A pang of indecision shuddered within me when my twelve-year-old daughter came home with her 7th grade summer reading list, excitedly proclaiming that she would be reading The Hobbit.
“How old were you when you first read it?” she asked.
I swallowed and loosened my collar. Once again, I imagined I was back in junior high with Tolkien’s masterpiece in one hand and, in the other, a beat-up paperback of something my older brother had read called Dragonlance.
It’s been a choice I have long agonized over, as I have raised my daughters on a healthy diet of Tolkien admiration. He made up entire languages, girls! Let’s examine his novels’ religious subtext! Hey, who wants to watch the movies for the 17th time?
Yet deep down inside, I know the truth.
I read Dragonlance first.
If you’re not a child of the 80s or 90s and have no idea what in the world I’m talking about, there’s a long-simmering criticism that Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman’s blockbuster Dragonlance novels were a rip off of Tolkien’s work and basically a long role playing game that bled onto pages that millions of people read.
I’m not going to get into that debate, as Tolkien’s trolls that tried to have Bilbo and the dwarves for dinner have nothing on the real ones sitting in front of their computers, their fingers ready to make snarky comments about politics, religion, and fantasy literature.
So, I’m going to let the haters do their thing and focus on what I know to be true: I do not regret choosing Dragonlance as my foray into fantasy.
Let’s put it this way: I haven’t re-read the Dragonlance novels in probably twenty years, and I remember more about the characters than I do most of the people I went to high school with.
Dragonlance imprinted on me not only because it was my first epic fantasy, but because many of the characters were deeply flawed and often failed miserably. They were a rag-tag group of friends, scorned even in their town. As the hero of the novels, Tanis Half-Elven, once stated of his companions, “We are not the stuff of heroes.”
And he’s right. All the heroes—representing all your favorite fantasy tropes—have issues. Tanis is right there at the top, struggling with his heritage and that he’s the product of a rape of an elf by a human. It’s further complicated by his love for two women (an elf and a human—I told you he had issues), and near the end of the novel, he betrays the friends who’ve followed across the apocalyptic landscape of Krynn and must attempt redemption.
Speaking of Tanis’ loves, long before Sansa Stark became everybody’s favorite royal-turned-politician-turned-ruler, there was Laurana. She first appears as a spoiled elven princess clinging to her childhood crush, but when Tanis rebuffs her, she learns what it is to survive in the harsh world outside her privileged bubble, dusting herself off from repeated defeats, rising when others crumble before becoming the general of armies herself.
But none of the companions come close to needing a therapist more than Raistlin, the sickly mage who becomes the classic anti-hero. It doesn’t help that the poor kid has hourglass eyes. Bitter and sarcastic, with a handsome twin brother who looks like a young Arnold Schwarzenegger, he delivers some of the best scenes on the novels with the compassion he shows to other outcast creatures. The question of whether or not he is good or evil bounces back and forth until the end, when Raistlin truly gets the last (frightening) laugh.
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The Dark Above
And then there’s the true star of the books: the world itself. A cataclysm has upended Krynn, turning once majestic cities into crumbled disasters. The cause of the cataclysm is a major theme in the novels: how power corrupts. It falls to the everyday people, the skillet-wielding waitress and other blue-collars of the fantasy world, to try and fight again the encroaching night.
It’s a bit of a spoiler, but Dragonlance presented one of the great lessons of life to me as budding adult: that evil turns upon itself. Good doesn’t really triumph; evil just betrays its own.
And from the original Dragonlance Chronicles came seventeen million (at least it looked that way in the paperback section of Bookland) spinoff books, but do yourself a favor and read the companion trilogy about Raistlin and his brother. It’s a thrill to watch the twins battle and grow, becoming men who come to understand the darkness within them both.
From that spawned my lifelong love affair with fantasy. I made my way to Terry Brooks, to David Anthony Durham and Greg Keyes and Neil Gaiman. And, as we established earlier, a devotion to Tolkien.
Dragonlance even impacted me, thirty years later, when I published by first novel and something kept toying at me not to make my protagonist the expected hero. It just didn’t seem right that she’d be a brilliant district attorney, a tenacious reporter, or a scrappy cop.
Instead, she would be a grandmother, largely relegated to serving as a support system for her family when her grandson mysteriously vanishes and no one, from police to the FBI, can find him. Yet as the story progresses, it is this unassuming woman who truly finds the answers that may, at last, rescue her grandson from an other-worldly plight.
She makes mistakes. She has dark secrets. She is terrified and almost gives up. She is not, as Tanis Half-Elven said, the stuff of heroes.
