John M. FordBesprekingen

F/SF

The concept is intriguing: to follow the lives of three fictional people caught up in important historical situations, culminating in the death of Richard III and the ascent of "Henry Tydder" to the throne of England (see note below).

The geographical scope ranges from Wales not long after the end of the reign of Owain Glyn Dŵr (Owen Glendower, d. 1415) to the last days of Byzantium in 1453; and from Renaissance Milan (Sforza and Medici families), to England during The War of the Roses.

Yes, it's a fantasy, with vampires, wizards and magic, but also real-life physicians, courtiers, kings, and soldiers, all of whom are convincingly portrayed as main characters as well as the "extras".

The individual stories were interesting, and the threads that were pulled together to weave the fate of Britain were intricate and sometimes elusive, but the author maintained a good sense of drama and believable detail.

Nonetheless, the conclusion was ultimately unsatisfying to me because the characters who were most invested in the fate of Wales had a trajectory from the beginning that was not compatible with its final, historical, end-point in the book.

*Henry Tydder is a kind of mangled version of the name of the victor of the Battle of Bosworth in 1485 who became Henry VII.
The English is Henry Tudor; the Welsh, Harri Tudur.
https://www.walesonline.co.uk/lifestyle/nostalgia/welsh-history-month-harri-tudu.....

PG-13: some mild sexual innuendo and situations; violence, although not too graphic.½

Wow. This is one of the most intricate, complex, multilayered, meticulously researched alternative history/fantasy books I've ever read. (If not THE most?)
- It helps if you know your English history, your Shakespeare, something about early Renaissance and Florence, something about ancient Rome and Byzantium :)))) It heightens your enjoyment of the book, as you go through the literary/historical allusions and Easter eggs scattered throughout.
- It was interesting to see John M. Ford imagine a world without Christianity as one of the dominant religions - a world which is more humanistic, more advanced, and is a (somewhat) better place for women than 15th century Europe of "our" world.
- Nothing is spelled out and the plot unfolds slowly. As a reader, you need to PAY ATTENTION and fill in the blanks.
- The magic system is very dark. I don't think I've ever seen its like in any other fantasy book.
- The characters are wonderfully - and subtly - drawn. (I loved Cynthia!)
- This is a book you need to re-read and see what you had missed last time.
- Like many others, I highly recommend Draco Concordans as a reading companion. It is geeky and wonderful, and it's interesting to see what you have missed in chapter x.

I don’t normally write reviews, but after some of the reviews I read here I was compelled to add my voice. This is two books, The Final Reflection and The Hand of Kahless. I was taken aback by this being two books being included under one title, I am not sure why the publisher made that choice, these two stories are only linked by their focus on the Klingons and the writer John M. Ford.
When reading The Final Reflection one has to remember this was written in 1984, the same year the movie The Search for Spock was released. Much of the backstory of the Klingon culture was still “An Undiscovered Country”. And you just have to view that story as a portrayal of the Klingon culture from a different creative viewpoint. Taken in that context this is actually one of the better Star Trek books I’ve read. You just have to get around these aren’t the Klingons we get to know in The Next Generation. There are some brilliant ideas in this portrayal of a warrior race, and some do make an appearance in later stories of Klingons, but not many. But the story is interesting and in the same spirit of most Star Trek stories.
The second book in this saga is the namesake of this review. This also was a good story, written in 2004 and set in the TNG timeline. These are the Klingons we know from the later series and movies. The author did a good job of staying true to the feel of the later television series. I enjoyed this story as well, I could clearly picture Picard and Worf and others speaking these words, and the plot was logical within the setting.
I can recommend both these stories, even though they’re different stories written at different times of both the author and the stories themselves.

A teen living on the Moon plays role-playing games with his friends, feels mildly resentful toward his father, and goes interrailing.

This is a cult sci-fi classic, and after reading it, I don't...entirely understand the hype. I think the subtlety of the plot is the thing that appeals to its die-hard fans, and I'll concede that I probably missed some of the clues that illuminate the water-sacrifice dilemma that consumes the adult characters in the background. There's another review on Goodreads that praises the book as an example of "anthropology of the future," which strikes me as a good descriptor: Growing Up Weightless is absolutely low-stakes slice-of-life sci-fi.

