I'm a sucker for dragons

And this is at least in part why i'm reading boy genius Christopher Paolini's saga about dragons and elves and dwarves and evil overlords and secret pasts and just about every other well-known and frequently-used trope in the fantasy business. (But no unicorns, at least not yet!)

I read Eragon when it first came out, thanks to my partner's mother, who does not really have a clear sense of what I enjoy reading but on very rare occasions does manage to give me something that I find readable.

I think the main things in the first book that kept me interested were Angela the herbalist, who is one of those fairly standard aburpt, gruff and cryptic pronouncement characters, but it's much more fun when they're women, and Saphira the dragon, becasue not a lot of people write female dragons, especially as main characters.

So I just finished the second book in the series, Eldest.

The loading on of overly-familiar tropes, from the "I am your father, Luke" moment to the "what do you mean, you're the heir to the throne?" moment, continues unabated. But one thing I will say about young master Paolini (I suppose I should let go of that - he's now of an age with many other writers just beginning their careers) is that he doesn't mind surrounding his boy-hero with powerful women and letting them actually do important stuff that sometimes even involves them telling him what to do becasue they know more, or are in positions of power. This is a book that passes the Bechdel Test.

And there's this scene where Saphira gets drunk that is just wonderful, because, how often does somebody write about a drunken dragon?

Imaro's unfinished quest

Charles Saunders:
Imaro
The Quest for Kush

The vast majority of epic/heroic fantasy written in English draws on the history and cultures of Europe for its inspiration - and particularly, medieval and renaisaance Europe. There have been exceptions over the years, and it is a good thing to know that those exceptions are growing in number. There's now a fair amount of epic fantasy that draws on East Asian and South Asian cultures, and even some that draws on American, Australasian, and some other Aboriginal cultures. But there's still not a lot that draws on African cultures - except, of course, for Egyptian and some other Mideast cultures.

Which brings me to the writing of Charles R. Saunders.

Back in the late 70s and early 1980s, Charles Saunders began writing heroic fantasy with settings drwn from the rich and varied cultures of Africa. The vast majority of his characters are Africans, not white men putting, in some fashion, their stamp on an unknown land.

This material was very much in the vein of Robert E. Howard's heroic fantasy, but it was written about black heroes, situated in fantasy realms based on black tradition, culture, history and belief, and it came from the mind and heart of a black man. And you know how rare that is in the world of fantasy and science fiction.

Saunder's main heroic character was Imaro, a young man who grows up as a pariah among his own people but goes on to become a great warrior with an evident destiny. He also wrote a group of short stories about the truly remarkable Dossouye, a black woman warrior in a time when it was still rare to find a woman warrior at all in science fiction or fantasy.

Sadly, we have never been, and may never be, permitted to read the fullness of Imaro's quest, or Dossouye's story.

DAW books published the first three novels of what, according to various interviews and other sources I've read, would have been a series of five or six novels that brought Imaro through a succession of preparatory quests and tasks until he was ready to meet his ultimate destiny.

But for a number of reasons, one of which was the serious error of describing the fist book, Imaro, as a novel about the "black Tarzan" (aside from the lawsuit that prompted, how can a black man born in Africa be anything like Tarzan?), DAW ceased publishing the series after the third volume and Charles Saunders withdrew from the field of fantasy writing.

Recently, Night Shade books reissued the first two volumes, Imaro and The Quest for Kush, with the intention of publishing all three previously published books, as well as the final books of Imaro's quest that Saunders had never completed, and even (this made my heart leap when I heard it) a Dossouye book.

But that's not going to be, it seems. Once more, the market for fantasy about black heroes written by black writers has proved to be insufficient, for whatever reason. Night Shade has announced that it will not be publishing the third volume, The TRail of Bohu, nor will it be publishing any new books by Saunders.

At least I did my part. I now have on my bookshelf the freshly re-read first two volumes of Saunders' novels. It was a great joy to read them again, becasue there's something in me that does love a Golden-Age style swords against sorcery hero. But I mourn that I will likely never learn the end of Imaro's journey, and I'll likely never read anything more about Dossouye. And that's a real shame.

Although, she says in a faint and wistful voice, if you ordered Saunders' two Imaro books right now from Night Shade, and told them how sad you are that they are not going to publish any more of Saunders' books, and promised to buy anything of his they print if they'd only reconsider, well then, maybe...