We’re doing something slightly different this week. Part of the joy of rereading Dragonlance is realising how influential and far-reaching they are. Everyone’s read Dragonlance—and, if not, isn’t now the perfect time to start? It is no wonder this series is so influential; it had its sticky claws in all of our childhoods.
To demonstrate this, and to give us the occasional week off, we’ve asked some authors and artists and general figures of the fantastic to chime in with guest posts. They’ll take the reins for a post, and talk through what Dragonlance means to them.
To kick it off, we’re declaring Sam Sykes our honorary Dragon Highlord. The author of The Aeons’ Gate trilogy and the just-released The City Stained Red, Sam’s a man who enjoys his fantasy. Who enjoys writing monsters and adventurers and terrible things happening to all of them.
Caution: unlike our proper reread posts, this one contains spoilers.
It’s 1:58 AM. I just had a stiff drink—not so stiff that I drank it to give the illusion of distinguish, mind—and I’m frustrated that I can’t romance this one character in a video game RPG.
Seems like the perfect time to talk about Dragonlance.
See, Dragonlance is a little like pornography in that it seemed extremely important when you were fourteen and when you get older you’re kind of embarrassed that you were that obsessed with it. I excuse myself for liking Drizzt when I was that old, because really, how could a young male nerd not identify with a walking wish-fulfillment? But Dragonlance remains a bone of contention for me.
I think, to my father’s chagrin and my mother’s delight, my fate was sealed when I opted out of going to a baseball game with my dad so I could stay home and watch The Hobbit (the Bass-Rankin version, baby; I’m all about headlights Smaug). I subsequently enjoyed the book, as well, but I didn’t really think much of fantasy after that for another few years until my mom came home with a book one day.
Kaz the Minotaur. The book that would make sure my middle school years would be long and awkward.
Kaziganthi de Orilg was originally a friend of Huma Dragonbane, the Dragonknight who brought back the Silver Dragons to help the good knights of Solamnia fight the evil knights of Takhisis. I would read The Legend of Huma later and realize Kaz’s origins. But before I knew any of that, I knew Kaz was a badass.
Seriously. He’s stacked and has a giant axe and takes no crap. You got a problem with Kaz? He wrecks you with a giant axe. Then he mutters something about honor and he’s automatically absolved of wrongdoing, because they drew first blood. I can only barely remember what that book was about—some kind of conspiracy in the minotaur court, maybe—but I remember when Kaz’s axe turned into a lance, SHOOM, and it turned out it was a Dragonlance! That sounds badass! And there were elves and ogres and comic relief kender and knights and maidens, hell yeah.
And DRAGONS. So many dragons! Some of them spit chlorine gas! Some of them spit acid! Some of them spit fire! Some were good and some were jerks! And they came in a convenient color-coded system so you could tell which was which! And damn did that guy just ride that dragon holy wow and he’s going to bang that girl and she’s also a dragon you can sex a dragon holy hell how cool is this.
This enthusiasm would stay with me as I read probably thirty more Dragonlance novels. I read about gully dwarves and evil knights and I think there might have been a sex scene in one of them because there was a scantily-clad chick on the cover. I honestly couldn’t tell you the plots to a lot of them and the ones I could were usually along the lines of “Takhisis here, she want to kill your ass, don’t let her!” But I ate those books like popcorn.
I used to give myself a harder time for this, just as I gave myself a harder time for liking Drizzt. But thinking back, I can see why I was lured in.
First of all, it was simple. Everyone’s name said exactly what they did. Tanis Half-Elven, the Half Elf. Sturm Brightblade, the Paladin. Raistlin Majere, the Mage. Caramon Majere, the Douchebag. Tika, the… the Girl. Tasslehoff Burrfoot, the Annoying Bastard. Kaziganthi de Orilg, the Orilg. You didn’t need to understand a whole lot before going in.
Secondly, it validated my worldview as a young, awkward weirdo who had no experience with social interactions. The world was full of evil and it was all out to get you. Things were very easy to categorize into who was good and who was evil. Girls were scary and mysterious. People would frequently misunderstand and demean you for no reason. Things were unfair, but heroes are special and get the girl and everyone loves them and you could be one of them.
Eventually, that wore off on me. Eventually, I started to wonder why, exactly, a culture such as the minotaurs’ could spontaneously develop a good guy like Kaz. Eventually, I started to wonder why it was always women with ambition that were evil or brought about the end of the universe. Eventually, I started to wonder why it was that things were just regular good or regular evil.