But it left me cold.

Boris wore a sweatshirt, jeans, and sneakers, not new but clean, and carried a backpack. Boris also had a bicycle clip on his trouser leg, although he did not have a bicycle. In Manhattan no one is surprised if your bicycle is no longer where you said it was ten minutes ago.

Sure to become nearly as much a favorite as Diane Duane's RIHANNSU series. If only this were really the way the Klingons were represented in the main series! Well, maybe I will think differently after watching more DS9 and Worf; still.

Another slightly dated one now, but a good read. I probably ought not to have read it before bed during a particularly tired week, since I'm sure I missed some of the detail. But lots of intriguing plot twists and so forth, anyway.½

What should have been an interesting take on a historical scenario was delivered in a completely uninteresting manner. And in several cases an unbelievable manner. I mean, how would they still have Christian names?

brilliant, like so much of John M Ford's work, and i so wish there was more. written after TOS and influential, especially on later series like DS9. told from the perspective of a Klingon Captain, and steeped in game theory. out of this story, in time, came a whole new view of the Klingons, the Federation, and the Star Trek Universe. also, the fact that the book exists, simply by being so good and so influential, makes an argument against suppressing original work that isn't canon.

La historia comienza en el año 1478 en una Europa donde las fuerza de la oscuridad y la magia enfrentan a las distintas potencias.

El Imperio bizantino no ha caído, sino que es más poderoso que nunca y domina media Europa. Juliano el Apóstata, conocido como Juliano el Sabio, consiguió acabar con el cristianismo como religión oficial y la expansión imperial prosigue sin que nadie parezca capaz de detenerla.

En este contexto se produce la presentación de los protagonistas: un muchacho fascinado por un brujo vampiro en apuros en las frías montañas del norte de Gales, otro que presencia el asesinato de su padre a manos de los enviados del Imperio Bizantino a la Galia y una muchacha hija de un doctor en medicina con grandes conocimientos en Florencia. Posteriormente se encuentran en los Alpes varios años después, donde unidos por su odio hacia el Imperio Bizantino se dirigen a Inglaterra para detener su avance.

Ford, John M. Growing Up Weightless. Spectra, 1993.
On my first reading, I underrated Growing Up Weightless. I mistakenly assumed John Ford aimed for a young adult story in the manner of Robert Heinlein but missed the mark. The setting is a near future Lunar colony divided politically and facing several existential crises. It is a territory familiar in Heinlein. Heinlein’s young heroes and heroines overcome difficulties and face the future optimistically. Ford’s hero, Matt, is not so lucky. Matt and his friends look down on the clumsy “slammers” from Earth. Matt finds hating Earth easy. He also resents the strictures of Lunar life and wants to join the crew of an interstellar colony ship. In the meantime, he and his friends entertain themselves with role-playing games and an unsupervised and unauthorized train trip to a base on the far side of the Moon. In the end, Matt discovers that making his dreams come true causes pain for himself, his family, friends, and potential lovers. Ford’s style is subtler and more difficult than one generally finds in young adult fiction. There are no large infodumps of exposition. Readers are like slammer tourists who must learn as slowly what the world is like. 4 stars.

The first 8 chapters of John M Ford's last novel which was unfinished at the time of his untimely death in 2006. A character-driven fantasy set in a steampunk-style world with parallels to our history where magic has replaced engineering.

Coron Varic is a member of the House of Lords in the Republic of Lescoray, representing a northern Coronage which he never visits, choosing to reside in the capital, Lystourel and employing an agent to manage the Coronage. He is one of the parliamentarians engaged in drawing up a constitution; the last king having abdicated some 80 years ago. At the last session before a recess, he meets Coron Longlight from the west who has travelled to Lystourel to seek assistance for her Coronage which is troubled by bandits. This is the story of what happens next.

The action takes place in Lystourel, the house of Coron Strange, Longlight's Coronage, and while travelling on the Ironways (the magical railways). We learn a lot about the world as we progress through the story. Lescoray is bigger than it first seems; it actually takes 2-3 days to travel to the west, and over a week to the north. Religion is based on four goddesses and their consorts, and appears to have elements of Voudoun; the goddesses possessing their priests. Both men and women are equal. Magic is based on craft lines - healing, artificers, and the like.

