Gentle reader, if you are of a delicate disposition… if you have any affection for the Dragonriders of Pern and don’t want it Ruined Forever, then I entreat you in the sternest possible way to not read beyond the jump. (While the following content is only NSFW in the mildest possible sense, it is poison to the brain.)

Some background, first, about the panel format. Each artist or team is issued a flip-chart and a selection of colored markers. An individual (either a participant or the moderator) is chosen to select a topic. The audience is prompted to shout topics, until the person doing the selection hears one he or she likes. The teams then have eight minutes to complete a picture based on the selected topic. A winner is chosen (by applause) from each round.  The person who suggested the topic receives the pictures.

While the drawing is in progress, audience heckling is mandatory.

Some of the topics this year included:

• Cthulhu eating pizza
• The Pink Panther on an acid trip
• Inappropriate superheroes (see Mr. Whitmore’s entry  for this round, via his Flickr feed)

Now, yr. humble narrator does like dragons. And, being a Rice alumnus, I’m fond of making fun of Texas A&M. The convention’s writer GoH was Todd McCaffrey (and the “ghost GoH”, Anne). And, it’s also possible I may have had a few adult beverages by that point in the evening’s proceedings. None of that excuses anything, but it may help explain what strange mental processes led me to shout “Dragonriders of College Station” at topic selection time.

It will remain forever a mystery to me why anybody else thought that was a good idea.

This is a thing that happened. (Art by J. Grant and Mel Hynes; image appears here with their kind permission.) Click thumbnail image for a larger version, should you want one.

This is another thing that also happened. (Art by Martin Whitmore; image appears here with his kind permission.) Once again, the thumbnail image is a link to a larger version.

My sincere thanks to the artists for the gift of their work, for putting up with my shenanigans, for being such good sports about the whole thing, and for agreeing (in the terrible, sober light of the following morning) to me posting it here.

(Oh, and by the way, despite threats to the contrary, I didn’t actually ask Todd to sign these. I don’t know him well enough to be sure he’d think it was funny, and he’s a nice guy whose feelings I’d hate to hurt. Remember what John Scalzi said about the failure mode of clever?)

Neil is the one on the left.

Happy Year of the Dragon to all. Neil Gaiman drew you a picture (click thumbnail to the right for a better view, or read about it on his blog).

If you hatch this year, you’re a Black Water Dragon — very auspicious indeed.

If you happen to like any linear combination of dragons and/or Art Nouveau, you should probably go see it. Treat it as a slide-show of visual wonders, occasionally interrupted by boring people talking.

I regard it as pretty absurd to talk about “spoilers” in the context of a work (ostensibly) based on a book that’s over fifty years old, and I don’t think I commit any. Nevertheless, here’s a cut:

I’m pretty sure things had gone badly off the rails when, during one meant-to-be-grim-and-suspenseful scene, a significant fraction of audience members involuntarily muttered “It’s… the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man.”

Aslan was kind of a dick in the first two movies, and has not somehow become less of one in the intervening time leading up to this one. (On this point, oddly enough, the movies are quite true to the books. I doubt that’s the allegorical point C.S. Lewis was trying to make, but it is inescapable when one approaches the work with a jaded and cynical — and non-Christian — eye.)

Speaking of allegory, isn’t the whole point of it to be figurative and symbolic, to have things standing in for other things? In short, isn’t allegory by nature meant to be at least slightly subtle? I can count at least three instances (one fairly lengthy) where people in the movie actually dropped character to proselytize at the audience. (Something the books, for all their minor flaws, never did.)

Many jokes were made in the car ride home concerning a series of children’s books written as an allegory for the Popol Vuh, where some whiny British kids fall through a magical laundry hamper into Xibalbá, and meet Vucub-Came (‘Seven Death’) who’s a talking jaguar or something.

Still and all, the movie is pretty as all get-out. The ship and the various mythical creatures are the real stars of the show, and get a fair amount of screen time. If the two stock images I’ve attached to this post do anything for you, it’s worth your while to check it out.

Comparing 2008 to 2009, we’ve seen catastrophic declines in castles, glowy magic and swords. Unicorns have seemingly disappeared, and even formerly sizable populations of elves, wolves and horses are in sharp decline.

Dragons, obviously made from sterner stuff, remain unscathed.