Then Dragons of the Summer Flame came out and at the end they got rid of all the dragons and who the hell wants to read a book without dragons.
The love affair was over. I moved on to bigger, dourer fantasies where they say cusses and people died.
I do remember there was this one scene where Riverwind got his entire body melted off by acid down to the skeleton. Then Goldmoon’s magic brought him back. That scene would shape my reaction to Game of Thrones in the future where I was reading ahead desperately for the magic spell that would bring Ned back to life. Good times.
I was happy to leave a lot of it behind.
But some of it, I kept with me.
I still like the theme of the adventuring party. To me, it seemed like a great way to have conflicts built in as people with dissenting views were fit in to each other. I still like the idea of big bad evils that genuinely want to stomp the shit out of you and all that you hold dear.
But I still like the enthusiasm. I like a world that’s not completely charted on the map in the front of the book. I like a world that still has stuff to discover. I like seeing a crazy creature and being impressed with its description. I like swordfights and goofy armor and heroes that take the hard way instead of being assholes because they’re heroes.
I like saying “hell yeah.”
And though I’m never going to get that from Dragonlance again, I still think there’s room for that in fantasy today.
Sam Sykes is the author of The City Stained Red and the Aeons’ Gate Trilogy. He will offend you on Twitter at @samsykesswears. Buy his book.
Even though this reread series keeps saying that Weis & Hickman’s Dragonlance novels are pretty clumsily written (and I agree), the boatload of other Dragonlance novels written by the many other authors working for the setting seem to me to be way worse, and most frankly suck from every standpoint.
At least the Chronicles and Legends Trilogies, as well as the Second Generation short story compilation, and Dragons of Summer Flame, tried to do something interesting with their characters. In these books people died and got brought back to life by magic, sure, but important characters also died and stayed dead. Some heroes did more harm than good even though they had good intentions, and some villains were actually honorable. And even though I didn’t like the later trilogy set in the Fifth Age, it kind of told us what happened in the end to every important character. I never did get around to reading the Lost Chronicles trilogy, so I don’t know if they suck a lot or just a little bit.
And, in contrast with the above article, I can much more easily forgive my teenage self for liking Weis & Hickman’s Dragonlance novels than R.A. Salvatore’s adventures of the drow emo Mary Sue. *groan*
I remember reading Dragonlance way back but I don’t think I ever finished whatever book I had mostly because Tanis seemed so cool to me and then as the adolescent I was I’d get distracted as I started to think about that. And looking back; for a book I’m sure was written as poorly as every one on these threads has said that’s a remarkable feat. It got me thinking about the fantasy genre in a way that even when I would later start reading The Hobbit or the Earthsea books never happened again. It wasn’t until much later that fantasy books like the Cosmere stuff by Sanderson and the Malazan Books of the Fallen really gave me an urge to think about these things again and to start writing myself. So that’s what Dragonlance did for me; it gave me my first taste of this genre I’ve grown to love.
And as a graduate student I’ve discovered that it had a similar impact on some of my friends. One of my friends still has the Dragonlance books on his shelves and will occasionally read them from time to time because of that connection with the past and that eases stress for him. We’ve also had some really cool discussions because we have this basis for the fantasy/science fiction genres that permeates into our work as graduate students.
Sam’s piece reminds me of the other end of the Dragonlance experience; there’s the original trilogies that hooked me and have all the nice memories, but there’s also the eventual one that woke me up and made me give my head a shake (for me it was ‘Flint the King’). Dragonlance did the opposite of manipulating the tropes: instead it snatched them all up, flushed them full of brilliant technicolour and made them glow in the dark. It was the sweetest fantasy candy that money could buy, and I bought a whole lot of it before I was full.
@1 I agree that a lot of the ‘other’ Drangonlance novells where garbage, not only because many of the various authors were less than skilled, but they seemed to lack the particular ‘feel’ we had come to expect from Krynn.
@3 Yes, I too conusmed too much of the ‘candy’ before getting a bellyache and stopping. I learned quickly to look at the author’s name on the cover and not be distracted by the flashy covers.
I’m not sure how Caramon qualify’s as a “DB”, I always thought of him as more like Lenny from “Of Mice and Men”. Particularly in the first trilogy, but it has been a long while since I re-read, so I could be off on my take.