Overall, a satisfying read but alas unfinished! From Neil Gaiman's introduction, it was near to being finished, although I wonder if it was actually only half way through - the 8 chapters were grouped in 2 groups of 4, perhaps related to the 4 goddesses? I could see stylistically there was a strong resemblance to The Scholars of Night, and to a lesser extent to The Dragon Waiting. The Ironways were perhaps related to the railroads in the Liavek series; there Ford's contribution was the theatre, which again was a element in the plot here, The Dragon Waiting and in The Scholars of Night.

Recommended

495 finished pages of a wonderfully original world built from scratch by a master of science fiction and fantasy who died in 2006 before he finished it. a great loss - it greatly rewards the reader as it is, though, and should be required reading in the field all the same. it traffics in magic that might be performed by engineers, if only engineers had been invented yet, and trains that might be steampunk if magic had not come first. in this fantasy of manners the characters are marvellously complex and tumultuous in their thinking, till they engage the heart. plus, Neil Gaiman has written a fine introduction.

I received an advance copy courtesy of NetGalley.

This is a book unlike any other I've read: it is being published in unfinished form, as the author died in 2006. An introduction to the work is written by Neil Gaiman. I felt leery as I began to read--how rough was this book? Would the lack of an ending leave me unsatisfied? Within the first page, however, I was hooked. The action begins with an artfully-described duel, then goes immediately to a tense parliamentary vote. The pace remains steady from there.

This is what I would as cozy fantasy. There is no major threat. There are no villains. The tension never escalates in the way of most books. I felt like I had the opportunity to hang out with some brilliant, incredibly complex people in one of the great literary salons of a past era, and I simply enjoyed lingering and listening.

The prose is eloquent in a way that made me gasp aloud more than once. ("Only mediocre conversations could be brought to an easy end. The intolerable and the important always found momentum to roll on." "The owls knew me from the other mice." "Society's not just a pyramid, it's a range of mountains; it takes time to level them.") The worldbuilding is deep and intricate; there were some things I never really understood, but I was immersed and didn't mind that much. The setting is a secondary world inspired by 19th-century Earth, though with none of the trappings of steampunk. There are trains and telegrams, and there is magic that is brilliant and unique.

The ending of the book is abrupt, as expected from the warnings at the start, but I can't say that I was left unsatisfied. No, I was left sad. Aspects is incredible even in its unfinished state. We'll never know how it was meant to be revised or to end, or how the series could have developed. What a tragic loss for us all, when this storyteller was silenced far too soon.

There is a lot packed into this short book.

Fun. Somewhat dated in ways

I’ve been picking up books in the Tor essentials imprint lately and just finished The Dragon Waiting by John Ford. A bit clunky at times but it was a real enjoyable alt history / fantasy read. Ford asks a lot of his readers, and it feels like this is one that would really hold up well to a reread.

It also feels like the kind of thing that in a lesser, or at least different, author would turn into a series.

This is an alternate 15th century Europe, brought to us by the brilliant John M. Ford.

Instead of Julian the Apostate, who only briefly interrupted the spread of Christianity in Europe, in this alternate history there was Julian the Wise, who lived long enough to prevent any faith from being banned, and any faith from becoming dominant over the others and being able to ban them. The eastern empire, its capital at Byzantium, remains strong and vibrant--and in the 15th century, is working to expand into western Europe. It controls about half of France, and parts of Italy, and wants more.

In other ways, this Europe is very familiar. Edward IV is King of England, Lorenzo de' Medici is a powerful banker and de facto ruler of Florence. Galeazzo Sforza is Duke of Milan, though in this world he's in the pay of Byzantium, and also a vampire.

We follow a wizard, Hywel Peredur, nephew of Owain Glyn Dwr; a mercenary named Dimitrios Ducas; a young woman doctor from Florence, Cynthia Ricci; and Gregory von Bayern, natural scientist, engineer, and vampire. Vampirism is a disease, and it can be spread, and that turns out to matter, quite a lot.

The story revolves around people with very different original goals, coming together to achieve something perhaps none of them had originally intended. We travel through the beliefs and the ritual and cultural practices that didn't get suppressed by the rise of Christianity, but Christianity is also here, in several different flavors.

