Into the Light Snippet #14 (nitpicker!)

runsforcelery wrote:

FriarBob wrote:Wow. Even with your track record I still had to see that one for myself.

I never read the dedications. In part because I (almost) never know who the person is. In part because I always assume it's a personal message that's none of my business.

In this case it was partly those but it was also a flare-lit tip off to anyone who'd ever heard of the name before. Unfortunately I am not one of those. I am one of the many folks who has never read ANY version of Dracula and outside of things like wikipedia I probably learned more of the legends from reading these forums than from EVERY other prior source combined.

Guess next time I read a book from Weber, especially one in a new series, I should make sure to google the names... just in case he's (again) dropping another atomic cluebat of foreshadowing on us.

Would I possibly have done such a thing? Moi? That most innocent and transparent of authors? Moi?

Well, actually . . . .

DrakBibliophile wrote:Nod.

David Weber did dedicate "Out Of The Dark" to Fred Saberhagen.

FriarBob wrote:Wow. Even with your track record I still had to see that one for myself.

I never read the dedications. In part because I (almost) never know who the person is. In part because I always assume it's a personal message that's none of my business.

In this case it was partly those but it was also a flare-lit tip off to anyone who'd ever heard of the name before. Unfortunately I am not one of those. I am one of the many folks who has never read ANY version of Dracula and outside of things like wikipedia I probably learned more of the legends from reading these forums than from EVERY other prior source combined.

Guess next time I read a book from Weber, especially one in a new series, I should make sure to google the names... just in case he's (again) dropping another atomic cluebat of foreshadowing on us.

runsforcelery wrote:Would I possibly have done such a thing? Moi? That most innocent and transparent of authors? Moi?

Well, actually . . . .

Is the Pope Catholic? Do bears do it in the woods? Does the sun rise in the East?

I'm sure there are many questions that are more difficult than that.

To cut FriarBob and all the rest of us who missed it some slack, it really is one of those things which are blindingly obvious in retrospect and with the right information, but not necessarily so beforehand. I recognised Fred Saberhagen as being a prolific older sf/fantasy writer, but had only ever read some Berserker stories and maybe seen the swords books somewhere, but I had no idea he had ever written Dracula stories. Like FB I always assume that dedications just reflect the author's personal relationships and don't pay them much attention.

Randomiser wrote:To cut FriarBob and all the rest of us who missed it some slack, it really is one of those things which are blindingly obvious in retrospect and with the right information, but not necessarily so beforehand. I recognised Fred Saberhagen as being a prolific older sf/fantasy writer, but had only ever read some Berserker stories and maybe seen the swords books somewhere, but I had no idea he had ever written Dracula stories. Like FB I always assume that dedications just reflect the author's personal relationships and don't pay them much attention.

True. It is probably only 'obvious' in retrospect. And I suppose I was guilty of a minor exaggeration... it's more like I don't do more than glance at the dedication....

Because this is Weber. If his nickname wasn't mad wizard it would be sneaky somethingoranother. When he's not dedicating something to Sharon or his kids, we should know there's a reason.

Oops.

Randomiser wrote:To cut FriarBob and all the rest of us who missed it some slack, it really is one of those things which are blindingly obvious in retrospect and with the right information, but not necessarily so beforehand. I recognised Fred Saberhagen as being a prolific older sf/fantasy writer, but had only ever read some Berserker stories and maybe seen the swords books somewhere, but I had no idea he had ever written Dracula stories. Like FB I always assume that dedications just reflect the author's personal relationships and don't pay them much attention.

FriarBob wrote:
True. It is probably only 'obvious' in retrospect. And I suppose I was guilty of a minor exaggeration... it's more like I don't do more than glance at the dedication....

Because this is Weber. If his nickname wasn't mad wizard it would be sneaky somethingoranother. When he's not dedicating something to Sharon or his kids, we should know there's a reason.

Oops.