From the very beginning, Dragonlance showed me that’s exactly who should be saving our worlds.
Ed. Note: A previous version of this article contained a photograph copyrighted © 2019 John Siracusa.
Jeremy Finley’s investigative reporting has resulted in criminal convictions, legislative hearings before the U.S. Congress, the payout of more than a million dollars to scam victims, and the discovery of missing girls. The winner of twenty Emmys and Edward R. Murrow awards, he is also the recipient of a national Headliner award, a two-time winner of the IRE award (recognizing the best in investigative journalism) and a national Edward R. Murrow award. In 2016, he was named the journalist of the year by the Tennessee Associated Press. He is the chief investigative reporter at the NBC affiliate in Nashville, TN, where he lives with his wife, daughters, and Thor, the worst puppy on the planet. The Darkest Time of Night is his first novel; its sequel The Dark Above publishes July 23rd with St Martin’s Press.
My first series that hooked me into Fantasy was The Chronicles of Prydain by Lloyd Alexander in 5th grade, quickly followed by the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings by Tolkien, then Dragonlance and The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever by Steven R. Donaldson in middle school. Those set me into a life long love of Fantasy and later Science Fiction (with the occasional Horror thrown in).
I read Dragonlance 1st too. I was in middle school in 80’s. I started playing D&D in 6th grade and just naturally gravitated toward them. I still have my original copies dogeared and well loved . All my friends read them too. From there I read Eddings ,and Feist , and I didn’t get around to the Hobbit until high school. It remains one of my fondest memories of college most of all though. I took a Fantasy and Romance class. We were required to read the Hobbit and watch Princess Bride. Best class ever! I still haven’t managed to read the Lord of the Rings trilogy. The Fellowship of the Ring was hard to get into for some reason and the size didn’t help . I have no problem reading monster sized tomes these days maybe I should try again.
Such chez, but I loved them, went on the read the Death Gate series which was even better. Then W&H got more ‘Orson Scott Card’ in their views, or maybe I just noticed them more.
The books that turned me on to Fantasy were David Eddings’ “The Mallorean” books. A lady I babysat for had them on her shelves, and I picked one up after putting the kids to bed one night and powered through most of it that night. I’ve never looked back, though I now have a very difficult time reading any Eddings. I could never get into the Dragonlance books. This might sound laughable coming from someone who started on Eddings, but I always found the prose trite and boring.
I think the first fantasy series that I read myself was the Belgariad. I had a bunch of Dragonlance after, but never really got into them (all my friends did though, so …)
That passage was transcendental to me as a child. 30 years later and the Death of Sturm Brightblade will still choke me up a little.
My journey into Fantasy started with those 4 books as well, followed by Icewind Dale trilogy and the whirlwind of Drizzt books to follow. The Hobbit came much later, following the reading of the LOTR books.
I too started with Dragonlance. The first one I read was Kindred Spirits, about Tanis and Flint. That lead to near a hundred more Dragonlance books. Which eventually lead to Forgotten Realms, The Death gate Cycle, The Dark Sword Trilogy, Raven loft, and many more. I even wrote my own book, as yet unpublished. Fantasy offered me an escape from the mundane world. Dragonlance was my true introduction.
I haven’t re-read the Dragonlance novels in probably twenty years, and I remember more about the characters than I do most of the people I went to high school with.
SAME.
And I’m not ashamed to admit that I cried when Tanis died (though I don’t recall now which book it was – it was well after Chronicles, that much I remember).
This was 100% my entree to epic fantasy, right on the heels of Redwall. I read the mainline series in internal chronological order- Meetings Sextant, Preludes I & II, Chronicles and Legends, and I would like this fact inscribed on my tombstone. In many ways it’s a total knockoff of things that had come before, not least of which is Tolkien’s, but it was a tremendous intro for a 12 year old to a genre I’m still reading 25 years later. Also, when Flint died I cried.
My earliest fantasy series were Narnia and Lord of the Rings. During high school I read a lot of Wheel of Time and Sword of Truth. I’ve read dozens of series since then, but I’ve never read Dragonlance even though I had friends who loved it. Does it still hold up? Should I put it on my list to read?
@11: Laurana alone makes the Dragonlance books worth reading. She is one of speculative fiction’s greatest characters.
The books were good; but the gold-box CRPG’s were great. Spent way to many hours killing draconians back in the day.
Was a long way from being the first for me (was the hobbit), but I very clearly remember feeling it was getting a bit ploddy and a friend told me to stick it out so I could read the next trilogy (the one about Raistlin and his twin). They were totally right. Not sure in all honesty I could recommend now reading one whole trilogy just so you have the background to the next one, but if you have all the time in the world (like I once did) i’d do it. That second trilogy was amazing.