This is a rich, lived-in world, and has special riches to offer to those interested in Renaissance Italy, the Wars of the Roses in England, and other absorbing bits of 15th century Europe.

And it's really difficult to say more than that, because this is such a rich, layered world and story.

Highly recommended.

I bought this book.

The legendarily smart and erudite Ford died young in 2006, and Tor Books is bringing his work back into print. Scholars is a 1988 Cold War spy thriller; the discovery of a list of Soviet double agents triggers a round of murder and betrayal, as the lover of the first murdered agent begins carrying out an audacious plan while Western and Soviet agencies try to stop her. Pulled into the action is Nicholas Hansard, a history professor valued by the spooks for his ability to spot patterns and authenticate documents. Also significant is a recently-found, previously unknown play by [[Christopher Marlowe]] which seems to depict an involvement of Marlowe with the spies of his 1500s-era England.

Hansard's development from analyst to field agent is well done. The Mcguffin is a secret computer board involved in warfare command-and-control, a refreshing change from the usual superweapon. The double identity of the vengeful lover is a bit too easy to figure out. Ford, who also wrote excellent poetry, has fun synthesizing verse by Marlowe from the discovered manuscript, and tense scenes with Queen Elizabeth I's spymaster Walsingham. Much is made of board games like Diplomacy, which Handsard and the spooks love to play in their spare time.

I started this book fearing its double crosses might be too intricate for me. However, I followed it without too much trouble - or, of course, it was way too smart for me and I missed a lot. The characters do frequently have realizations about personal relationships that seem opaque to me.

This 2021 edition features a brief introduction by Charles Stross, who also works the vineyard of speculative Cold War thrillers. He reminds us that all such books were and still are written under the shadow of thousands of nuclear weapons, standing always ready to fire.

Well done, but not as good as I expected.½

Dang. Good. Book.

This is a Cold War spy thriller, published in 1988, when the Cold War was still on and fear of nuclear annihilation still felt very, very imminent. Ford was a great writer, and this book gives the lie to the defense for the sexism and other attitudes we are often urged not to criticize in older works "He was of his time." Ford's female characters have to deal with the sexism and misogyny of the time, but they themselves are strong, intelligent, independent, and not treated by Ford as if they deserve the attitudes they have to struggle against.

Nicholas Hansard is a young professor of history at a small college, who also has a tiny toehold in the world of espionage--though he's not entirely aware of it. He just does some research and document authentication for The White Group, and has no real idea what The White Group really is.

The really important thing he doesn't know, though, is that his mentor, Allan Berenson, is a spy, theoretically part of the US intelligence world, but in reality working for the Russians. When Berenson dies, apparently of a heart attack but in fact a carefully staged elimination of the double agent, things start spinning out of control, not just in Hansard's life, but, especially there.

He nearly quits his enjoyable little side job with The White Group, having realized by events surrounding Berenson's death that something is very odd, but is persuaded to at least delay that resignation with the bait of a newly discovered play purportedly by Christopher Marlowe--who was himself a spy employed by Elizabeth I's spymaster, Francis Walsingham. He's given a copy, and sent to England to do the research necessary to determine if it's real.

Once there, he meets a woman named Ellen Maxwell at the British Library, who is also there apparently doing research.

Meanwhile, we are seeing other parts of the story from other viewpoints, including at a military wargaming center in Britain, a joint NATO operation testing new equipment and plans. We also see high-level Soviet (and more than thirty years later, I initially typed "Russian," because the world has changed) operatives in Britain, and the woman who was the number two in Berenson's ring, still working to carry out his plan, which includes a nuclear strike.

All the different threads and players are intertwined in the story, and we can't always be sure who is really working for who. We don't, above all, know who Berenson's loyal and determined number two, going by code name WAGNER, really is, though there's more than one candidate, as well as the possibility that she's someone else.

This is a subtle intricate, and satisfying Cold War spy thriller, with a greater awareness of the distance between social rules and reality than most (not all) of Ford's contemporaries in the field.

