I write for you while you sleep
After three nights effectively sleepless, I finally slept almost ten hours and resent the absence from the Boston skyline of some of the architecture I dreamed about photographing. I don't know where this city would put more bridges, but it had them. I still feel I had visited the cobbled seaside plaza before.
Inspired by![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
sholio, I re-read Byron Preiss, Michael Reaves and Joseph Zucker's Dragonworld (1979) for the first time in decades. I have a used paperback in storage, but actually can't remember when I acquired or first read this illustrated brick of a book, although its mental filing near Carol Kendall's The Gammage Cup (1959) and Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman's The Death Gate Cycle (1990–94) suggests early high school. I had remembered it imperfectly and characteristically: I responded to the adventures of a reclusive inventor who starts heroically out of his depth trying to stop a war and escalates to finding himself on a quest for dragons and tuned out much of the war itself and the politicking around it.
Amsel was a small man, small and wiry, with a great explosion of white hair under a floppy hat, and a face that could claim any age from thirty to fifty. He was dressed in loose-fitting green and brown clothes, covered with pockets. In the pockets were all manner of things: a thong-bound parchment notebook, a quill pen which carried its own ink supply (Amsel's own invention), a lodestone, a small hammer (for chipping off interesting rock specimens), a small net of tanselweb (for capturing interesting insect specimens), and a pair of spectacles (also Amsel's invention). He believed in preparing for any eventuality.
It's an odd, ambitious, slightly stiff book; it reads at times like a novelization of a film that doesn't exist, presumably with creature effects by Jim Henson. Assholio points out, its secondary world would look a lot more normally Tolkienesque if it were more magical, but mostly it has dragons and related species, second sight, and an assortment of invented animals, vegetables, and minerals, of which my favorite is the gemstone equivalent of an alkali metal whose exothermic reaction to water has been harnessed for thermal airship technology. We were trying to think of other non-magical secondary worlds that are not stealth science fiction or alternate history and mostly I was coming up with Lloyd Alexander's Westmark and the volcano of Carol Kendall's Firelings, plus the edge case of Megan Whalen Turner's Little Peninsula. Am taking suggestions, especially if I have overlooked an obvious Frances Hardinge.
All of the news I have seen has been such that I am avoiding my other social media because I just don't want to read the takes. The eye-blurring headache appears to be separate, but I also resent it.
Inspired by
sholio, I re-read Byron Preiss, Michael Reaves and Joseph Zucker's Dragonworld (1979) for the first time in decades. I have a used paperback in storage, but actually can't remember when I acquired or first read this illustrated brick of a book, although its mental filing near Carol Kendall's The Gammage Cup (1959) and Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman's The Death Gate Cycle (1990–94) suggests early high school. I had remembered it imperfectly and characteristically: I responded to the adventures of a reclusive inventor who starts heroically out of his depth trying to stop a war and escalates to finding himself on a quest for dragons and tuned out much of the war itself and the politicking around it.Amsel was a small man, small and wiry, with a great explosion of white hair under a floppy hat, and a face that could claim any age from thirty to fifty. He was dressed in loose-fitting green and brown clothes, covered with pockets. In the pockets were all manner of things: a thong-bound parchment notebook, a quill pen which carried its own ink supply (Amsel's own invention), a lodestone, a small hammer (for chipping off interesting rock specimens), a small net of tanselweb (for capturing interesting insect specimens), and a pair of spectacles (also Amsel's invention). He believed in preparing for any eventuality.
It's an odd, ambitious, slightly stiff book; it reads at times like a novelization of a film that doesn't exist, presumably with creature effects by Jim Henson. As
sholio points out, its secondary world would look a lot more normally Tolkienesque if it were more magical, but mostly it has dragons and related species, second sight, and an assortment of invented animals, vegetables, and minerals, of which my favorite is the gemstone equivalent of an alkali metal whose exothermic reaction to water has been harnessed for thermal airship technology. We were trying to think of other non-magical secondary worlds that are not stealth science fiction or alternate history and mostly I was coming up with Lloyd Alexander's Westmark and the volcano of Carol Kendall's Firelings, plus the edge case of Megan Whalen Turner's Little Peninsula. Am taking suggestions, especially if I have overlooked an obvious Frances Hardinge.All of the news I have seen has been such that I am avoiding my other social media because I just don't want to read the takes. The eye-blurring headache appears to be separate, but I also resent it.
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It's actually a trilogy and probably easier found in the omnibus volume, but Downing rewrote bits of the first book in between, and frankly I think the original is better. The cover definitely is!
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I didn't recognize the title, the cover of the first edition looks intensely familiar, the title summons no memory of a narrative. I suspect I saw it around in libraries and never read it. I'll check it out! I take random recommendations, too.
It's actually a trilogy and probably easier found in the omnibus volume, but Downing rewrote bits of the first book in between, and frankly I think the original is better. The cover definitely is!
Good to know! I will eschew the omnibus.
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Both of my local library systems completely strike out, but thanks to the magic of digitization—of a copy discarded from the Boston Public Library—it looks as though I can read it on the Internet Archive. The chapter titles are extremely promising.