@11 – yes, they pretty much hold up. But you can safely stop with Chronicles and Legends. The other series are very hit-or-miss.
I too read dragonlance first in middle school. I remember as a preteen wanting to be like Raistlin. Then one day I woke up(25 years later) and realized weis, hickman, and the companions of the lance helped turn me into Caramon,
I feel like you wrote this just for me!!!! I read this first too, and came to it a very weird way, having encountered the art book first, loaned to me along with a trove of 80’s comics by one especially kindhearted and delightfully geeky suitor of one of my older sisters while I was recuperating from a car accident.*
I was so enthralled by the cover painting of that floating castle, of the mountain carved into a dragon, and most importantly, the tree houses of Solace that I insisted, whined, and cajoled my mother into buying the novels for me**. I also must confess that a wonderful pencil drawing engendered my lifelong interest in the exploits of pirate captain Maquesta Kar-Thon.
My favorite character will ever be Tika Waylan (what’s with the magic ring? We will never know), but I also had such a crush on Dalamar! My heart! Words cannot express. A tortured, exile dark-haired elf from elegant, restrained and haughty Silvensti because he’s basically all Emo Goth? Be still my pre-pubescent heart.
There were so many delightfully fraught romances here – Goldmoon and Riverwind, Alhana and Sturm, Crysania and Raistlin, and most wonderfully tragic, like tragic in a classic, Greek Tragedy Classic (with a capital ‘C’) sense, Prince Gilthanas who fell in love with a dragon in a maiden’s form. Sigh. All designed to strum my twelve year old’s heart’s sensibilities. Pfft, you and your books about teenagers with crushes on sparkly vampires, you 90’s kids. Try falling in love with a silver effin’ dragon.
* He grew up to be a college English literature professor, and he’s still so very, very dreamy. Hi Keith!
**Larry Elmore’s masterpiece! I have a very distinct memory of my mother speedly perusing the books at Waldenbooks to make sure that they were appropriate enough to buy for me, and I remember her being very excited when she showed the fantastic drawing on the Inn of the Last Home, and then leafing through the pages of Autumn Twilight and then saying sadly “Oh, man” and I knew exactly why (having partially read them in the store before any one would actually buy them for me, I was aghast at a later image of the inn dashed to pieces. You all know which one).
*** Another Larry Elmore masterpiece – I mean, a woman of color pirate captain with her natural afro’ed hair, killer gams and killer fashion sense (in a medieval setting!), who heads up a crew with a minotaur first mate, a tinkering, gadget obsessed gnome and a sprightly, elegant female Kender? Who isn’t obsessed? (don’t forget the gully dwarf, either!)
I actually read the Twins trilogy first, which was confusing at times when I had to figure out history between characters that wasn’t explicitly said, but in a way I loved being a little lost (something that I still have to this day, I still like being thrown cold turkey into a setting). Even then I agree… I definitely remember Dragonlance a lot better than any of the LOTR books, and I still pick up my well loved copy of Test of the Twins to feel melancholy sometimes. Part of me wants to play the RPG setting, but I also wonder if it won’t be as much fun when not tinted by my nostalgia goggles.
@17- FEELING YOU ON DALAMAR THERE. I had the biggest crush on him as a wee thing.
Came here to comment that Dragonlance was also my first experience with fantasy. And then I was heartened to see so many commenters also shared that experience. First my friends got me to play D&D. Then to read the Chronicles, and then all the other Drangonlance books. That was around age 13-15. But these were definitely the books that first cultivated a lifelong love of fantasy. I think this is true for a lot of us who were in middle school at the end of the 80’s and high school in the 90’s. Tolkien was discovered later, much later.
Memories of the childhood :)
Gateway drugs!
I can’t agree with this article enough. Thinking back now, the Dragonlance Chronicles, was my doorway into the world of fantasy.
Just a tip to your readers, Random Books, made the Audio Books of the DL Chronicles on 3 cassette tapes (to my knowledge, it was never made in CD’s). They were an excellent complement to the story after reading the series a couple of times.
I saw this and immediately felt twelve years old. I found these on my dad’s bookshelf and was hooked immediately. I raced through these and the twins’ trilogy and wanted more. The death of Flint made me cry, but the death of Sturm destroyed me. Weren’t the good guys supposed to win? And live? And go on to have other adventures? Doesn’t evil lose? The fact that these were the first books that taught me otherwise imprinted them forever on my heart. Also, yes, I do remember these characters and story lines way better than I remember those losers from high school.