Context? Fantasy novel covers. This news courtesy of Orbit Books (via Making Light). Their handy comparison chart is reproduced to the right, but really: go read the original article. Sample quote: “The number of dragons on covers held steady this year. The dragon population seems to be in perfect balance – but we can’t tell if that’s because new dragons are being born to replace old ones, or if last year’s dragons are just really healthy.”

Update: from the same source, an insightful analysis of dragon coloration on said book covers. Once again, the original article is well worth the click-through. (PDF infographic linked via the image to the right.)

Not directly dragon-related but also from Orbit and amusing: fashion trends for fantasy heroines and tag cloud of title words.

Update: The thumbnail images now link to legible but quick-to-download bitmaps (which require no special software to view, and pose negligible security risk). If you want (local copies of) the original PDF sources, they are here:

• cover image trends (230KB PDF)
• dragon colors (3MB PDF)

[Updated 2010 Aug 23 by DGH to add link to dragon colors study.]

[Updated 2010 Aug 24 by DGH to make images link to bitmaps, and to add separate links to PDF documents.]

In brief, I’m removing all links to amazon.com from posts I’ve written here. Please read on after the jump if you’d care to know why.

In the past, when I’d posted about books or films or music, I’d often link to the product page on Amazon. This seemed like a relatively stable external resource with an image of the item, a summary of the contents, and at least something like open critical review. Plus, it gave people who want to buy what I’m posting about a convenient place to do that.

Recently, online retailer Amazon and publisher Macmillan got into a dispute over pricing of e-books. (The details are a bit inside-baseball and not really relevant. If you’re curious, there’s a good article on Making Light with plenty of links for further reading.)

What is relevant is that Amazon decided to disable the “buy” option for every item from all 41 Macmillan imprints.

I do in fact have some opinions about who is right and wrong in the dispute (executive summary: both parties are wrong and there’s plenty of blame to go around), and I also have some opinions about what outcome would best serve readers and authors.

These opinions are not why I’m removing the Amazon links. I’m doing so because Amazon’s behavior is seriously hurting individual authors. I’ve spent the past couple weekends at conventions, listening in person to actual working authors (who write the sort of books I like to read and want to see more of) telling me things like this [source]:

If my sales numbers dip, then down the road the publisher can and will either not buy a new book from me or offer a much lower advance than before. Doesn’t matter that the dip was clearly not my fault, bean counters look at numbers, not the causes behind their drop.

Amazon is hurting people I care about, and sabotaging writing I care about, as “collateral damage” in their negotiations with Macmillan. I’ve been contributing — in a tiny way — to this by giving them free advertising in this forum. That was wrong, and bad, and I’m doing what I can to correct it.

I know full well that the impact is insignificant, but that does not relieve me of the responsibility to at least stop being part of the problem.

Note that I’m posting as me, and not using MY ADMIN VOICE here. This is dhenke, as an individual contributor, making changes to my own posts. This is not site policy. Other contributors are free to link to Amazon and to have (and state on this site) whatever opinion on the matter their own consciences dictate.

[Edited 2010-02-10 by dhenke to add the following:]

Removing links to Amazon from my posts on SGS is a great symbolic gesture, but it isn’t likely to have much in the way of direct costs to Amazon. (By that I mean: Take the number of people who’d click on such a link and buy the item. Now subtract the number of such people who, if no such link were present, would seek out and buy the item on Amazon anyway. Did you get “zero”? Because I did.)

It does have a more subtle (but over time and large numbers of users, much more significant) effect: It reduces the Google page rank for Amazon’s listing of a product. Two of clubs? I shall explain:

Imagine Norma Peterson (nom de plume “Elektra Ravenfyre”) writes a book called Dragons of Wednesday Afternoon. Naturally, it is a staggering work of majestic brilliance, and hordes of people on the ‘net write (in various websites) megabytes upon megabytes of gushing reviews and screenplays and repulsive DoWA slash fiction.

Google-bot crawls all these places, and notes where they link. Some link to other fannish stuff, some to the author’s home page, and quite a lot link to the page on Amazon where you can buy the book. This is a gross over-simplification, but: If a whole lot of pages all over the place mention Dragons of Wednesday Afternoon and also contains links to Amazon, then a Google search for Dragons of Wednesday Afternoon will likely show Amazon as one of the top search results.

Position within Google search results is important (I’d argue) even if you happen to be Amazon.