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That does sound like an interesting book!
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Thank you! My going theory is they haven't built them yet.
That does sound like an interesting book!
I enjoyed re-reading it! Pieces of it turned out to have been in my head all these years and other pieces clearly never made an impression in the first place.
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https://www.goodreads.com/series/100628-emilie
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I have not encountered those! Thanks for the heads-up.
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Huzzah!
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Thank you!
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HOWEVS, I must register my complaint about your headache.
(I have acquired for you a sticker, because they go in the post easily. Well, my id acquired it. But for you.)
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We'll definitely have enough river for them! And channel. And harbor. And Seaport.
HOWEVS, I must register my complaint about your headache.
Please do! Maybe it'll listen to you.
(I have acquired for you a sticker, because they go in the post easily. Well, my id acquired it. But for you.)
(I look forward.)
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You know anthropogenic effect on sea level is a myth, Gentlethem.
*fourth-wall face*
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This reminds me of The City & The City and places existing in the spaces between cities!
I'm glad there was sleep, and I hope the headache is gone! *hugs*
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I dream a lot of places in between this city.
I'm glad there was sleep, and I hope the headache is gone!
Thank you! It has diminished, at least.
*hugs*
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The description of Amsel made me think, "Ah, out of the White Knight by Albert Einstein." I don't know why that locution. I know very little about horses.
P.
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Thank you!
The description of Amsel made me think, "Ah, out of the White Knight by Albert Einstein." I don't know why that locution. I know very little about horses.
I don't know that it makes your assessment of his bloodlines incorrect!
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Random tangential anecdote: a friend was once pontificating to me about Spinsters and Distaff Side and similar expressions that refer to women as primarily producers of thread, and I looked something up and found someone referring in all seriousness to the distaff side in horse breeding, which gave me a good laugh.
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I am so glad you got some sleep.
I know I've read other non-magical secondary worlds, but the only one I can think of right now is Richard Adams' Shardik and Maia,.
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Thank you.
I know I've read other non-magical secondary worlds, but the only one I can think of right now is Richard Adams' Shardik and Maia,.
That totally counts! I have not read either. [edit] And made me remember that Tanith Lee's A Heroine of the World (1989) may count, because I am not sure it has anything more supernatural in it than a pack of Tarot-equivalent cards near the beginning. I thought she had written something that would qualify.
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Agreed that Downfall of the Gods meant it literally. I have also read some of Parker's novellas that were just intrigue and engineering, so he should at least count in the same way as Megan Whalen Turner. And I had ironically thought of him in the form of Tom Holt and dismissed on grounds of historical fiction. Thank you!
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I don't think I'd rec those two books. The worldbuilding was inventive but the author's turgid id kept showing through.
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Your choice of adjective is distressingly eloquent. So noted.
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I don't know where this city would put more bridges, but it had them. --This got me imagining a city that could unfold bridges like a fan from a central point.
with a great explosion of white hair under a floppy hat, and a face that could claim any age from thirty to fifty. --This made me laugh because I'm thinking that for an explosion of white hair, fifty is a more usual bottom age limit? Though some people do go white early. Or maybe in Amsel's world, white is a hair color for people of all ages.
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I always took him for an older person with a youngish face. He uses his spectacles for reading and has always been a handy climber of rocks and trees and thinks of himself as old enough not to be making some of his mistakes; he's canonically younger than the father whose loss of a child sparks the war, but when he crosses the straits into a country where he can be mistaken at first glance for a child because of his height, a second glance shows the lines in his face. He's lived alone most of his life outside the town where the story starts, tinkering with his experiments and studying the natural world. It goes against the illustrations—their dragons and coldrakes are great, their people are not necessarily as I would picture them—but I probably imagine Amsel something like Jof in The Seventh Seal (1957), whose actor was in his late forties and in the right light his face looks it, but not his gestures or expressions or his springy tumbler's body. Only with that dandelion-clock of hair, whose origins
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Older person with a youngish face was what I imagined. I have known one person who did go very white in their thirties, a man. And maybe it's all down to Einstein, but we definitely imagine (well... I definitely imagine) the dandelion-clock of white hair as going with a mentally adventurous, imaginative person.
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Hooray! Contribute to the literature!
--This got me imagining a city that could unfold bridges like a fan from a central point.
That's a lovely image. It looks like a seashell to me.
--This made me laugh because I'm thinking that for an explosion of white hair, fifty is a more usual bottom age limit? Though some people do go white early. Or maybe in Amsel's world, white is a hair color for people of all ages.
People in Amsel's world seem to have about the same range of skin and hair tones as people in this one, just as the thirty-to-fifty designation tells the reader that their lifespans are about the same. (The human cultures on either side of the straits differ significantly in height, but both are explicitly human, not stand-ins for hobbits or elves or anything.) I personally have cropped up a lot more silver in the last couple of years than before. That said, the last time I read this book, thirty-to-fifty sounded much more adult.
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Thank you! I've read other novels of hers, but not that one, and I keep forgetting about it.