The DragonLance series by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman have been dear to me since childhood. Not only are they my favorite fantasy novels; indeed, I count them along with the books of Moses and Jeremiah and the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche as my favorite literature at all, and I have re-read them even more times than those great works. I read the Chronicles and Legends to my own children during the long Winter Night of the pandemic. Anyone not familiar with the books I would urge to read those, starting with Dragons of Autumn Twilight.
I had recently requested of Gilean that he put the Chronicles trilogy on hold for me at my local library, and was just finishing Dragons of Spring Dawning to return it, perusing the New Arrivals section of the library in case there was anything good, which there generally isn’t, as the greatest books are old and printed long before I was born and half the pleasure of reading them is the smell and the coarse yellowed pages, although once in a while there’s a good presidential biography—
Anyway, the Three Moons must have been aligned, because just as I was ready to step out of the world of Krynn and put those childhood memories back on the shelf I stumbled upon Dragons of Deceit, the latest entry in the series, just come out this summer and the first book in a promising new trilogy.
Even if you are new to the adventures of the Heroes of the Lance, this would be an entertaining read. The book opens with brand new characters while touching upon the social realities of this fictional world, specifically its chivalric aristocracy, with the casual realism of Oliver Pötzsch’s historical fiction: in fact, it put me in mind of The Castle of Kings, with its focus on politics and intrigue, still such timely subjects in our own day, as well as the centrality of a young, independent yet devoted female character, the lady of the castle.
Destina Rosethorn is a captivating new character who will draw in readers new and old to her very human travails and foibles. It might seem timely that the main character is a woman of color; however, the more I return to the original books, the more I realize how ahead of their time they were in the 80’s, with central and very nuanced female characters cast as heroes and villains, lovers and temptresses, haughty and humble—and the ways in which they dealt with race and culture, symbolically yet realistically, through the various ‘races’ of Krynn (dwarves, elves, humans, gnomes, and their perennially endearing version of halflings, the irrepressible kender) and the different tribes, nations, and vocations of these peoples.
Back to Destina. Without revealing the entire plot, this young woman, the teenage daughter of a knight of Solamnia and a Black woman from the isles of Ergoth who believes in the ancient gods of nature in a world of cynical agnosticism much like our own, undergoes a series of losses, triumphs, and reverses as she attempts to maintain her family castle and defend their legacy. As she comes of age, facing a marriage of convenience, discovering her awakening feelings for other men in the wider world, and transforming her naïve girlish pride into battle-tested courage, her spoiled optimism into cold deceit and manipulation to save her beloved father and restore her family’s fortune, her very human situation is spiced up with garrulous dragons, mysterious wizards, and crafty dwarves.
DragonLance fans will particularly love the depiction of Thorbardin, the mountain kingdom of the dwarves. A god or two may also make a cameo, but it’s really the third part of the book that makes our eyes tear up, with its return to the Inn of the Last Home, where it all started, so many years ago—so much has changed, on Krynn and here on Earth; in the lives of the characters we’ve come to love and in the lives of us readers during those moments when we actually put the book down and work and play and form relationships and part with loved ones and bring a new generation of readers into the world, teaching these future heroes to always be wary of Takhisis, for evil can never be banished forever, yet also showing how the world is only maintained through balance of opposites.
So much has changed, yet some things remain the same; the Inn of the Last Home will always be a cozy place to stay when we are weary along our journey. I can smell Otik’s famous spiced potatoes now.
As Destina goes through these changes in her quest, our feelings for her can’t help but change. The most effective female characters in fiction are those who cause us to constantly adjust our assessment of them, vacillating between admiration, sympathy, and disrepute. The rôle of women in literature has evolved from the charmingly innocent and devout ladies of Puritan New England and the scheming villainesses of Shakespeare to complex, believable and living characters eliciting corresponding complex reactions, and while this has been going on for quite some time as women have become more prominent as authors, probably the first esteemed profession in which they were thus distinguished, I would like to go out on a vallenwood limb and say that Margaret Weis has made an important contribution to that tradition, especially now that so many women are embracing, and embraced by, the world of fantasy gaming and literature.
I digress. Before I go telling you about that time I met the wooly mammoth, let this aesthetic get back to his diligent task of piquing your interest in this exciting new adventure. The book is filled with surprise twists and turns in storytelling that flows seamlessly, uninterrupted by pretentious literary posturing, yet is full of depth and nuance nonetheless. Perhaps the most inventive and unexpected episode is the most hilarious wedding scene since Mozart was writing opera, but I’ll say no more than that. Another thing about DragonLance is the way these books use magic and theology to approach philosophical questions. As in drama, the characters and races all present their own perspective and worldview, but it goes deeper than this. Of course, the focus of the story is the idea of going back in time and altering our reality, and whether this may have unintended consequences, and by implication whether our own world is fashioned by intelligent design or unavoidably permeated by chaos. But really, the whole purpose of the Device of Time Journeying is to give us an excuse to revisit those Legends, those Chronicles, those seasons of dragons we have come to love so dearly. We all remember where we were the first time a grumpy old dwarf sat down on a rock to whittle and smell the home fires of Solace.
“No road is ever old.”
—Kender saying