Long live Raistlin!
Not my first — I had already started with Tolkien and Lewis and Lloyd Alexander, amongst others, but I remember seeing the paperbacks (the exact editions shown in the photo) appear on the shelf at the local hobby shop, buying them, taking them home, and reading them in as close to one sitting as I could manage. Those copies (plus the original Legends) are still on my shelf.
Not even close to my first having devoured the SF section of bookstore and library before considering looking at the fantasy. I would read Dragonlance sometime later and while I won’t say I hated them, I had long before read much better. I spent more time at the gaming table creating my own fantasy games out of kitbashes of Greyhawk & Glorantha, Blackmoore and the Third Imperium off in the distant Spinward Marches.
I may have had other books that rang in my heart like the DL books did for you, but in the end, that is why there are so many and different ones out there. We all have our stories to tell. I could tell you of the mage college dropout who ended up being a thief and a mercenary for a time before becoming an independent “consultant” or the Imperial scout with his Terran house cat in a little “borrowed” star ship thousands of light years from Sol and so on. That’s what these books really give us.
Happily I got into SF/F in the late ’70s, early ’80s, so my first adult fantasy novels were either Katherine Kurtz’s Deryni, or Michael Moorcock’s Elric, and soon followed by Andre Norton. Dragonlance came along half a decade later; the books were good pulp fantasy, the modules were terrible railroaded trash that helped propel me out of D&D and into better RPGs.
However, I would in no sense call them Tolkieny. They’re D&D fanfic, sure, and D&D borrowed a few races and monsters from Tolkien and the Celtic and Norse myths he ripped them off from, but otherwise there’s no real similarity; D&D is mostly Robert E. Howard & Jack Vance, and Weis & Hickman followed the rules with few exceptions.
I was pleased that they got rid of hobbits and used Kender, Celtic trickster elf archetypes, instead. While annoying in a gaming group, Kender are vastly more interesting in fiction.
No single MacGuffin to toss in a volcano, I’d even say it mocks the idea: Every possible save-the-world artifact just requires more work. Even rediscovering “the gods” means the evil gods came back, too. There’s very little pining for the lost age (which Tolkien got from Greek myth; it’s rarely present in Gygax’s work); the ancients screwed things up so badly the Cataclysm had to be done to cure it. The plot moves along rapidly and things happen, as they tend to do in pulp fantasy, instead of thousands of pages of walking.
The biggest difference, of course, is that in Dragonlance there’s more than one woman with a plot and lines of her own, and no divine right of kings. It does share Tolkien’s lack of pigmentation—even Goldmoon and Riverwind are improbably painted as Vikings wearing Native American clothes—but the evil “races” aren’t explicitly stated to be dark-skinned southern and eastern humans, either.
Much better to give kids Dragonlance than The Hobbit, but there’s better choices than either.
Loved Dragonlance. Wouldn’t dare read it again and spoil the memories now; I don`t think it’s something you should seek out as an adult with any great expectations, but your young teenager will like it.
Things I learned at a young age thanks to that: that you can enjoy a story first and foremost for its characters, never mind the plot (Tasselhoff and Raistlin foremost). And that I’ll never read all the books in the world (sequel after sequel after …).
Another treasured memory: mom was D&D wary, so at the bookstore I showed her the nice red cover of the first of these, and the dreary dark cover of The Dark Tide by Dennnis McKiernan and said, which would you rather see me reading? She pointed to the pretty red one. That’s the D&D one, mom – ha!
My first fantasy read toward the end of high school in the late 80s. I was a voracious reader, but it was mostly romances and classics. These books opened a whole new world for me, leading me to science fiction also. Cried when I read the last because it was over.
great story, thanks for sharing![.](//s04.flagcounter.com/mini/Jkzv/bg_FFFFFF/txt_DEDEDE/border_FFFFFF/flags_0/" width="1"/>)
The Dragonlance novel “Stormblade” was the first fantasy novel I ever read, and for some reason it just really didn’t grab me. I switched over and read Brooks’ Shannara novels and Tolkien, then decided to give Dragonlance another shot, and this time it took. I devoured every one I could get my hands on, and for years, kicked myself for selling them all at a garage sale when my family moved (except for the original trilogy, I never gave those up). However, just within the last year, I realized that I’m an adult and can do whatever I damn well please, so I went on eBay and repurchased almost every Dragonlance book I could find (at least up through the Bridges of Time series).
