So in the early hours of this morning I ended up feeding my baby to the sound of an interview with Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, the most bestselling duo of fantasy authors of all time.

It was odd.

Not the interview itself, which was kind of awesome. It was really fascinating to hear about how the mega publishing sensation that was the Dragonlance books came into being, and to listen to these two people who have had such a close working relationship for 25 years – how an editor and a game designer became bestselling novelists.

But what was odd was that I sat there, snuggled under my doona with my baby, and I started feeling all warm and fuzzy and nostalgic… about Dragonlance.

I discovered fantasy with a capital F when I was thirteen (well technically I had it thrust upon me by my peers, who know who they are) and from then until I was seventeen and the cringe set in, I consumed fantasy voraciously, and almost indiscriminately.

I say almost, because there were some I loved more than others. It had nothing to do with writing quality, though, and everything to do with personal taste. For instance, I was bored rigid by Raymond E Feist (apparently when you’re a teenager this is some sort of crime) and couldn’t get into a single Janny Wurts title, but loved the Empire novels they wrote together. I adored David Eddings and Jennifer Roberson, but couldn’t face Stephen Donaldson, and gave up after book 3 of Robert Jordan. I adored Anne McCaffrey’s space opera romances but never got around to reading her dragon books. (Hell, I loved Star Trek Next Gen novels but didn’t like the tv series much, I’m complicated, okay?) I struggled through Lord of the Rings, finding it tedious and lacking in female characters, and when  godiyeva found out I hadn’t read the Hobbit and stole my copy of LOTR until I had done things properly (she was a very judgemental teenager) I gladly accepted the excuse to stop bothering.

I loved Dragonlance. I had forgotten how much.

Once I hit 17 the combination of a sheer overwhelmth (it’s a word!) of bog-standard fantasy and an over-exposure to Terry Pratchett and other making-fun-of-fantasy-traditions-type-books, I turned into a pure fantasy snob. The swallow-without-chewing fantasy loves of my early teen years were heartlessly discarded and goodness, books written as game spin offs? Couldn’t possibly be any good!

But in those glory years when I did not know that Dragonlance was a gaming tie-in, or that it was generally regarded as having pinched a lot of stuff from Tolkien, I just plain loved the books, the characters, the stories, and I read many of them. And last night, in my sleep-deprived haze of Adventures in SciFi Publishing, and the enthusiastic conversation that seemed very much to be of the opinion that the Dragonlance Chronicles were awesome, it occurred to me to wonder if maybe they actually were awesome.

Sure, there were pointy eared elves in there, but I seem to remember some pretty interesting elf politics too, that were a lot more realistic and well politicky than Tolkien’s elves, which mostly just floated around making grim pronouncements and looking good in green.

The plot was kind of crappy and forgettable, but plot is not really what we go to fantasy for. There was colour and magic and stabby weapons, hoorah!

There were a lot of taverns, but hey, they were long books by the standards of the day, we all needed a fictional drink or two to get through them.

Half the characters were deeply annoying… but then there was Raistlin, an anti-hero who was rude to all the more heroic types and not all that attractive and had such a devastating brain…

And there were female characters by the bucketload, and maybe they did mostly divide into wenches and princesses, but they were there, and doing things other than languishing in castles, and there was Kitiara, really, I can forgive a lot for a book series that provided Kitiara, the good-girl-turned-bad, the general of the troops, with her short curly hair and her boot fetish.

There was romance, and there was sex, and there was angst, and there was slapstick. I even liked the cheeky little kender with their ‘oh in our culture it’s not stealing it’s just normal behaviour’ sociopathy. Tthere were dragons, and there was battered armour, there was backstory by the metric ton and banter, oh yes, there was banter. (the kind of banter that sounds cool and funny because it’s the first time you’ve heard all those phrases…)

Oh dear. The nostalgia’s really set in now. I haven’t had such fond Dragonlancey thoughts since the time at that con when Zara B and I spent like 3 hours at the ASIM table happily casting the Dragonlance movie in our head.

I’m starting to suspect that the only way to make the shiny-in-retrospect go away is to actually re-read the damn things.

…

No, I think not, somehow. Nostalgia is so cuddly and warm through those distance lenses. Let’s keep it that way.

Tags: dragonlance, fantasy, listening, nostalgia, podcasts, reading, true confessions