I never read the short story, but knew about it before I read the book. The forward sort of confirmed how the book was going to go. Btw, I loved Saberhagen's Dracula series.

PeterZ wrote:

Randomiser wrote:To cut FriarBob and all the rest of us who missed it some slack, it really is one of those things which are blindingly obvious in retrospect and with the right information, but not necessarily so beforehand. I recognised Fred Saberhagen as being a prolific older sf/fantasy writer, but had only ever read some Berserker stories and maybe seen the swords books somewhere, but I had no idea he had ever written Dracula stories. Like FB I always assume that dedications just reflect the author's personal relationships and don't pay them much attention.

FriarBob wrote:
True. It is probably only 'obvious' in retrospect. And I suppose I was guilty of a minor exaggeration... it's more like I don't do more than glance at the dedication....

Because this is Weber. If his nickname wasn't mad wizard it would be sneaky somethingoranother. When he's not dedicating something to Sharon or his kids, we should know there's a reason.

Oops.

I never read the short story, but knew about it before I read the book. The forward sort of confirmed how the book was going to go. Btw, I loved Saberhagen's Dracula series.

So did I, and Fred became a friend I was honored to know. If I could kill two birds with one stone in the dedication, so much the better, but the truth is that his Vlad inspired my Vlad, although I think I've taken the concept in a rather . . . different direction. He's certainly a different person, at any rate, and I think some of the people who were so pissed off about vampires in the first books are going to be thinking about things rather differently now that Chris and I have finally gotten Book 2 finished.

As I think I've explained elsewhere, the original short story was intended as a "one off" and its vampires were vampires in the classic sense, but more on Fred's model. When I did the novel, I realized there were going to be . . . compatibility issues, shall we say? So I sat back and reconsidered what my "vampires" really were and came to a rather different conclusion.

And, yes, the fact that I invoked Fred's name in the introduction was intended as a signal that this wasn't going to be what it might look like on the surface.

runsforcelery wrote:
And, yes, the fact that I invoked Fred's name in the introduction was intended as a signal that this wasn't going to be what it might look like on the surface.

And yet, after all this time, this is the first I've ever seen the dedication mentioned in the forum.

mutter, mutter, blindsided us all, again, mutter, mutter

runsforcelery wrote:
And, yes, the fact that I invoked Fred's nme in the introduction was intended as a signal that this wasn't going to be what it might look like on the surface.

Randomiser wrote:
And yet, after all this time, this is the first I've ever seen the dedication mentioned in the forum.

mutter, mutter, blindsided us all, again, mutter, mutter

A couple of years after War of Honor and Lady "Elaine" North Hollow stuck her tongue out at her reflection in the mirror, I tend to over-analyze ANY text RFC writes.

Randomiser wrote:

runsforcelery wrote:
And, yes, the fact that I invoked Fred's name in the introduction was intended as a signal that this wasn't going to be what it might look like on the surface.

And yet, after all this time, this is the first I've ever seen the dedication mentioned in the forum.

mutter, mutter, blindsided us all, again, mutter, mutter

Though as soon as Stephen Buchevsky's group of refugees stepped into Romania, readers had a whopping great clue that vampires were going to turn up. It's almost a subset of Chekhov's Gun - if an English language SF or fantasy book has a Romanian setting in Act One, vampires will have appeared by Act Three.

The SF vampires will have a technobabble explanation and the fantasy vampires will be, well, vampires. But they will turn up.

And there was a major clue when Mircea Basarab managed to take Stephen Buchevsky by surprise in his first appearance.

I mean, what kind of person could sneak up on a Marine in "full battle mode"?

Bluesqueak wrote:Though as soon as Stephen Buchevsky's group of refugees stepped into Romania, readers had a whopping great clue that vampires were going to turn up. It's almost a subset of Chekhov's Gun - if an English language SF or fantasy book has a Romanian setting in Act One, vampires will have appeared by Act Three.

The SF vampires will have a technobabble explanation and the fantasy vampires will be, well, vampires. But they will turn up.