In the second novel in national best-selling legend Mercedes Lackey’s richly-conceived new Joust series, the dragonrider Vetch escapes to Alta, the subjugated land of his birth. There, he hopes to teach his people to raise and train dragons-and build an army that will liberate his homeland.
Dragon fantasy from Mercedes Lackey. Here’s her own description of the series.
Why Dragons?
A good question that; there is really no reason (speculation about racial
memory going back to the first primates notwithstanding) that dragons
should be such a persistent mythic theme. The earliest known reference
is in Babylonian literature, to the great dragon/goddess Tiamat, and the
latest known populate the shelves of the fantasy section of the
bookstores. Maybe it has something to do with the alien quality of
reptiles. Sooner or later every fantasy writer seems to have a go at
them, and I’m no exception to that. This time around, though, I decided
to take several different takes on the subject. Most of the current
dragon literature treats dragons as on a par with humans insofar as
intelligence goes. I decided to treat them instead as really big ’birds’ of
prey—featherless raptors the size of small airplanes, if you will. Now, as a
raptor rehabber, I know a fair bit about raptors, and I’m using that
knowledge in handling the behavior, the bonding, and the training of the
dragons in the Joust series. I’m also fascinated with ancient history, in
particular, the history of Egypt, and I’d wanted to do something in the
nature of a fantasy in that setting, but there’s a bit of a problem with
that. Egyptian scholars are some of the nit-pickiest people on the planet,
and as Barbara Mertz (aka mystery writer Elizabeth Peters) has pointed
out, endlessly argumentative. They wouldn’t like an Egypt with fantasy
elements; anything I got ’wrong‘ would generate nuisance-letters. Any
book with a lot of fantasy-elements in it would open the floodgates. And
I had always wanted to do something with the Atlantis myth too; alas,
Atlantis doesn’t do well commercially... But, if I took pre-dynastic Egypt
and the conflict between Upper and Lower Egypt, used Atlantis as Lower
Egypt, turned the whole thing into a fantasy setting and added
raptor-dragons...
Ah, now there was a plan! And the more I thought about it, the easier it
all fitted together, and the dragons—oh, the dragons! True
desert-dragons, designed to cope with and even thrive in hot sands. Not
fire-breathing; trying to work out things as big at that which fly and
carry a rider was going to be difficult enough to set up logically. It would
make them, more-or-less, the equivalent of WWI biplanes, with riders
perhaps dropping pots of Greek Fire, or snatching up military leaders to
drop them from a great height, and certainly spying and patrolling from
above. This made me think of the Flying Aces (which I am researching for
Phoenyx and Ashes, also upcoming from DAW) and the way they
initially dueled each other in the air with pistols, and even dropped bricks
on one another, before someone managed to arrange machine guns so
that they didn’t shoot their own props off. Which gave me the whole
Jousters premise, as well. The culture of the ancient world gave me the
background of all of this, a background quite different than the usual
medieval European setting of the vast majority of fantasy today. How the
dragons fitted into that background would also be unique.
From there, everything just flowed. I’m excited, DAW is excited, and we
think this is going to be a terrific story.
—Mercedes Lackey
In Alta the second novel in Mercedes Lackey’s richly-conceived Dragon Jousters series, the dragonrider Vetch escapes to Alta, the subjugated land of his birth. There, he hopes to teach his people to raise and train dragons—and build an army that will liberate his homeland.
Books in the Dragon Jouster Series
Book 1 Joust
Book 2 Alta
Book 3 Sanctuary
Book 4 Aeyrie
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Links
More about Mercedes Lackey
Heralds, Companions and Velgarth
Mercedes Lackey’s website
Cover artist Jody Lee’s website.
The DAW Books website
The Tor Books website
The Baen Books website
The Secret World Chronicle website
