cahn

From hamsterwoman: tabacoychanel is hosting a Dragon Waiting read here :D

...which means that it is NOW IN PRINT, in case you are like me and 2020 kind of... meant you weren't paying attention. YAY!

I am super excited about this!

Warning that it is VERY allusive and rather opaque if you don't know a LOT about Richard III and the Wars of the Roses (I think if you do know a lot about it, it is less opaque, but... this is not my demographic, or at least wasn't the first n times I read it). If that doesn't sound like your cup of tea, this is likely not for you. If you like trying to puzzle out what the heck is going on, though, and like wacky and historically-informed AU's played straight (vampires treated as part of the natural world order and resulting in Christianity being relegated to a minor sect!) this may be for you!

I didn't forget!
Tangentially, I realized there is no way I can do this during Yuletide season. I'll pick this up again in January. Anyone have any thoughts on what book they'd like me to do?

OK... let's see whether I can make any sense of this. This is where the book gets even more tangled than it was before. Knowing a bit of history, and knowing that the whole point of some (all?) of these subplots is to riff off of our universe's history, really helps. Again here is the link to Draco Concordans (DC), which elucidates a lot of this history.
( Cut for length. )

September JMF reread is The Dragon Waiting. I consider TDW to be the most complex and rich of John M. Ford's books; it's trying to do all kinds of things, historically and otherwise. Because there is so much going on in it, it has become clear to me that I have to split this into several posts. In this post I will talk about what I think several of the general themes are, and in subsequent posts I will address specific questions and thoughts I have about specific parts of the text. Right now I think I will do one post for Ch 1-8 (which are relatively easier to follow) and another post for Ch 9-13.

First note: This is the first time I have read TDW closely following Andrew Plotkin's Draco Concordans at the same time, which I highly highly recommend as it made sense of quite a few things I hadn't quite been able to parse, and pointed out some of Ford's jokes that I hadn't even realized were there. (I also disagree with or have additional commentary about some of his points, which will go in the later posts.) Andrew Plotkin, you are a hero.

Second note: there will be general spoilers in this post, though this book is one of those where the fun is in seeing how things are done rather than what happens, so I don't think most of them will actually really spoil the book for a new reader. The one exception is the "Chapter" one-sentence synopses, which I've put under a separate cut.

On the most surface level, JMF is writing an AU about Richard III in which (spoiler) the AU plots a path for Richard to live at the end; and in addition the text is very concerned with making sense of the whole Problem of Richard III and finding a narrative (sometimes meaning total AU, as in what happens to the Princes) in which Richard can be someone whose motivations are understandable by and sympathetic to a late-twentieth-century audience. This is something that I understand a lot better now, as a result of watching a lot of operas/musicals and trying very hard to make sense of their nonsensical plots :P No, seriously, history is clearly much less well documented and full of odd personalities than one might ideally like for good storytelling, and I feel like in real life / history, often the reasons that something happens are "everyone involved was being STUPID" and that doesn't make for a good narrative, so Ford is basically, well, taking history and making a novel-with-a-properly-hanging-together-plot-and-characters out of it by way of AU.

That AU, though! The AU, as JMF makes clear in the afterword, is one where Julian the Apostate (in our universe) / Julian the Wise (in AU) brought back paganism. Additionally, the Emperor Justinian made Byzantium into a world power by virtue of becoming vampire after the time at which he died in our universe. (Why yes: this AU has magic and vampirism.)

On an overall plot level, JMF is writing about how four (author-created) characters keep this evil Byzantium from taking over England -- by way of, in fact, having Richard III survive and win the Battle of Bosworth Field. It took me a rather embarrassing number of reads to actually understand that very simple plot, although in this reading I noticed that it is carefully set up explicitly in the first several chapters, I'm just a terribly non-detail-oriented reader.

On a more granular plot level -- well, the plot actually does advance in a granular fashion. There are conspiracies and plots like a little self-contained mystery each chapter or two, all of which feed into either character development or the larger Byzantium-antiByzantium plot, or both.

