Dragonlance is back in the news (and not for great reasons) now and it got me thinking about the original trilogy. I thought maybe in this Covid time I would return to Krynn and see how well my memory of it holds up.
There is an old saying, "The Golden Age of Sci-Fi/Fantasy is 14." That rings truest for me here since I was 15 when Dragons of Autumn Twilight was released in November 1984. I devoured these books back then. I had been on a steady diet of Tolkien and Moorcock and others that I thought of as "near-D&D", since these books actually had real D&D terms and spells in them they had to be better, right. RIGHT?
Well...even then I could still "hear dice being rolled in the background" as it were.
I'll be blunt. The books are not great and a lot of my fondness for them has more to do with the time in which I read them and nostalgia. This was never brought into sharper focus than when I tried to reread them about 12 years ago. The icing on the cake was the terrible direct to video movie of Dragonlance: Dragons of Autumn Twilight.
I like Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman. They are very good people. I like their adventures. Ravenloft by Tracy is one of my all-time favorites. The Legends Trilogy is good as far as my memory goes. So I am rereading this again with a more open frame of mind.
Instead of complaining about these stories for what they are not, I am going to enjoy them for what they are. I am not sure if I'll post much about them here. Covid-19 is doing a number on the Universities and I have never been busier, so my free time to read is limited to a couple of minutes over lunch. But if something comes up then yeah, I'll share.
I can say this, I am three chapters in and I am enjoying what I am reading. There is heart here and that is something some other books seem to lack.
I think I also have that same compilation, also signed by them both at a GenCon a while back. Not award-winning literature by any means, but still fun to read.
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