The Dragon Waiting, by John M. Ford

[mrissa]

Review copy provided by the publisher.

Dear Mike,

I miss you. There are signs of life in the atmosphere of Venus, the American West is on fire, and the world in general is in a state that would have gotten us at least four of your poems, maybe more. I don't expect you could have fixed any of it, but it'd still be better to face it with you.

But we have your stuff. We have that. So I read The Dragon Waiting for the fourth time this week, in its new edition. Scott Lynch wrote a lovely introduction for it, and I had to go off and cry and swear like four times while reading it, because Scott didn't get to know you, he's very clear about that in the introduction, and he's just the very tip of the amazing ship-shattering iceberg of people who should have gotten to know you. But he has The Dragon Waiting. Not the same as getting to talk to you about EMT/firefighter geekery or caper stories or whatever it is that you'd know in common that I don't even know yet, but it sure isn't nothing.

In some ways your books are where I left them, Mike. There are bits that I always remember, and I've never found them to pale on rereads. The parts I love, the horrible moment of the doctor realizing about the young prince, or the scene where [spoiler] is deliberately horrible to [spoiler] for strategic reasons, or the way that it all unfolds by implication--they're all still there.

But they also change on the rereads. There are always things that hit me harder later. The line about how if Dimi's father could die, so could any god: my dad was alive the last time I read that, so it was a softer blow, more bearable. But also I think of you when I read that, though you were neither father nor god to me. If Mike could die so could any friend. If Mike could die so could any mentor. If Mike could die so could any artist. You left us so many of the things we'd need in your absence, but friend, you never intended that they should sit easy, and they don't.

The things you did with this different world were more graceful, more compact, more allusive than--my God, you wrote this in 1983. 1983. Some of it might look a little less astonishing now that other people have come along and said, hey, yeah, I think I'll do that too, but it's like our friend's kid saying Hamlet was a lot of common quotes strung together. You were there first and best. Your Byzantium, your Margaret of Anjou, your Lord Rivers, the things you think to do that other people still don't think of...backwards, on schees.

It's September, which makes it 14 years since we lost you. That math is very hard to understand. And now there's this new edition, so instead of scouring used bookstores we can just...tell people to pick up a copy. Just casual-like. At their favorite bookstore, if they can go there in this plague; online if not. It's such a relief, Mike. We're doing the best we can, but a new copy of The Dragon Waiting sure doesn't make anything harder. I've written you a whole series of Nature stories, Jo's got Richard and Savonarola and Ficino in Lent, so many others, we haven't stopped wanting to talk to you. It's just that now it's going to be easier to ask more people into the conversation.

Thanks. For all of it.
Marissa

Comments

[rezendi]

❤️

[jbru]

For a while, I would check the shelves if I happened into a used book store for any of Mike's books. I'd buy them on the theory that *someone* would need a copy and that someone usually turned up sooner or later. I'm glad I (and I'm sure others) don't have to be that vector any more. But we are all poorer without more Mike.

[mrissa]

Last Christmas two of my favorite people each got a copy of a Mike Star Trek novel because they were available at the library book sale for a quarter each.

A QUARTER.

So yeah, I also do the used bookstore thing.

[matt_doyle]

Of all the people in the world who I don't know, and yet miss, Mike occupies a category previously reserved for my Grampa Leonard and David Bowie.

Like my grandfather (who died of his third heart attack in his fifties - his second was in the theater watching a Marx Brothers movie, and he was laughing too hard to let anyone know for more than five minutes - a story I am told he related with great aplomb and joviality), he's someone whose presence, words, and influence suffuse and surround me in ways which are very visible. He's a part of conversations, a part of relationships. Never having met him I can still describe, in vague terms, the sorts of interactions I would have had with him - I don't know how he would respond, but I have thought about the questions I'd ask, the jokes I'd make, the things I would want to discuss.

Like David Bowie, it's a parasocial relationship. Maybe it wouldn't have been if we'd met, but this feeling of familiarity is, for obvious reasons, not reciprocal. But my relationship with his work, unlike my relationship with those who knew him, is one-sided in the way a relationship with art usually is. But while I intend to read at least one or two new Mike Ford books a year, I want to pace myself - the way I haven't yet listened to Blackstar - because I want there to be more out there that's new and that I can experience for the first time, to keep some of that freshness for times I need it.

Anyway. I only just read the Dragon Waiting in January 2019, I think, it being one of my Christmas gifts to myself, along with How Much For Just The Planet, which I think was the Christmas before. I love alternate histories, and I love secret histories, and I love the...

The way the interplay of larger political forces is focused and realized through the tension of personal relationships and the lens of individual perspectives. I've been thinking about an alternate history of the Napoleonic Wars lately, thanks largely to Patrick O'Brien, but it's The Dragon Waiting that I keep coming back to when I think about telling details and the shape of those changes.

Thank you for being one of the people who introduced me to the man behind the curtain.

[mrissa]

Thanks for listening when we did.

[pameladean]

I'm not sure this ever got a tune or a performance and I don't think it's been published either, but Mike wrote a song with this as the end of the chorus:

Everybody's saying that the kid's insane,
Doing ninety miles an hour in the breakdown lane.

That's what I think of so often when I read anything of his.

P.

[mrissa]

His self-description was sure a thing sometimes.

[jazzfish]

Bits of it are on the radio at the very beginning of The Last Hot Time. If there's more I'd love to see it. Though that's gonna be true of anything he wrote.

[pameladean]

Oh, yes, of course they are. I guess it's time for me to read that one again.

I've had a hunt around the more easily accessible portions of my office and cannot find my copy of the song. I need to clear out the entire room at some point because squirrel damage to the window needs repairing, so I'll keep looking.

I'm sure I'm not the only person with a copy.

P.

[davidgoldfarb]

I read Ford's* stories in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine when I was a kid and I had a lot of trouble with them because they were shaped like the problem-solving Golden Age stories that I'd read in reprints but they weren't doing the same things and I was too young to understand or appreciate just what they were doing.

*(I met him once or twice but I never knew him, and I feel weird calling him Mike)

As I got older a lot of people I really respected on Usenet raved about him. So I picked up The Dragon Waiting. And I prepared for it by reading Henry VI 1-3 and Richard III. (Good choice.) And I read Dragon and it blew me away. I need to re-read it again sometime, if only I didn't have so much on Mt. Tsundoku already —

On file770.com there was a fad for bracketed elimination contests. I successfully campaigned to get Dragon seeded into the second round of Twentieth Century Fantasy after the organizer left it out of the first round.

(If memory serves me right it ultimately came down to LotR vs. Earthsea.)

[mrissa]

My answer to "LotR vs. Earthsea vs. The Dragon Waiting" is "yes please, I'll make a second trip if I have to."

[rosefox]

<3

[anne]

I only knew him on Making Light, where my finest moment involved saying something that inspired him to write a poem.

14 years. It doesn't seem possible.

[sartorias]

I never met him and this still made my eyes sting.

[thanate]

14 years ago I was still soft-avoiding fandom for silly reasons to do with childhood impressions & being vaguely alienated by the music Robin McKinley's bio said she listened to.... And yet, 25 years ago I was wandering around girl scout camp scribbling "green is the color" on rocks with charcoal. I should give The Dragon Waiting another read; I think my first read of it suffered from too much hype for my depth of first reading. Hurray for reprints.

(also brb, looking up the Venus thing, which I'd previously missed!)

[ndrosen]

I remember reading some of his stories and poetry, and I met him at Boskone in 1987; I also exchanged a few words with Jane Yolen then, and heard Esther Friesner read a story, and saw other sf people.

Rest In Peace.