The Dragon and the George
Gordon R. Dickson, 1976
Premise: A man jumps mentally into a medieval fantasy world in search of his fiancee.
I picked up a copy of this off a dollar rack ages ago because I knew it was the (partial) inspiration for the animated movie The Flight of Dragons, a staple of my childhood. This background knowledge meant that I finished the book despite an extremely lackluster opening section.
The beginning reminded me, negatively, of Connie Willis' Oxford time travelers books, in that the characters are unlikeable, insufferable academics. Jim and his fiancee Angie are poor, depressed adjuncts scrabbling for enough work and money to buy a home. Jim feels quite hard done by, by his boss, his landlord, and the world in general. He idly wishes that he lived in a time when you could use physical force against those who wronged you, thinking this would somehow be simpler. As a historian, he should really know better. He also has a weird obsession with Angie's ability to talk people into her point of view, which never comes up again in any meaningful way.
Angie has a job in some kind of wacky research lab studying astral projection, and when an experiment goes wrong, Jim impulsively follows her to what turns out to be a medieval-esque fantasy world. However, Angie is there physically, and Jim ends up mentally occupying the body of a dragon. She gets kidnapped, first by other dragons and then by the "forces of darkness", and it's soon up to Jim to collect a group of brave companions and go rescue her.
It has a few compelling scenes and some intriguing characters, but overall the book left me cold. The ending is especially stupid, undermining any message or point or meaning the book could have possibly intended, instead remaining an extremely boring, very male power fantasy.
By the end, I decided that whoever wrote the movie must have read the book and thought: "Wow, there are a few neat ideas and images here, but the main character and the ending are rubbish. Let's change those completely."
1 Star - Didn't Like It
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