The original 1989 cover.
Art by Jeff Easley.
The 1989 back cover.
The cover of the 2003 Wizards of the Coast reprint.
Art by Matt Stawicki.
The back cover of the 2003 WOTC edition.
Everyone was happy with the reception RED SANDS received, so TSR decided to have Toni and me take on the world of Krynn. By 1989 Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman were no longer writing for TSR. The popularity of Dragonlance was still rising, so the time was ripe for new Dragonlance ("DL") books. The first three titles in this new series were styled the Preludes. They were prequels to the events described in the original Chronicles trilogy. (The other two Preludes titles are KENDERMORE, by Mary L. Kirchoff, and BROTHERS MAJERE, by Kevin Stein.) As I recall, by this time Mary Kirchoff was fiction editor at TSR.
Specifically, Toni and I were asked to write about two of the major DL Chronicles characters, noble and knightly Sturm Brightblade, and DL's own Very Dangerous Female, Kitiara Uth Matar. DARKNESS & LIGHT is set five years before the events in the Chronicles. By the way, the ampersand in the title is official, as it appears on the published book cover.
The basic premise was, Sturm would undertake a quest to find his father, who had vanished years before. Kitiara, as befits a footloose adventuress, decides to tag along and see what happens. This was not an unusual start for a heroic fantasy novel. Then things took a weird turn.
As a historian by training and by inclination, I'd always liked the pre-Jules Verne, proto-science fiction written before 1860. Most antique SF is satirical rather than predictive, and grew out of the earlier, parallel tradition of traveler's tall tales. Two tales I particularly liked were Cyrano de Bergerac's COMICAL HISTORY OF THE STATES AND EMPIRE OF THE MOON (1657) and Bishop Francis Godwin's MAN IN THE MOONE (1620s?). These relate flights to the moon by the most fanciful means--Cyrano by fireworks rockets, Godwin by a frame lifted by trained geese.
Toni and I knew the gnomes in the Dragonlance universe were conceived as half-baked inventors and crackpot mad scientists. What could be more natural than to have Sturm and Kitiara encounter a band of gnomes who've built a flying ship? Our plan was to get our heroes to the red moon of Krynn, Lunitari, by means of a giant hydrogen balloon propelled by great flapping wings.
Makes sense, right? Maybe not, but it was a fun conceit. When we pitched this idea to TSR, they were nonplussed. Was space travel possible in Dragonlance, even fanciful space travel? The question was put to one of the senior masters of Krynn lore at TSR, whom we only knew as "Big Jim." Can Thompson and Carter send Sturm and Kitiara to the red moon, he was asked?
"Why the hell not?" That was good enough for us.
The real Cyrano de Bergerac:
it's partly his fault.
(The epigraph reads: "The earth was unwelcome to me/I took my flight to Heaven/To live on the Sun and the Moon/And now I speak to the Gods.")
"F.G. B of H" = Francis Godwin, Bishop of Hereford.
Sturm, Kitiara, and a boatload of silly gnomes accidentally fly to the moon. They're only trying to get to Solamnia on Krynn, but gnomish inventions rarely work properly. After suitably nutty adventures on Lunitari with a race of giant ants, a demented "wizard," and a suave dragon trapped in an obelisk, the gang returns home. Leaving the gnomes, Sturm and Kit find they've landed in Solamnia, not far from their original destination. They split up. Kit grows tired of Sturm's stuffy nobility and unbending sense of honor. The balance of the book consists of Sturm aiding some downtrodden peasants who are being preyed upon by the sinister Lord Merinsaard.
We were asked to write a novel 150,000 words long. This was quite long for an average paperback in those days--more in the John Jakes mode than say, a typical Michael Moorcock novel. Toni and I were young and full of fire, and we pounded out 150,000 words as requested. In those days our method was, after hatching the plot and characters together, I would write a complete first draft and Toni would re-write it as the second. Our deadlines seldom allowed us more than two drafts to start with, though there were always revisions requested by the publisher later. This method worked so well it remained our approach for all our subsequent books.
I wrote on an IBM Selectric typewriter. Previous to that, I used a manual Smith Corona portable. Typing on a manual typewriter was like using a mallet to drive tent stakes. Going from an electric typewriter in high school to the Smith Corona, then back to a feather-touch IBM ruined my touch typing technique, and I've been a six finger typist ever since. Toni was more advanced; she used an up-to-date (for 1989) Apple Macintosh. Typing 150,000 words at an average of 300 words per page resulted in a 500 page manuscript, a full ream of typing paper. When this landed on the desk at TSR, they were appalled. They realized 150K was much too long for their format and asked us to cut 50,000 words.
(Toni writes, "As I recall, they asked us to cut 30K words after the MS. was done as
you say, and then they asked us to cut more when it was in proof pages.
In proof pages!")
Think about that--cut 1/3 of an entire novel out, leaving enough to be a coherent narrative. We also had a close deadline of just a couple weeks to do this.