Nobody asked, but if you’re wondering: SGS isn’t making me any money. I’m not getting any referrer credit from Amazon (and wasn’t, even before I pulled their links). Nor am I getting any from Google, nor anybody else. I have no plans to change this. Ask me again once I’m getting a million page views a day. While we’re at it, I’d like a unicorn.

Out of idle curiosity, I had a quick look. In calendar year 2009, I made 21 orders from Amazon totaling US$1319.45. (This includes items purchased for myself as well as gifts for others. It also includes items ordered through Amazon from their affiliates. The figure includes shipping charges and tax, if any.) I have no good way to quantify the gifts others bought for me through my Amazon wishlist (which I have just removed) — however, it is certainly non-zero.

I’m not saying I’m boycotting Amazon, or suggesting that you should. I have not deleted my Amazon account. I am saying that for now, they’re going to be my online retailer of last, rather than first, resort.

I’m also saying that if some of the things I’m doing on the Internet are driving traffic to Amazon, then the responsible thing for me to do is to stop doing those things.

What you may not know (comma Bob comma) is that it is now being re-released, on the web, a bit at a time, for free. More details after the jump.

Though (at the time of this writing) there are only a few pages available, it’s an easy and risk-free way for new readers to get a taste of this classic and under-appreciated work.

While the art may sometimes lack polish, Duncan & Mallory is so relentlessly charming that it scarcely matters. Perhaps I’m viewing it through the lens of twenty-plus years of nostalgia, but with seemingly everyone in fantasy and comics trying to out-do one another at being dark and edgy, it’s refreshing to see a story that never stoops to being cruel or vulgar.

Mallory, in particular, is an endangered species in modern fantasy: a genuinely likable character. He’s a swindler and a cheat, but operates from a profoundly kind and moral core (and does so without ever becoming preachy — you’d never see a Mallory in any of the products extruded by the Rat Company). Then again, maybe I’m biased when it comes to dragons. You know. Maybe.

While on the surface, the story and dialogue seem relatively simple, there’s a lot of storytelling meat on these bones. Mallory is The Trickster (which appears to be a favorite theme of Ms. White — see her current work Coyote for example). There’s subtle, sophisticated verbal and visual play with the ambiguous and transgressive qualities of the archetype, even while the actual text remains at the level of slapstick. (In this, Duncan & Mallory is no different than many of the more traditional Trickster legends.)

The original printed-on-paper version was filled with wonderful little details and in-jokes that, sadly, don’t really come through very well in the relatively low-res scans on the website. If it seems like the sort of thing that appeals to you at all, I’d strongly recommend buying the dead trees.

On the other hand, the web version does include some commentary from co-author Mel White (the anthropologist one, not James Melville White; you’ll find the latter if you JFGI) that explains some of the process and the jokes. Pro tip: hover your pointer over the page image for xkcd-style mouseover text. It makes a great companion to the print version.

Three volumes have thus far appeared in print: Duncan & Mallory, Duncan & Mallory: The Bar None Ranch and Duncan & Mallory: The Raiders. Thus far? Yes. For in an SGS exclusive[1], I can now reveal that a fourth Duncan and Mallory story is in the works. This comes from no lesser authority than Ms. White herself, who was kind enough to talk about it for a few minutes at AggieCon 41. Apparently it was planned and outlined with Mr. Asprin, back in the day, and now awaits only Ms. White completing her thesis and having sufficient free time.

This probably represents the longest hiatus between released works in a series, ever, that does not in some way involve Valve Software.

Waiting, bated breath, etc.

[1]– Totally not an SGS exclusive. Everybody but me has probably known this for years.

[Edited 2010-02-10 by dhenke to remove Amazon links. See explanatory post.]

I don’t expect to win; there are a lot of strong entries, some of which I’d choose over mine, were I judging. (I deliberately didn’t read any of them before I composed my submission. Good thing, or I’d probably never have started.)

Read the full text of my story after the jump.

Update: The winner and runner-up have been announced. Congratulations to them, and to the surprisingly large number of other worthy submissions. Thanks to Rob Beschizza and to BoingBoing for running the contest. (Older updates moved to the end of the article.)

“You already told me it wasn’t a micrometeorite, midshipman.”

“Lab says metallic structure — could be artificial — with bacterial DNA inside.”

“They say every pebble ‘could be artificial’, Jenkins. Covering their bums. Bacteria’s nothing new. Anything else?”

“Afraid so, sir. The DNA encodes a signal. They’re calling for investigation under general order four.”

“Let me guess, sixteen consecutive digits of pi, starting a million digits in?”