I feel very at home here. I’m a Tolkien freak, but Dragonlance was also my real first intro into fantasy novels, and I found the Chronicles, the Legends, and then some 20 or 30 after that to be the perfect gate-flinging-open into fantasy fiction forever. There was a point where I felt Krynn’s novels shifted to a place I wasn’t crazy about, possibly right around when Dragons of Summer Flame came about, so I sort of let it be. But I’ll keep an open mind, revisit all the original books someday, and if I’m lucky, kindle my son’s interest in them when he’s old enough. Formative indeed, and yep, more diverse than most people realize.
I was never into super hero comics. But when I discovered the Dragonlance comics, I did collect those for a while. Great stuff, but I never knew anyone who shared the interest in those days.
I love Sturm Brightblade, of course, but when I saw that most of the comics were dedicated to a female Knight of Solamnia, Riva Silvercrown, I was really happy.
@32 JLaSala Your appearance here makes me want a post comparing “the stuff of heroes” in LoTR/The Hobbit versus DragonLance. Both works seem to engage with that question but coming to slightly different answers.
Dragons of Summer Flame are when I trended away from the books, too.
@34, I don’t think it’s in me to do anything like that, though. I’m not a big fan of comparing things too much. One could draw some parallels between Tolkien’s stories and Dragonlance, I suppose, but there’s so much about the execution that’s different—the language, the style, the pacing, the accessibility—that I don’t think it’s quite fair. They don’t set out to do the same thing (not that the authors’ aims should necessarily be speculated upon anyway).
Truth is, I adore Tolkien, Weis, and Hickman for what they’ve done, and I like that both morals and spirituality are an enormous part of their works (and never in a preach way, either). But I don’t think I could do any of them justice by elaborating on comparisons.
The “stuff of heroes” is, in itself, a pretty worthy topic, though.
I have to say, the character of Raistlin is probably the most influential one on me. His arc was excellent. Heck, I dressed up as Raistlin (black-robed, silver-haired, gold-skinned) on Halloween in my freshman year of high school when almost no one in school dressed up at all. Embarrassing at the time—no one had a clue who I was supposed to be, too—and yet I look back with a measure of pride. No photo exists to prove it, either.
@35 That they aren’t doing the same thing is why they’re worth comparing. Maybe TPTB at Tor can arrange for a group effort :P
I was more on team Tanis than Raistlin. In retrospect, I probably had a bit of a crush on the mopey half-elf and an affinity for over-thinking things. Though basically all the subtext about his origins went sailing by overhead.
Thanks for writing this.
The first time I saw the Dragon Lance novels we were visiting family friends back in the 80’s. Their son was a three or four years older than me. He can be blamed for introducing me to D&D and to the War of the Lance, for which I am grateful. The companions gave me hope when I was feeling isolated that I too would one day find a family of misfits to be a part of.
I had the read the Hobbit in various incarnations before I ever encountered RPGs. First, there was the book on tape version of the Hobbit animated movie that somehow found it’s way into my road trip library. I can still remember that page turn chime as if it were playing right now. I must have listened to/read it a hundred times or more. Then I had (still have) the unabridged text of the Hobbit with illustrations from the animated movie. Still later I ended up receiving and reading the four book collection including the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings.
BTW, Fizban and Tasslehoff were a genius team up.
,I was turned on to fantasy mainly through Jack Vance, Fritz Leiber and Michael Moorcock. Always found the Dragonlance books poorly written in comparison.
From the perspective of a game seller in that era, Dragon Lance was interesting because it kicked off a … 13? year period in which TSR published an impressive number of fantasy novels. Just click on this link and play with the year of publication to see how titles/year increased over the 1980s and 1990s. Towards the end of that period, there was an odd disconnect between what customers wanted and what TSR was willing to publish, almost as through the standard feedback between company and customers had broken. And in fact it had: the company through which they sold to the book trade somehow bungled their returns. Instead of sending the unsold books back for credit, the unsold books ended up stuck in warehouses. From TSR’s point of view, it looked like they could publish literally anything and it would sell. As a consequence, it made sense to them to follow policies like the “No stars” rule, where authors who were too popular would be dropped in favour of less known authors: TSR wanted readers who bought _TSR_ novels, not Salvatore or Weiss novels, because Salvatore or Weiss might move to a different publisher.
And then one day all those unsold products showed up in one million dollar return, with a demand for the credit owed, and TSR imploded.
@39 — I did not know that (about the returns kerfuffle), but it does explain some things.
I remember a time when I could go into my local Waldenbooks and there’d be an entire case or two dedicated to nothing but TSR books (well, and maybe half a shelf of non-TSR gaming tie-in novels at the end).