You can't cut 33% of a story by line editing. We cut whole chapters, deleted characters, and dumped entire subplots. When you cut a story this much you have to follow through the surviving text with a fine tooth comb to make sure the deleted references are completely expurgated--"following the cuts," it's called. Toni really shone at this. She is a superb editor.
The screwy Lunitari moon flight was our favorite part, so we preserved it as best we could. It made up about two-thirds of the 100,000 word novel. The balance of the book was, I fear, a bit mangled, and it some places perfunctory. We trimmed it down as required, sometimes with a scalpel and sometimes with a chainsaw.
The title, DARKNESS & LIGHT, was TSR's. Toni and I wanted to call it THE GUARDIAN OF LUNITARI, or A VOYAGE TO LUNITARI, in homage to Cyrano and Bishop Wilkins, but it was TSR's book, so we got TSR's title. Later, when Spanish publisher Timun Mas came out with their splendid hardcover edition of DARKNESS & LIGHT, they called it EL GUARDIAN DE LUNITARI.
DARKNESS & LIGHT appeared in April 1989, and it was an immediate sales success. It is the best selling book Toni and I (or I alone) ever wrote. It sold 100,000 copies or so its first months and is still available as a e-book today. It appeared on several best seller's lists and has been reprinted several times. In 2003 it was given a new edition with new cover art by TSR's successor company, Wizards of the Coast. Each time it was reprinted Toni and I offered to edit it, to fix errors or narrative clunkers, but this wasn't done. As far as I can tell, the last print editions and the current e-book have the same text as the April 1989 edition.
Although it sold well, DARKNESS & LIGHT garnered a lot criticism from fans. Current ratings online hover around three stars out of five. Some of this criticism is aimed at the choppy nature of the story, natural enough given the severe editing it received before publication. Other negative views derive from aspects not related to the difficult birth of the novel.
A surprising number of fans disliked the concept of fantasy space flight. For them (I guess), space flight is irrevocably a part of science fiction, and they do not like their dream-metaphors mixed. Toni and I have at various invoked the spirits of Cyrano, Defoe, and Wilkins in defense of fantasy space flight, but some fantasy fans are very conservative when it comes to their beloved genre. Swords and sorcery, yes. Flapping, winged ships traversing space, no.
Another group of fan critics objected to our characterization of the existing Weis & Hickman characters: Sturm, Kitiara, Caramon, et. al. Our depictions of Sturm and Kit inevitably differ from Margaret and Tracy's because Toni and I are different people, different writers. We tried to keep the flavor of the original characters but shade them according to the situations we put them in. Some readers were fine with that. Others weren't. That's only to be expected. Working in a shared universe like Dragonlance, this would be a recurring concern.
A few readers just don't like any Dragonlance stories not written by Weis & Hickman. They say so outright. They refuse to read any non-W&H books. Oh well.
Later, DARKNESS & LIGHT was criticized because of a retcon in events preceding the Dragonlance Chronicles. In 2002 Weis & Hickman wrote THE SECOND GENERATION and DRAGONS OF SUMMER FLAME, which revealed that Kitiara and Sturm did more than fly to the red moon that fateful year. Kitiara seduced Sturm, and later gave birth a son, named Steel Brightblade, who figures prominently in the 2002 stories. Obviously, some readers declared, the absurd events in DARKNESS & LIGHT did not happen. It's all a "kender tale"--Dragonlance lingo for a leg-pulling tall tale.
That's OK. Cyrano would understand. People said the same thing about his story too.
The first edition of DARKNESS & LIGHT features artwork by TSR artist Jeff Easley. The 1989 cover is a bit obscure. It shows a poodle-headed Kitiara standing over a fallen Sturm--a scene from the very first chapter. They're only sparring at that point, and the image says little about the rest of the novel. The 2003 reprint has a livelier cover by Matt Stawicki. Kitiara has better hair and perfect lipstick. I'm not sure what the rest of the 2003 cover has to do with the novel. There are still no gnomes or a flying ship to be seen.
DARKNESS & LIGHT has been widely translated. I own copies of the French, Italian, Spanish, and Russian editions. I've heard there are German and Japanese editions, but I've not seen them. There may be other foreign editions too. TSR and Wizards of the Coast used to pass along sample copies of foreign editions when they had spares, but I don't think they always got enough copies to both keep on file and share with the authors.
L'édition francais.
Juste pour toi, Cyrano
The best edition is the Spanish hardcover, published by Timun Mas in 1990. An artist finally put the gnomes' flying ship, Cloudmaster, on the cover. Bravo!
DARKNESS & LIGHT has no dedication.
In 1992, when my wife Elizabeth and I were on our honeymoon in Europe, we happened to spot an array of Dragonlance books in a store window in Ghent, Belgium. In the midst of them were our two titles, DARKNESS & LIGHT and RIVERWIND THE PLAINSMAN (1990). They were British paperbacks, published by Penguin Books. It was a nice surprise seeing your books on sale in a far-off place like that.
Next: Chapter 10 of DARKNESS & LIGHT
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