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Review Archive
BOOKS
The Annotated Chroniclesby Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman
TSR; Renton, WA; 1315 pgs; Hardcover; $34.99
Two staples for any impressionable child hell-bent on reading fantasy should be Tolkien's Lord of the Rings and Weis and Hickman's Dragonlance Chronicles, Dragons of Autumn Twilight, Dragons of Winter Night, Dragons of Spring Dawning.
Yes, they're that good.
Fifteen years ago a group of friends stumbled upon something wonderful. They were unlikely heroes set to the most unlikely of tasks: To restore faith and healing to a broken world. And I love each and every one of them for bringing me along on a journey overflowing with excitement, magic, friendship, faith, love, valor, greed, struggle, and above all, Fantasy.
The group of friends to which I'm referring could be the companions from the trilogy; Tanis Half-Elven, Sturm Brightblade, Raistlin and Caramon Majere, Goldmoon, Riverwind, Flint, Tika, Laurana, Kitiara, and yes, even Tasslehoff Burrfoot. Or, I could be talking about Margaret Weis, Tracy Hickman and all of the other wonderful writers, designers, and artists at TSR that breathed life into these characters (not to mention the genre).
But, of course, I'm talking about both groups.
I am happy to announce that they're back. All of them. And they're offering a reprint of the Chronicles Trilogy, bound together and specially annotated, for those of you who fancy yourself the type of Fantasy reader that loves (or needs) to travel every inch of road, know every detail down to individual spell components, and how the creators massaged a world's evolution using nothing more than their imaginations and lot of hard work.
The Annotated Chronicles is a virtual fountain of fascination. Name etymology, backgrounds on idea creation, developmental tidbits, preliminary character and race sketches, little factoids from the creators that sometimes seem apropos of nothing, and (oh yeah), the fulls text from Dragons of Autumn Twilight, Dragons of Winter Night, and Dragons of Spring Dawning. It's all there. A bit like Pop-Up Video, with neither the "pop-up" nor the "video." Just the juicy behind-the-scenes commentary.
The Annotated Chronicles makes a perfect addendum to any Dragonlance reader's collection or any fan of Krynn's companions who dares to say he or she knows it all.
(Originally published in Realms of Fantasy magazine, February 2000.)
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