I did read the first tranche of TSR novels when they came out (the first couple Dragonlance trilogies and the first Moonshae & Icewind Dale books), but they never really sunk their hooks into me. I strongly suspect that if I were a few years younger (or if the books had come out a few years prior), though, I would have inhaled them by the caselot.
@39, fascinating. I’d only heard some of that before, but you’ve explained it pretty well. Truth is, I am personally grateful for that kerfuffle, as it gave me that enormous collection of Dragonlance, Forgotten Realms, and then Ravenloft novels which inspired me to write my own. So I did get to publish one D&D book (well, two, but only one can be found today), and I’m grateful. :)
I do wish WotC would go back to trying out new or lesser known authors. Some good came of that.
I read the Chronicles and Legends series many years before I finally read LOTR, though I had read The Hobbit first as a kid. These two trilogies blew me away, and the characters always stayed with me. I reread them a few years ago, and I have to say, I loved them every bit as much as I did then. What a blast, I could hardly put the books down. Great literature? Not likely. Derivative? Most certainly. Great characters and epic storytelling? For certain.
It was Tolkien for me. But (@2 robinm) I also had a hard time with Fellowship of the Ring. I just couldn’t accept that the character I’d grown to love—Bilbo—was replaced by someone I didn’t know. Fortunately I kept slogging, and probably about the time the Hobbits leave Bree, I was so caught up that it didn’t matter anymore.
Same. Loved these books as a young teen, but I’m terrified to go back and re-read them. Despite the cliches present early in the series, the story becomes truly original with the Legends series.
@44:
Its pretty painful to read the original trilogy now. I tried to do it about 10 years ago. I tried to get my 13 yo daughter to read them, but fantasy aimed at that age is so sophisticated now that she laughed at how bad they were. Legends, however, is still excellent.
Chronicles reads exactly like what it is. The first attempt to write a novel for either author. They got much, much better with subsequent novels. Especially the Death Gate Cycle, which I have re-read as an adult, and still enjoyed.
Whereas I don’t find them painful at all, but nostalgia is powerful. I look forward to rereading it, and in fact put it off so that it’s as fresh again as it can be. But yes, the writing certainly improves for both Weis and Hickman as time goes on, as is (usually) the case for all authors.
Just as The Hobbit itself is wonderful, but the writing of The Lord of the Rings has grown from it enormously.
I took the photo at the top of this image. It shows my own original copies of these books, which I love dearly. See this tweet for the original: https://twitter.com/siracusa/status/1144638288860499968
The best version is battered but still cared-for enough that the art isn’t all messed up.
@46:
Yes, most authors improve over time. One would hope! My point was more that we rarely, rarely get to read an author’s first attempt at writing a novel. They don’t usually get published — they end up in a trunk somewhere. This was a companion written for a game setting as a tie-in to the game, published by the company that produced and distributed the game, and written by the staff writers who wrote the copy for the game manuals and other ephemera. No traditional publishing house or editor was involved in the writing and release of these novels.
And they read like it.
They originally had hired an author to write Hickman’s story treatment and game design as a novel, but it didn’t work out, and Hickman decided he and his technical editor, Weis, would write it themselves. I’m glad they did, since they produced some amazing stuff together after this. And this, itself, was amazing in its own way.
TSR had published other things before Dragonlance, but again, it was all stuff like coffee table books of artwork with some short setting pieces and short stories in them. They were not like Tor, or Del Rey, or Orbit, and the purpose of the novels was to drive sales of the game.
Incidentally, Margaret recently told the story (in bite-sized increments) of precisely how she and Tracy Hickman came to write the Chronicles, starting with Dragons of Autumn Twilight, on Facebook.This was the second half of her delightful tale:
They’ve always been very clear about how it all came together.
Aside: If anyone here did love the books as kids but are afraid to revisit them, consider seeking out the annotated edition (a three-book omnibus of the Chronicles). It’s full of candid insight.
@50 — Again, I’d heard parts of that story before, but not the full version; it’s fascinating to know what was going on behind the scenes.
I reread Chronicles a few years ago, and Legends shortly thereafter, and I did enjoy Chronicles, warts and all, and Legends was really, really good, and a surprisingly dark follow-up to the original trilogy.
@50:
I still have my copy of the Annotated Legends book. My paperback copies of Chronicles were lost long ago in a move.
I was 15 and in full cynical teen flower when I read the first Dragonlance novel and did not care for it a bit. If it had three or so years earlier, I probably would’ve been on board. I have a younger brother who liked the series. I read plenty of fantasy novels in my youth that I wouldn’t want to revisit, or that I’ve revisited and realized I should’ve left for a memory. The Dragonlance stuff just didn’t make it in under the wire for me.
