Customer Reviews

Realms of Dragons: The Worlds of Weis and Hickman

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1 star:		(1)

 

 

If you want to know more about the worlds created by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, this book will give you a good amount of information on the various settings. The bulk of the book is a comprehensive and considerably detailed encyclopedia separated into five different sections -- each one dedicated to a particular series (i.e. the Death Gate Cycle, the Dragonlance Novels, etc.). The book is also wonderfully supplied with beautiful full-color paintings from the novels, black and white photographs of the authors in the Interviews chapter, and a helpful book-by-book analysis of the authors' various works. The first problem, however, with this potentially great work is that the description at the back of the book misleads the reader. It promises "numerous black-and-white DRAWINGS and MAPS to each world." This is false. There are absolutely NO MAPS within the book, and the only black and white pictures are mostly photographs. It's disappointing because detailed maps would have greatly aided the encyclopedia entries. And a well-structured timeline would have likewise been invaluable and much appreciated. The encyclopedia entries also need more information. Some descriptions are only a sentence long. In addition, the book-by-book analysis in the first chapter completely left out the Dragonlance Novels (which I find particularly sinful, because it was the Dragonlance Series that catapulted Weis and Hickman to fame.) So much more could have been added visually. The writing content could have been packed with meatier annotations and previously unknown trivia. I guess I'll have to wait for another,worthier attempt at these magnificent fantasy realms.

If your looking for an autobiography, novel or a new story, you've come to the wrong place. This is a very detailed reference book FULL of information, with only a little new meterial (like about the author's lives). If you are a longtime fan of the author's, however, this can be a great book to have. After having already read the books of Weis and Hickman, reading this book can remind you what happened, clarify confusing points, or simply bring back memories of a great story.

This book is really really cool. Weis and Hickman are awesome authors, and this book is great for fans of them. It has all their books, from the dragonlance to death gate to darksword, and even some of their solo works like the star of the guardians. I love it, a definite good buy.

Like someone else said, the back cover is a lie - there are no maps. Basically I borrowed this book from the library because of the first 50 pages which contain interviews with Weis & Hickman. This is really interesting stuff, covering :
- their backgrounds
- how they got to TSR
- how the whole DragonLance project started
- how they got chosen to write the books and the incredibly short time frames they had - they wrote the first DragonLance book in under 2 months!

My advice, read this section, forget the rest. It ain't worth buying but definitely worth borrowing.

this book was worse than my grandma's steak