The Dragon Book
Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois, editors
Ace
Fiction, Anthology/Fantasy
**+
DESCRIPTION: Fierce, proud, magical, majestic... Few fantastic creatures have infiltrated the human imagination like the dragon. This short story collection contains 19 tales from some of the top names in fantasy and science fiction literature today.
REVIEW: After finishing this book, I started wondering if, perhaps, my problem with anthologies isn't with the stories, but with me. Maybe I don't understand what a
short story is. I always thought that a short story was a condensed tale, either taking place in a very short time or simply distilled into its purest form, without the subplots
or scenery or false starts or deadweight characters that populate longer works. After reading this collection, each one written by a best-selling author who presumably knows
more about writing and stories than I could begin to comprehend, I've been forced to conclude that I was mistaken. Apparently, most short stories are about unlikable characters
doing unlikable and uninteresting things which only rarely advance whatever passes for a plot, only to end with either a non-event or an out-of-the-blue twist that feels like it
was spliced in from another work of fiction. "Short" also apparently can be expanded to cover forty or more pages worth of this aforementioned meandering prose.
Anyone who has read my reviews knows that I have notoriously bad luck with short stories; Bruce Coville, who seems to rely more on story integrity than celebrity name-dropping,
seems to be the only safe bet, in my experience. But I've read and enjoyed books by several authors included here, such as Naomi "Temeraire" Novik, Jonathan "Bartimaeus" Stroud,
and Tad "Shadowmarch" Williams. (It was also at Half Price Books for a very good price.) So, I figured I'd make an exception to my standard No-Anthologies-Edited-By-Anyone-But
-Bruce-Coville rule. Sadly, the stories by two of my favorite authors, had I read them alone, would've turned me off of their larger, better books completely: Williams gets too
clever for his own good with malaprops and other English language maulings in "A Stark and Wormy Knight," while Novik's "Vici" - about the beginning of the dragon-human bonding
that forms the heart of her alternate-universe series - lacks the character depth and sense of historic realism that I so love about the Temeraire books. Out of the whole book,
I only enjoyed maybe three or four of the stories (including the one submitted by Bruce Coville.) The rest varied between pointless and boring, lacking sympathetic characters or
situations I gave a rat's tail about, and often relegating the titular dragons to bit parts. Once again, this seems to be a case of editors (or, I suppose, publishers)
collecting Big Names to drop rather than good stories. Lesson learned the hard way... again...
You might also enjoy:
Bruce Coville's themed anthologies (Bruce Coville, editor, YA Fiction - Short stories collected by the author)
We Three Dragons (Bill Fawcett, editor, Fiction - Three holiday-themed dragon stories)
Dragons: The Greatest Stories (Martin H. Greenberg, editor, Fiction - Short stories of dragons great and small)
The Temeraire series (Naomi Novik, Fiction - Alternate-history Napoleonic wars are fought with sapient dragons as living airships)
Dragons - Truth, Myth, and Legend (David Passes, YA Nonfiction - Dragon lore)
The Bartimaeus books (Jonathan Stroud, YA Fiction - Enslaved spirits provide the power for an alternate modern London ruled by magicians)
The Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn trilogy (Tad Williams, Fiction - A daydreaming scullion boy becomes part of a quest to save his world from an undead enemy)
The Shadowmarch series (Tad Williams, Fiction - The royal Eddon twins stand between the divided world of Men and the inhuman Qar)
Here, There be Dragons (Jane Yolen, YA Fiction - A collection of Yolen's dragon stories)
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