YHB read The Dragon Quintet with low expectations, and it pretty much fulfilled them.
The novella or novelette or whatever is an awkward form, I think. It’s too long to just be a quick introduction to an idea of a world, a simple story, and out. It’s not long enough to take a lot of pages exploring the world or making the story complicated. Not that there can’t be good novelettes, but I’m more likely to be annoyed by a bad one than by a bad short story. I think.
Anyway, this is five “short novels”, two of which are evidently being expanded (or have been expanded) into proper novels. The Mercedes Lackey “Joust” seems like a well-written knockoff of the Pern books, and the Orson Scott Card’s “In the Dragon’s House” is slight and vague. I think they’d both be better as short stories than novels, but then I’m not paying their rent.
“Love in a Time of Dragons”, by Tanith Lee is pretty good. It’s well-written, and surprising in places, and sweetly inventive. I should probably read more of her stuff, if this is a good example. On the other hand Elizabeth Moon’s “Judgment” is clumsy and didactic. The dragon dispenses Wisdom (as does the main character’s mother); the point about lying by omission is made over and over again.
The best, unexpectedly, was Michael Swanwick’s “King Dragon”. I’d read his novel The Iron Dragon’s Daughter, which I didn’t much like, and this has some of the sense of that. He does have a facility for brutal juxtaposition of fantasy and technology, like this bit seemingly intended for pull-quotes:
Puck’s body, when they dug it up, looked like nothing so much as an enormous black root, twisted and formless. Chanting all the while, the women unwrapped the linen swaddling and washed him down with cow’s urine. They dug out the life-clay that clogged his openings. They placed the finger-bone of a bat beneath his tongue. An egg was broken by his nose and the white slurped down by one medicine woman and the yellow by another.Finally, they injected him with 5 cc of dextroamphetamine sulfate.
On the whole, though, it was the metaphor that worked for me, the dragon as heroin, the idea of weakness and strength, and the well-written tight plot. Not that I’m running over to the Swanwick shelf for my next book, but I liked it enough to put him back on my perhaps list.
,
-Vardibidian.
Interesting coincidence: I just read the Swanwick in Year’s Best Fantasy this morning on the plane. I thought it was pretty good; I never read Iron Dragon’s Daughter (partly ’cause so many people hated it), but this story made me wonder if it was set in the same world as that book.
Some of the bits of the story, though, felt to me a bit too cute, a bit too self-consciously precious or something. “Look at me, I’m taking an old fantasy trope and spiking it with high tech!” I didn’t feel that way about most of the story, just about a few items, perhaps especially the items that included a list of details of magic (like the first paragraph you quoted).
Still, pretty good overall, and some great images.
…In case you care but didn’t know, in the sf world a novelette is anything from 7500 words to 17,500 words (call it roughly 25 to 50 pages of a paperback); a novella is 17,500 to 40,000 words; a novel is theoretically anything over 40K. Though in recent years I don’t think anyone’s published many novels under about 100K words. Common wisdom is that the novella is the real heart of the field, but that novellas are hard to sell, because there are so few places that publish them (and thus the few places that do publish them get regular accolades for doing so). Novel readers tend to find novellas too short, though, and I tend to find them too long.