Ooh, please do “Brothers Majere” next! Or that weird one where Sturm and the gnomes fly to the moon and develop superpowers for some reason…
I think I was just a bit too old — I was in high school when TSR first started releasing fiction and I dutifully read first couple of Dragonlance trilogies (Chronicles & Legends), Gary Gygax’ Gord the Rogue books and the first few Forgotten Realms novels, but while I enjoyed them well enough at the time (and still revisit them because nostalgia), I could never quite summon up the courage to try to penetrate that mid-1990s Wall o’ Identically-Sized TSR Novels.
Some of the side story novels are actually my favorites. The Draconian Regiment books were a lot of fun in particular, but the absolute best of the bunch had to have been a spinoff from Dragon’s of a Summer Flame’s events. I forgot its name, and even whether it was a short story in a compilation or a full novel, but it was about a party of treasure seekers heading in to an abandon island in search of gold. Instead of gold, however, they find Summer Flame’s creepiest new baddie; shadow wights.
For those unaware, with a simple touch a shadow wight can wipe you from existence. You don’t die, you’re entirely unmade and erased from everyone’s memories. As a result, the entire story was effectively slotted into the horror genre, and told from the limited perspective of characters who constantly forget the friends they lose around them. The claustrophobic ending is probably the strongest single image any Dragonlance book has ever instilled in my mind, and it was as fun to read as it would have been horrible to experience.
Speaking of which, does anyone know what book that story was in? I’d actually like to read it again.
@1
I never liked that series, even when Urkel the Drow was not the main character. I still think the Moonshae series was a better series.
But it was the 2nd edition tie-ins (Shadowdale and the Avatar Trilogy) that turned me off of D&D books forever. One of the greatest things about 3rd edition is that they never wrote bad novels to try to justify their retcons.
@1 & @8: I think it is a relative thing. Chronicles is a pretty clumsy series – even the authors admit it – but there are reasons for that clumsiness, and it doesn’t prevent the books from being important/influential/totally awesome.
I think that Legends, where Weis/Hickman got to write in a way that was free from the constraints of being an RPG narrative, is much better as a series, and also shows what they can really do.
And, honestly, I totally agree. Chronicles may be clunky, but it is much, much better than anything else anyone wrote in this world. Or many other tie-ins.
I can’t stand Drizz’t either. Although I do get a kick out of the Avatar series, but again, more because of what it was doing (using novels to bridge a change in the game system) than the books themselves.
I have to admit, I kinda loved Legends the most. Shhhh.
I actually liked Richard Knaak’s Dragonlance books – Legend of Huma, in particular. (Knaak went on to write his own dragon-based series, Dragonrealm, which was another guilty pleasure for me!)
I admit I spent too many years reading Dragonlance novels, and FR novels too. I also admit I loved Legends, and even a Drizzt book, Homeland. And my final sin, I’m usimg this reread to force my wife to read Chromicles for the first time ;)
@7
a quick googling turns out Rebels&Tyrants, and after your review if you confirm that that’s it, I’ll read it!
@11: I liked Huma as well. And it was a nicely self-contained epic. (Kaz and Magius were also both awesome.) I think a few people here read Huma before Chronicles, and I wonder how that changed the experience. Part of the fun (to me) of Chronicles, was the way that the stuff in the past was just sort of… nodded to, and then ignored. Huma then made a nice prequel.
But if the reading order was different, and Chronicles are a ‘sequel’… Shrug. Weird.
I hate to be that person, but Dragons of Summer Flame didn’t get rid of the dragons, it got rid of the gods. The Dragons were still around and without the other gods, or the magic they manifested in the world to check them and Takhisis exhausted from stealing the planet and placing next to a planet of MONSTER DRAGONS, dragons ran rampant across Krynn
Kaz was my favorite character from the entire Dragonlance series. I found Raistlin’s story arc to be more epic, and fleshed out, but Kaz… he was it, and his axe “Honor’s Face” was awesome!
That being said, the single best book i read out of all the dragonlance novels was “Lord Toede” it was the first book I ever recall laughing out loud at. It was hilarious.
I’ve never been ashamed of reading and collecting those books, and never thought they were poorly done. They were a delight to me and I read them as an adolescent and they just worked for me. That being said, I don’t know if 18 to 22 years later I’d read them again. I wouldn’t want to tarnish all the wonderful memories I have of those books, and all the enjoyment I got from them.