Ejderha Avcıları Okulu-16: Dünyanın En Yaşlı Ejderhası-Yeni Baskı itibaren Beyaz Balina Yayınları içinde LIT biçim

Hazem Safi zoma93 — **This review may have inadvertent spoilers in my rush to say the million things that come to mind after this reading experience. I could try to use that spoiler-link, but it would get redundant and in my way of utter gush that is about to happen. You are warned.** Dan Simmons could start his own religion, and I would build an altar. At the same time, I will never read Hyperion, based entirely on my biased aversion to space-opera. That doesn't matter, because this book is written by some alternate-version of Dan Simmons, a man who can write himself out of an Arctic polynya with one frostbitten hand behind his back and no tongue. He is the Tom Clancy of horror; yes, he writes scary stories, but he writes them so thouroughly, so fully imagined and crafted, that his monsters are not the 14-foot bears or opium-rattled serial killers that forward the story, but the shady hearts of his heroes. Yes, he does immense amounts of research to get you there, but every researched detail adds to his story, and proves his genius at storytelling plausible events with implausible conjecture. Some readers are apparently really mad about how Simmons wraps up this tale, or that he even bothers to include the threat of a man-eating monster in an otherwise thoroughly terrifying historical fiction account. All this great research, incorporating all the known artifacts and discoveries concerning the Franklin expedition composed into a riveting tale, spoiled by a supernatural monster. Not so for me, because the story Simmons has utterly fabricated reads to me as metaphor. From the perspective of the native Inuit, the monster makes a whole lot more sense than the ridiculous English gentleman's urge to waste vital energy hauling an over-packed sledge over hundreds of miles of pack ice so as not to abandon a prized mahogany lap desk or a gilt-rimmed china service. The ending of this book, so controversial, speaks to me about faith and balance and compromise with the earth, in a way that no man characterized on this expedition, no matter how sympathetic, would ever understand, unless placed in the circumstances that Crozier finds himself. Yes, all men are human, with a human's instinct to survive, but Simmons reminds us that without a respect for the Order of Things, our instincts will fail us. It is, quite literally, a communion with the Earth that will save us. I love to tell other readers one of my favorite aren't-authors-quirky? stories about Dan Simmons, how he was researching for this novel (and I don't know how he first got the Franklin bug) when he discovered that Dickens and Collins had written a play about it, and was so fascinated by that that he immediately penned another big, fat, fabulous novel, Drood, based on Dickens, Collins, and their strange friendship. He writes like I read, stringing one fascination on to another. At this point, I've told that story so many times, I don't even know where I heard it, or if it's even true, really. But it's obvious, whenever Simmons gets passionate about something, you'll have a 700+ page vacation-in-a-binding at the end. Next, I'd like to see him spin something from the Fox sisters, whom he only touched on in The Terror, the mid-19th century Spiritists, one of whom later married Elisha Kane, an Arctic explorer who discovered Franklin's first winter camp. This is right up his alley, just be warned, he might throw in a fire-breathing, soul-eating orca just to keep you guessing.