Hot on the heels of the Riddley Walker annotations project I found a couple of months ago, the extraordinary Zarf1 has produced a monumental cross-indexed reference for John M. Ford’s The Dragon Waiting.

Like the Riddley Walker project, if you haven’t read the book don’t read the annotations. In this case you won’t spoil yourself quite as much, since the form doesn’t reward reader discover so heavily, but you’ll probably decide not to read something that evidently relies so much on noticing and remembering so many small details… Which would be a shame, because you can read TDW without catching even a quarter of the things Zarf has picked up on, and still enjoy it heartily.

(I first read the novel in high school, and believe me I wasn’t keeping track of calendars and dynastic feuds and geneologies and so on… I’ve read it again since, and this work makes me want to read it again.)

It seems that Ford was a fairly prolific science fiction writer (he died last year), even with a couple of Star Trek tie-ins to his name. I think I’ll steer clear of them, but I might have to check out some of his other works — and perhaps I’ll have a wander through the concordance and try The Dragon Waiting again.

Notes:

  1. Author of some damn fine interactive fiction, a bunch of apps and libraries, many reviews and a wonderfully strange column, among many, many other things. [↪]