The Blood of a Dragon
Actually, this is fantasy, but it's going back on the stack. So that's the icon I'm giving it. I'm afraid it didn't keep my attention.
- Author: Lawrence Watt-Evans
- Publisher: Del-Rey (Ballantine)
- Published: 1991
- Place: New York
- Pages: 231
I hereby vow to also enter the books I don't finish reading in Fading Memories. So, if I pick up the book from the stack, I can see whether my opinion has changed at all.
I remember I've tried reading this book before; when I noticed Lawrence Watt-Evans posting on the rec.arts.sf.composition newsgroup that I frequent, too. And what he has to say about writing is quite often very interesting (for Usenet values of interesting, of course).
And when I saw that he's been working on an imaginary world (Etshar) since he was sixteen years old, I was doubly interested. I have one of those worlds (Andal), too. And I'm writing novels in that setting, too. And I've used my world a game setting, too. The main difference is that I had been working on the world for years before I even knew role-playing games existed.
It's a pity therefore that the book couldn't grip me. It's a nice world, thoroughly worked out, but so very D&D-ish, or perhaps more Runequestish. I've got nothing against an iso-standard pseudo-medieval-europe world, with the regulation kinds of magic and the regulation guilds.
But if you throw in a boy who makes good through ambition despite a negative ability to work magic, I start to skim. After all, little chance of finding anything, is there? The setting is already known, the characters look very familiar, too, and the familiar dance can begin. Dragons, too. And dragons blood as a magical ingredient. In the end, even the twists are familiar — perhaps a function of this book being over a decade old. Fantasy (and science fiction) doesn't age well. More beaujolais primeur than vintage port.
I skipped to the end, I'm ashamed to say, and then put the book back on the shelves. One of these days I will come back to it, to investigate whether there are surprises in the middle part of the book, but now I'm going to finish the Death in Springtime, another Magdalen Nabb which I found in a second-hand bookshop yesterday.
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