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.]