Ford died in 2006, and due to lack of a will and a literary executor, and misunderstandings, his work has been out of print ever since. It's a joy to have this book available again after so many years, with the rest of Ford's work scheduled to be published over the next few years. Fair warning: This is his only book that isn't science fiction or fantasy, and this one is, arguably, alternate history, or secret history. The first to come back into print, last year, was The Dragon Waiting, is an alternate history historical fantasy.

Highly recommended, and I mean that not just for this book, but for all of them, as they become available again.

I bought this book

I picked this up a while back because I had read one Star Trek novel, and one Mike Ford novel, but never any of Ford's Trek novels and I'd heard they were good. And then this happened right after I found it, so it was meant to be. And sure enough, this was a lot of fun.

I'm still probably not the best audience for this, because even though I like Trek a lot, "do some extra world-building in someone else's universe and hope it'll somehow match up with all the stuff other writers are making up" just isn't my favorite kind of writing. I can't help reading this like I would a stand-alone novel, and it doesn't really work that way: even though there are almost no familiar faces (there's the thinnest possible frame story to get Kirk, Spock, and McCoy into it for 10 seconds), it does kind of assume that you'll automatically be interested in questions like "What did people on Earth think about the Federation in its early days?" or "Would Klingons ever tolerate Vulcans in their midst?" or "Who invented the transporter first?".

That said, I can see why Ford's version of this stuff has such a good reputation. The world-building, though it's just as shaggy and hand-wavey as Trek always is because of the need to fit with a not-very-planned-out '60s TV show, is way more elaborate and immersive than anyone would've really demanded for Ford to do. He goes above and beyond with making up Klingon cultural details, most of which did not end up being accepted as canon in the shows and movies, because he clearly enjoys it and because no one's stopping him (you can really see this in the early scenes where he spends a lot of time on a complicated gladiatorial chess game—he describes it well enough that a careful reader could probably figure out what this is supposed to look like, but I doubt he expected most people to bother, he just wanted himself to understand the rules). That's cool, but I still wouldn't be so into it if it weren't also just plain good engaging prose with a good sense of drama and character. It's not easy to take a setting where everyone is a super-violent asshole who's obsessed with honor and revenge, and make the protagonist and his friends consistently interesting if not necessarily sympathetic; Ford manages to do that with his Klingons in a way that the shows and movies only intermittently did, giving us characters who aren't out of sync with their ultra-belligerent culture at all (as for instance Worf is) but are still practical in their own way and can even have a sense of humor about their behavior. That falters a little near the end when the Klingons encounter a human who's a brilliant pacifist, and we get a bit of the "aliens don't understand this wisdom that humans have" tone that was so common in earlier SF—it's overdetermined that the protagonist will come to respect this guy and that'll save the day (although it helps that most of the humans don't understand the guy either). And the political back-stabbing subplots are still kind of tedious, but in the action scenes there's a great sense of legitimately brave people improvising under pressure; where another writer might have taken a screenplay-like approach to those scenes and just narrated who was shooting what, Ford makes those details clear enough but focuses on keeping the characters vivid and giving us enjoyable sentences.

I would totally recommend this to anyone who's curious about what a licensed property looks like when it's done in an eccentric fan-fiction mode by someone who is a massive nerd and also has a way with words.

This is an interesting read. John M. Ford reminds me somewhat of Neal Stephenson but maybe a little less didactic. For a complex alt history tale this felt like a well-paced read. As others who have reviewed this book, there were parts of the novel that wandered a bit - but it is well worth the journey.
I find it interesting that this book was written well before some current trends - strong female leads, LGBTQ characters both appear to be well represented in the Dr. Ricci and Dimi characters. This book can be said to have been well ahead of its time- perhaps even timeless in the classic sense.
This book is going onto my re-read shelf.

I finished the book. I got confused in the middle because I am not that familiar with English history of the period and what the book was about. I started it thinking it was a book about the survival and expansion of the Byzantine empire and various people trying to fight against it. The book was really about giving reasons for how Richard III acted. I was vaguely aware that Richard killed off all the possible rivals to the throne including two young nephews. This book explains that he was doing it to fight against various plots of the Byzantines. The main characters and the Byzantines were there just to explain that story. The book was well written and the characters were well done. People would probably enjoy the book more if they read Shakespeare's Richard III play and maybe Wikipedia.