Master of the Game

The Dragon Waiting

By John M. Ford

16 Nov, 2020

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10 comments

Support me with a Patreon monthly subscription! — 16 Nov, 2020

**Special Requests**

10 comments

John M. Ford’s 1983 The Dragon Waiting is a World-Fantasy-Award-winning standalone alternate-history fantasy.

Byzantium prevails! True, centuries ago a huge swath of western Europe slipped out of the imperial grasp. But the vampire-dominated empire is patient and it is again expanding westward, slowly and inexorably.

Interminable factional war between and within Italian city states makes Italy an attractive target for the Byzantines. Easy enough to exploit rivalries and orchestrate assassinations of such leaders as might effectively oppose them. The di Medici are obliterated and Florence falls with them.

Medici doctor Cynthia Ricci flees before she can be killed. Her flight takes her west, past the border between Byzantium-dominated Europe into English-ruled Europe. Safety is an illusion, however, because English Europe is high on Byzantium’s to-do list.

In the past, English kings were strong enough to hold a considerable chunk of what is now France. Now the English realm is divided between York and the remnants of Lancaster; civil war rages. This is opportunity for the Byzantines; they can help one side win, if that side is willing to ally with the empire. Poor odds that the resulting government would be independent and not mere a puppet of Byzantium, but ambitious men are very good at kidding themselves.

Standing between another Byzantine victory and English independence under Richard III are Cynthia and three unlikely allies:

Welsh mage Hywel Peredur,
Greek mercenary (and possibly the rightful heir to the Byzantine throne¹) Dimitrios Ducas,
and German engineer and vampire Gregory von Bayern.

~oOo~

I have not read this in decades. This time I was savvy enough to notice that while the grand outlines of history had been rearranged (Julian the Apostate prevented Christian takeover of the empire, which then prevented the rise of Islam, the Crusades, and the fall of Byzantium), the same great historical figures of our timeline appear on stage right on schedule. It might seem silly to complain about this aspect of the setting when I take magic and vampires perfectly in stride … but I’m a reviewer and I can complain if I want to².

(Also, as someone whose ancestors hail from Scotland and Ireland, I am not one hundred percent invested in the English cause.)

Ford loved to write dense narratives in which there are no infodumps whatsoever. Characters don’t say anything to each other that they wouldn’t say in the ordinary course of things. This can leave readers utterly at sea. Have no fear: whereas in 1983, when this was first published, readers were on their own, the readers of 2020 can consult this handy concordance as they read.

Even if the reader has little grasp of European history or Shakespeare or the Arthurian canon or any of the other sources on which Ford is riffing (and so cannot appreciate Ford’s allusions, inversions, and witty narrative games), this story still stands on its own. The characters at the heart of it are engaging enough one does not have to understand the minutiae of Ford’s reimagined Europe to care whether or not the characters survive their part in the unfolding drama.

The Dragon Waitingis available here (Amazon US), here (Amazon Canada), here (Amazon UK), here (Barnes & Noble), here (Book Depository), and here (Chapters-Indigo).

1: Except there isn’t even the smallest chance that he will ever realize the family ambition of retaking the throne. He’s definitely enough of a potential threat to warrant being sent to the frontier or perhaps murdered.

2: I wonder what happened to the Mongol Empire and the Black Death? A thriving Byzantine Empire seems like an irresistible target for the Mongols.

Comments

Graydon

The Mongol Empire required the confluence of a generation of good grass years and cohesive internal politics. Easy enough to arrange for the confluence not to happen in an alternate history. (Easy enough to arrange for the Mongols to go nowhere but China, too, if the grass years were not quite so good.)

Richard Hershberger

The appearance of great historical figures from our timeline in supposedly alternate histories, with or without fantasy elements, is pretty much a deal killer for me. It is lazy, smacks of the author nudging and winking at the reader (which I despise, with only very limited exceptions), and eliminates most of what I find interesting about alternate history, the exploration of how this alternate timeline plays out.

KeithRichard Hershberger

I can accept a gray area of up to a few hundred years post-change, depending on when the change took place and how physically distant it was. If something altered the Roman Empire in the 1st Century CE, then you could make an argument that it might take a while for there to be a significant knock-on effects in India or China that would cause changes in their history.

Robert CarnegieKeith

In an alternate timeline, political leaders may tend to appear on the hereditary principle, so that altered events would involve a lot of the same people anyway.

There are vampires in this alternate timeline, but then, how many vampires are in ours? Given that they are good at hushing it up. So is it so different?

On the other hand, human reproduction involves a swarm of spermatozoa with each their own distinct random selection of genes from the father, and if you get different genes, you get a different person, slightly at least. But they may have the same name.

KylinnRichard Hershberger

While I would normally agree about disliking alternate histories which still contain major figures or events from our timeline, much of the delight of The Dragon Waiting is in seeing how Ford plays with the same. It would have been quite possible to write a similar book without all the real world historical and literary allusions, but it would have been a much less rich work. In this case, I give the author a pass for the sheer delight of seeing how he weaves the real world and fantasy elements together.

Lydy NickersonRichard Hershberger

Ford is lot of things as a writer, but lazy is not one of them. In general, I agree with you that one of the frustrating things about alternate histories is how many of the people from our timeline populate the alternative. Its one of the reasons I don't particularly like the genre. But it is also part of the normal furniture of an alternate history, and Ford is playing an intricate game with the standard furniture of the genre.

Pamela Dean

After sitting attending yet another panel in which devoted alternate-history readers decried the use of actual historical characters in an alternate history, Mike Fordremarked to me, quite mildly, "That's why it's subtitled 'A Masque of History'."

Richard HershbergerPamela Dean

It sounds as if Ford recognizes the issue and isn't pretending the book is something it is not. OK, I'll give it a shot, and have just ordered it. It is the authors who make a great show of historical historicalosity who really annoy me. Yes, I am looking at you, S. M. Stirling!

Robert CarnegiePamela Dean

On TV, an alternate timeline usually has the same actors appearing, it's in the contract, but they may be given different jobs.

An exception up to a point is "Red Dwarf" with the appearance of "The Inquisitor – a self-repairing simulant who survived until the end of time, and is now time-travelling into the past to judge those who are worthless, remove them from existence, and replace with another who could have been conceived in their place" (Wikipedia). Because he's crazy, I think they said. He decides to remove two of the regular cast from the timeline and then hunt them to death, during which they meet their replacements. Who then also are removed from the timeline for the same reason, but I may have misunderstood that part.

At other times, they met alternate-universe selves who were female instead of male, and once found that the entire show was in an immersive game parlour and they were doing very badly when the game ended: they got to peek in on other players who were doing much better as the same game characters. Oh, and there's the U.S. remake, which didn't get past the pilot stage.

Mike McCarthy

Thanks James! I am reading this now.