DRAGONS (and Dungeons)

So there I am, 14, and flipping through a friend's Monster Manual (First Printing of First Edition, the one with no illustration for the Eye Of The Deep, and of course the classic Sutherland cover, and my attention was focused not on the topless monsters (oh, boys and girls, there was nudity back in those days in our gaming books... mmm.... Loviatar....), but on the dragons. It utterly and completely fascinated me that there were ten types of dragons (plus two uber-dragons). My semi-Asperger's adolescent mind was enraptured with the categorization scheme -- colors for evil, metals for good, each with levels of power, and of course each dragon had eight age groups to which it could belong. (Indeed, a large part of the appeal of the Gygax era was, to me and to many others, the codification and classification of fantasy. To some folks, especially hoity-toity modern day artsy-fartsy new-age hippie commie 'indie' game designers, this is blasphemy and anathema, the destruction of wonder. To me, though, it's the candle to the moth of my interest. The world of Gary Gygax, the world of color-coded dragons and numerical demons, of oozes and trappers and lurkers above, is the world that first grabbed hold of my consciousness. Thinking of it now, it occurs to me that the obvious artificiality of it was a huge part of the appeal -- it was so self evidently a designed world, a world made up by a modern mind for the purpose of being made up, that it told me "You can do this too!". Mythology was not just something inherited or absorbed, with no known origin and no credited creator; mythology could be made up by anyone.)

OK, major digression there. Anyway.... Dragons.

Book Review/Thoughts: The Sparrow

I just finished "The Sparrow", by Mary Doria Russel. It was this month's book for our local SF Reader's club, and it was very much the sort of book I'd pretty much never pick up to read on my own, which is why I like our local SF Reader's club, because it has a good cross-section of genre fans and, thus, a wide selection of books outside my usual preferred range. Sometimes, I am reminded why I really don't like books in a particular genre/style/tone... and other times, my horizons are broadened. In Lizard's opinion, a hundred crappy books are worth one great one... that is, I don't mind a large number of misses if I get even one hit.

So it is with "The Sparrow".

Read on for the full details!