” ‘I Love Lucy’.”

“Jenkins?”

“A twentieth-century teleplay, sir.”

“Seriously?”

“There’s more sir. It’s no episode we ever transmitted. It’s… new.”

“First contact is fan fiction?”

Update: The winner will allegedly be announced on Tuesday, 15 December.

Update: Finalists announced. (I’m not one.)

Update: The apparent winner is user femaletrouble3. Congratulations to ditto, to sanborn (my fave) and all involved.

Return of the King, 1st US Edition Cover

Did you hear the one about the Aggie who had a truly first-class library of science fiction and fantasy?

The denizens of Texas A&M University take a lot of stick, some fraction of which they may perhaps deserve. As I’m a Rice alumnus, you may believe me when I say I’ve heard (and repeated) my share of the dreadful jokes.

But this post is about one of the places where not only have the Aggies excelled, but have done so within the realm of unqualified, unabashed flat-out geekishness — one of my personal favorite sorts of excellence, and one I deeply admire.

During Aggiecon 39, I managed — through a chain of serendipity and in spite of my own complacency — to get invited on a small tour of the science fiction and fantasy research collection at the Cushing Memorial Library and Archives. I went in assuming it would be an amusing way to pass a couple of otherwise idle hours.

It was one of the highlights of the con.

I’m not a library sciences geek; I’m sure I don’t know the first thing about what to look for, nor the right words to describe it. But the quality of the holdings, the careful curatorship and above all the genuine enthusiasm of the staff for the collection in their care were hard for even a layman to miss.

I told you all of that so I’d have an excuse to show you my pictures of the cover for the 1st US edition hardback Return of the King from their collection.

There have been a hell of a lot of different editions of the six-books-bound-in-three-volumes-not-a-trilogy. Enough, in fact, that another altogether separate book has been written to enumerate them. Books have covers, and the history of the War of the Ring in particular offers no end of situations that beg for visual illustration.

Update: There are a number of online galleries of covers, worth visiting but sadly incomplete. (Links to counterexamples would be welcome indeed.)

The covers illustrations run the gamut from tasteful to lurid to psychedelic to extremely minimalist to downright baffling. For the most part, they avoid the worst sins of modern mass-market fantasy cover art.

But this? Right here?

This is how you do a book cover.

I’m not saying that because I love the dragon. That’s a lie, of course. But I’m not saying it just because I love the dragon. The cover, taken as a whole, is extremely effective — it makes me want to re-read this story I know by heart, right now. Just looking at a digital picture of the book on a computer screen makes me want to hold it in my hands, smell the paper and wallow in the physicality of it as much as in the actual words.

detail: 1st US edition Return of the King cover

There are some great modern artistic interpretations of Tolkien. I’m partial to John Howe, myself. But somehow these simple line drawings (and the author’s own, for example in Farmer Giles) evoke some echo of the aesthetic of the text that all the sweeping vistas and photorealism in the world seem to somehow always miss. They speak of some sort of Anglo-Saxon dreamtime, rich with things unstated but implied: a body of myth like an iceberg, nine-tenths of it hidden.

Maybe it’s just me, but there’s also something about this illustration that makes it very easy to imagine it being a picture created by someone within the fictional world of the stories, a genuine artifact of the fictional world.

Plus, it is a tremendously appealing dragon:

[Edited 2009-09-15 by dhenke to add links to online cover art galleries.]

[Edited 2009-09-16 by dhenke to add link to JRRT's other artwork.]

[Edited 2010-02-10 by dhenke to remove Amazon links. See explanatory post.]

Heavy Words, Lightly Thrown: The Reason Behind the Rhyme by Chris Roberts.

Each chapter starts with a bit of nursery rhyme, then describes — in a very conversational way — possible meanings, origins and interpretations. Though the subject matter may seem of interest only to those who believe literature to have user-serviceable parts inside, this book strives to entertain, even when it means stepping away from academic rigor.

The subject matter leaps from political intrigue to sexual innuendo to the dense web of literary reference, but the narrative remains interesting and informative throughout. It taught this jaded bibliophile a few new things, and dispelled as myths a few things I’d previously assumed to be true.

I found the English-to-American glossary in the back to be unnecessary and perhaps a little condescending, though I have my suspicions this was the idea of the publisher rather than the author.

[Edited 2010-02-10 by dhenke to remove Amazon links. See explanatory post.]