“Evil turns upon itself. Good doesn’t really triumph; evil just betrays its own.”
Such a great observation.
Dragonlance was first for me too. I re-read them maybe 5 or 6 years ago but am thinking after reading your article they deserve another run through. Raistlin and Caramon were my geeky self and my sports buff brother and while I didn’t challenge gods, the struggle they had, and the love they had for each other was evident.
“I do not regret choosing
#Dragonlance as my foray into fantasy.”Trolls and critics be damned, I couldn’t agree more. Long before Pug, Simon, or Shea . . . before Elric, Fafhrd, or Convenant . . . before (yes) Bilbo and Frodo, there was Raistlin and the Companions of the Lance. I cut my genre teeth on those very same TSR paperback editions shown above and, for me, it is still the story that defines epic fantasy for me.
“Yet deep down inside, I know the truth.
I read Dragonlance first.”
Even though I had played a ton of D&D by then, my first SF reading foray was The Darksword Trilogy, same authors!
What a great story!
I don’t believe Dragonlance was my first fantasy. If I remember, my first was C. S. Lewis’s Narnia series.
But Dragonlance was one of my favorites as a teenager. I think I might have read all of them. Even the bad ones from Preludes, Prequels, etc. And Lord Soth in Ravenloft. Heh.
Dragonlance was not my first foray into SF, I’d plumbed those waters YEARS before the release of Dragonlance. But, they did cement my (ongoing to this day) love for the magicians & wizards. Merlin is my hero, but Raistlin cemented my love of the breed. :D
Yup. Same here. My buddies in high school introduced me to Dragonlance, and I have no regrets. Side note: the buddy that introduced me said these were the first full books he ever read. Dragonlance helped make me into a fantasy fan. I didn’t read Tolkien until my early 20s, but I must confess I found Tolkien a little slow compared to 1990s Dragonlance. The films are top shelf and up there with my favorite films of all time.
I read Tolkien first at age 9 thanks to a Christmas gift from an uncle. I loved it enough to start looking for fantasy and found Dragonlance fairly quickly. My library wasn’t big enough to have more than the first trilogy and the twins trilogy. I didn’t care for the twins much, so that didn’t encourage me to seek more. I loved, loved, loved Tasselhof and Fizban. I was also a Kitiara fan.
This was also my first fantasy series and it was also the first D&D game system I played. Dragonlance will always have a place close to my heart.
Teen of the 80s here. Read these. Loved these. I believe I’ll re-read them soon. Thanks for the memories.
My first fantasy book was The Sword of Shannara, which my father first read to me, then I read all alone when I was roughly 10.
The Hobbit was the first book I bought with my pocket money – I was 12 and I still own that copy. I remember I didn’t like it a lot.
I was reading a lot of sci-fi (mostly Asimov) at the time, and I stumbled on the Dragonlance trilogy right after my first reading of the LotR, when I was 14.
I loved them, and more importantly they introduced me to the best hobby ever, D&D, which I’m still playing at a regular live game now that I’m 46.
As a child of the seventies I was playing D&D, at home and even on the school playground, by the time I was 8.
Surprisingly, I didn’t start reading the TSR novels until High School. I devoured hundreds of them in my late teens and early twenties; but Chronicles was first. I laughed out loud at Tass, felt kinship with Raist, and when Sturm died…I not only cried, but I think I went through all the stages of mourning.
My favorite Dragonlance book is The Legend of Huma. Can’t put a finger on why, but I read that one five or six times at least. Another fave is The Elven Nations Trilogy.
Was a Gen-Con regular back in the day when it was in Milwaukee; before being a nerd became cool. Met Tracy Weiss, Margaret Hickman, Larry Elmore, Keith Parkinson, Richard Knack, R.A Salvatore, Clyde Caldwell, and so many more of the writers and artists working with TSR back in the early nineties. Had, and still have, aspirations of writing someday. That desire really started when I read these books.
I built a book shelf in my 30s just for my TSR paperbacks and the crown jewel is a paperback box-set of Chronicles signed by Weiss, Hickman and Elmore.
I think I still have at least 50 in a box in the basement. Some of the trilogies are missing a book due to friends not returning to the library, and I have read and own much better fantasy, but I have this vision of being old, retired, and having all the time in the world to re-read what fired my imagination when I was a younger man.
Good Lord. Correction to my error above in the names of the authors. Always Just said Weiss and Hickman. Let the flaming commence as deserved.
I also started with Dragonlance, and I will always look back at those books with fondness. Loved this piece!
