I write for you while you sleep

[sovay]

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 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.

Comments

[ethelmay]

I suppose it means the face independent of the hair, but I agree the juxtaposition is clumsy. Needs a "despite" or some equivalent pointer.

[asakiyume]

And if it does mean the face independent of the hair, does it mean that indeed, Amsel is someone who got white hair early? Or is he an older person, but with a youngish face? (Not that this matters! It's an arresting description regardless! But it did make me muse more than maybe it intended. Or maybe it intended precisely this amount of musing!)

[sovay]

Or is he an older person, but with a youngish face? (Not that this matters! It's an arresting description regardless! But it did make me muse more than maybe it intended. Or maybe it intended precisely this amount of musing!)

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 pameladean almost certainly correctly notes.

[asakiyume]

*nodding*

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.