A review by rbreade
The Dragon Waiting by John M. Ford

The story of how this award-winning novel fell out of print and after twenty years finally returned to bookshelves--Isaac Butler's " "The Disappearance of John M. Ford", in Slate, is worth its own read.


Ford's wonderful "what if?" premise goes like this: What if the Emperor Julian followed through with his resolve not to have a favored religion for the Byzantine Empire, reversing Constantine's support for Christianity, so that instead of monotheism, the existing pagan religions continued to flourish alongside Christianity, and what if magic of a spooky, dangerous sort existed, as well as vampires, of a sort, and finally what if a group of people--a Welsh wizard, a Florentine doctor, a Byzantine mercenary, and a German vampire/artillerist--banded together to thwart a literal Byzantine plot to establish its puppet on the throne of England, pushing the claim instead of Richard, Duke of Gloucester, the historical Richard III?


Ford has the writing chops to pull this off in literary style, writing as tight and as crackling a sentence as anyone in any genre. And when he says, in that Butler story, that he "has a horror of being obvious," he's not kidding around: if you blink or nod, you'll find yourself lost. Even if you're reading closely, you might need to flip back and reread sections: Ford isn't going to serve his reader pre-chewed plot points and inferences!