I'll talk about these more when I do the more in-depth posts, but just briefly: ( Spoilers here. )

Another thing which I haven't seen elsewhere (or in Draco Concordans) is that JMF is also clearly riffing off Charles Williams' conception of Byzantium, which forms an epigraph to the book. So: JMF had read Charles Williams' totally wacko and awesome Arthurian poetry. (*) (BTW, this poetry is now in public domain in Canada. I am just saying.) Charles Williams was an Inkling, and one of the wacko and awesome things about his Arthurian poetry is that it is totally chock full of Christian-religious symbolism (one of the things I adore about it). I could go on about this all day, but suffice it to say for these purposes that the Empire of Byzantium, in Williams' poetry, is analogous to the City/Empire of God/Christ, the highest good. So what does JMF do? He borrows the Byzantine Empire and makes it the Big Bad Evil in an AU where Christianity is relegated to a minor subsect of Judaism. Well played, sir.

landingtree referred in a post to a certain tendency to male gaze in Ford's work (not that there's a lot of discussion of breasts or anything, but there is a certain male POV that sometimes can relegate female characters to little more than love interests / plot points), and I do think that can be a thing (and when we get to Web of Angels, let's discuss fridging in a big way, wheeeee) but this book is the one where I feel he is working against that, and male gaze exists at least partially to be pushed back upon by the female characters. There are still a lot of guys in this book, but Cynthia as one of the four main characters is awesome (interestingly, women in Byzantium!AU seem to be at least incrementally more equal -- almost no one gives Cynthia any crap for being a doctor, though part of that is that her family is famous for doctoring), and there are enough female characters that I am happy with all the roles they're filling. This book passes Bechdel easily, which is not something I can say for... most... of his books. (Growing Up Weightless, and I guess that Liavek story where they're putting on a play, because both of those have ensemble scenes. But everything else I'm coming up blank, although we'll see once I reread. Pretty sure Final Reflection doesn't.)

Also, random thing about this reread: I liked Gregory a lot, even more than on previous readings. Poor Gregory :P

There are probably a whole bunch of other things he's doing that I don't yet know, and other things I've noticed but am forgetting to talk about :P

(*) Which I have now also read literally because Williams shows up as an epigraph in this book and I'm pretty sure in one other of Ford's books (though I don't remember which one) (**). So when K and I were in that bookstore during college and she picked up the Arthurian Torso from the used book shelf and said, "Hey, this has notes by C.S. Lewis, are you interested?" I said, "OMG IT'S CHARLES WILLIAMS! YES. YES I AM."

(**) A list of things I have read because of TDW:
-Charles Williams, most of his work
-A Short History of Byzantium (John Julius Norwich)
-The Daughter of Time (Josephine Tey)
-The Princes in the Tower (Alison Weir) (Weir clearly Does Not Approve of Daughter of Time, lol)

4/5, with the huge caveat that there is a whole lot of nostalgia working in this book's favor, for me. It was one of the first Trek novels I ever read, and the first Ford I ever read, and the copy I have is the original old library copy I first read (which eventually turned up in the library book sale). Ford is, of course, an acquired taste, and one I can't necessarily recommend unless you're a huge fan of piecing together a complex, often-inadequately-signposted plot, lots of allusions (in this one there are at least three SFF book allusions, not to mention all the Trek allusions. Speaking of which, I assume he's talking about Forever War? Should I read that?), and having to reread to catch all the bits one missed the first time, and his insistence on breaking boundaries (his two Trek novels were a) a worldbuilding Klingon novel where the Enterprise crew show up in the prologue, the epilogue, and a cameo by kid!Spock and McCoy's diapers, and b) a musical). This is all, of course, complete catnip for me!

So, anyway. Here we go. As usual for a Ford book, the entire first two-thirds are character and worldbuilding setup for what happens in the last third; the last third is the plot-heavy bit but is heavily dependent on the character and worldbuilding of the first two thirds. ( Here is where I try to work out what's actually going on; this may be boring if you don't know the story, plus obviously massive spoilers. I think I actually understand most of the plot now, but there are fundamental bits I am still unsure of. )