calimac

To Kepler's, for a book launch event for James A. Owen, aka

coppervale, aka GoH for Mythcon 40. Instead of reading from his fiction, he gave an illustrated lecture on how to draw a dragon, and told inspiring tales of making lemonade out of his life's lemons.

The book? Oh, that's The Indigo King, v. 3 of "The Chronicles of the Imaginarium Geographica." So far I've read v. 1, Here, There Be Dragons. Three young men from the year 1917 are swept into a fantasy land which they must save from the local Voldemort. At the end, the heroes, by name John, Jack, and Charles, are revealed to be Messrs. Tolkien, Lewis, and Williams. It's not much of a spoiler, because clues dropped from the beginning are plentiful enough to identify them to anyone who might care, and because the revelation might encourage you to read the book, as it did me.

Setting the story at a date when none of the three had yet met in real life, along with the epic plot and the YA prose (the genre label on the spine reads "Teen Fiction"), give the book an air more akin to the film Young Sherlock Holmes than anything else, but it's an agreeable and readable story. Are most of the facts dropped about the Inklings' lives actually wrong? (For one thing, Tolkien's given name of choice - when he used one at all; he wasn't a first-names kind of guy - was his middle name, Ronald, not his first name, John.) To my relief, it doesn't matter! (Can you imagine how liberating it feels for me, as a scholar devoted to factual exactitude, to be freed from it? This is fiction!) They're not the tiresome clichés of sloppy scholars, they're not biting or invidious, and the plot doesn't depend on them except when Owen is straight-forwardly making something up.

Hey

scribblerworks and

sartorias, I want to do a paper for Mythcon on "The Inklings in Fiction". Cite James Morrow and J.I.M. Stewart and others, back to that rare Gerard Hopkins novel that nobody's read but me. Some may remember a graphic novel by the name of Heaven's War? Owen is much, much better than that; believe me.

On to v.2, The Search for the Red Dragon, of which I now own a copy with a t.p. dragon inscribed by the author in red ink.