Dragonlance is to The Hobbit/LOTR as Starwars is to Startrek.
I also started with Dragonlance first.
When I was 11 I spent a couple weeks at my dad’s house during the summer. I was bored one rainy day and went snooping through a spare bedroom that had a bunch of boxes. One of them contained the entire Dragon Lance series. I was hooked.
Sounds like we’re all from a very specific generation (born in the 70s – late elementary/junior high in the mid to late 80s). I read plenty of Sci-Fi (Tom Swift) and was already a Star Wars and comic book fan. Then around ’85 I got hooked on D&D. Soon after starting reading Eddings, but I first fell in love with the Forgotten Realms – Moonshae series by Douglas Niles, but quickly grabbed onto Dragonlance and read them over and over again. Moved on with Weis and Hickman to their Death Gate Cycle series too. Last year I took my box of books out of the basement and gave them to my then 9-year old. She’s read them all over and over again, but beaten the absolute heck out of them – a few covers toast. (I think Kendermoore was a particular favorite of hers). But the TSR books and the DC comics (Forgotten Realms and Advanced Dungeons and Dragon comics in particular) have kept me a fantasy reader to this day. (I”m a member of fantasy buddy reads book club on Goodreads which has been a fantastic place to be at home amongst fellow fantasy readers and read new authors and re-read old authors together again.). Now I just have to find a local group to play D&D again on a regular basis for the first time in over 20 years since my daughter is now interested and going to a larp-style day camp with her younger brother later this summer. Picked up all the 5th edition stuff last year too.
Interesting how many of us were introduced to fantasy by the same set of books! My parents read Narnia to us as kids. But my real appreciation for fantasy (and honestly reading in general) started when I was around 8-10 years old, with the Chronicles of Prydain… just like @1 Danny K. I was sick, home from school that day and my mom lovingly wanted to take my mind off feeling ill. She handed me the first book in the pentalogy, “The Book of Three”.
Once I blew through those novels, I was officially hooked on fantasy. My friend was reading some books called “Dragonlance” that initially attracted my eye simply due to their beautiful cover art. In my opinion some of the old Dragonlance covers look better than most of the newer ones. They look less cheesy/cartoony and more high fantasy-ish… (Although if you haven’t seen the newest cover reiterations of Dragons of Autumn Twilight etc… like “Rumor of Dragons” CHECK THEM OUT, those look great!) But the one cover that caught my eye initially at my friends was The Legend of Huma… what a wonderful intro into Dragonlance! After that it was Kaz the Minotaur and then of course the cornerstone trilogy. I ended up reading like 50 Dragonlance novels, and I still have them all, somewhere in my attic. My son is now 8, daughter 6, and this write up by Mr. Finley has got me wanting to offer them the world of Krynn now!
I read Tolkien first, but I remember reading and enjoying Dragonlance in High School, until TSR drove it into the ground by releasing a bajillion novels written by everyone and their uncle it seemed.
As a side note, I would not take the “Tolkien ripoff” criticism too seriously, as the entire genre was a “Tolkien ripoff” at this point in time, and there were many far more egregious examples. The first book of the Wheel of Time gets that criticism a lot, with very little basis other than it follows the basic tropes of the genre at that time.
The first WoT book is deliberately similar to LotR, but after that the series becomes different.
@73
The first book has some deliberate callbacks to LoTR, for certain, as the author has stated. And it does implement many of the standard High Fantasy tropes, but the tLotR-clone statements have been vastly overstated. Or rather, it was no more so than many in the genre at the time, and quite a bit less so than some.
I did love these and the Twins series. The characters in these books are definitely my internal archetypes for the characters I play in games. These guys could walk into Skyrim. The LOTR similarity wasn’t noticable. For me the Sword of Shannara was the first time I ever found the LOTR similarities impacting my enjoyment of the book. However Belgariad hooked me on Fantasy, I have reread it more and with my kids.
I recently reread the first few chapters, and the Tolkien parallels actually really stood out to me. A vague Prancing Pony vibe in the Inn of the Last Home, up to and including a mysterious figure sitting in a darkened corner (Raistlin). But still, the inspirations in the Chronicles feel more like homage, not theft. As you can see in the annotated edition, Weis and Hickman made a lot of deliberate archtype choices because it was born out of D&D games. And remember, these are among the earlier D&D novels when RPG influences weren’t as tropelike as they are now.
These were not my first fantasy books as I was born in 1972 but they were among my favorites. I have started purchasing first editions on ebay. I fell in love with the characters and never forgot them when they first came out. Tasslehoff Burrfoot was the friend I always wished I had. Thanks for this!