin (reminding us that dragons may be good but never safe).
Runners up: Lewis’ Eustace/dragon (mode of transmission of the dragon disease), Gannett’s dragons of Blueland (best benign childhood dragons) and McCaffrey’s phosphine-spewing Pernese dragons (best SF-plausible dragons).
Comment by elizabeth — March 8, 2011 @ 10:06 am
I love McCaffrey’s Pernese dragons, but they’re not *fantasy* dragons…to me, anyway, their origin–bred up by humans from fire-lizards–makes them more akin to other large domesticated animals.
Smaug and Yevaud and Kalessin and such are true dragons–creatures with their own long backstory, independent of humans.
Benign childhood dragons…didn’t appeal to me when I was a child.
Comment by Dave Ring — March 8, 2011 @ 11:09 am
Yes, I meant to set apart McCaffrey’s dragons as creatures of science fiction rather than fantasy. As such, they need to meet a higher burden of physical and biological plausibility. I like the way Pernese dragons chew phosphate-rich firestone and reduce it to flammable phosphine, and I like the impressibility of dragon hatchlings. I’d like to see stronger underpinnings (in terms of past selective pressures) for the dragons’ caste system, telepathy and ability to “go between” places and times. The lack off these pushes Pern to the fantasy border of soft SF.
Comment by Finny — March 8, 2011 @ 8:44 pm
*thinks of my favourite book dragons*
The dragon in The Book Dragon, all the dragons in Naomi Novik’s Temeraire series, the “toy” dragon in Brother to Dragons, Companion to Owls…I know there are more…yet for some reason I can’t think of them. Later, perhaps.
Comment by Daniel Glover — March 8, 2011 @ 9:07 pm
Lions, and Tigers and … Dragons !?! Oooohhhh, my! Well, well, well, as if a god putting their mark on the forehead of a paladin wasn’t enough. Now, dragons long gone to go with the eternal elven lives. Mmmmm. No wonder Kings wasn’t a “hinge” book.
Likey, likey.
Comment by elizabeth — March 8, 2011 @ 10:07 pm
Finny, I also love the dragon in The Book Dragon, and Novik’s dragons, but those came later in my life (and thus affected any dragons I might write much less) than the ones I mentioned. Novik’s dragons, in particular, occupy a place in my mind similar to McCaffrey’s. Alternate history is more on the SF side of things, to me.
Comment by elizabeth — March 8, 2011 @ 10:09 pm
Well, one dragon so far. I’m not going to speculate on how many might show up later. (I hope not many.)
Comment by Celina — March 11, 2011 @ 3:44 pm
I must say I love the dragons from Dungeons And Dragons. And the dragon from the movie Spirited Away. Dragons can have alot of roles, from evil mindless monsters to benevolent guardians. The only thing I dislike is that when a dragon is used as a cool mount and nothing else.
Comment by Mary Schmitt — March 11, 2011 @ 7:54 pm
I’ve always liked dragons and McCaffrey’s was the first I’d read that didn’t make them evil. I also like Jo Walton’s dragons in Tooth and Claw.
Comment by arthur — March 14, 2011 @ 10:49 am
This is Arthur. It’s weird… when Tolkien first published “The Hobbit”, dragons were… light any airy, like Kenneth Grahame’s “The Reluctant Dragon.” Smaug was not that sort at all. He was Beowulf’s dragon and all the other great ‘worms’ of old reborn.