hat happens when you pair a legendary science-fiction painter with a Godzilla fixation and a multi-award-winning writer/editor who spans universes with a goddess named Alyss? If you're very lucky, you end up with a book like Dragonhenge, which marries Bob Eggleton's fabulous dragons with the dragons' creation myth, recounted by John Grant as it might be told by the dragons themselves.
Winner of seven Hugo and 11 Chesley Awards for his science-fiction and fantasy art, Bob Eggleton branched out into landscapes a few years ago. Today, private commissions and other fine arts projects complement his book cover paintings, illustrations and conceptual art for movies and thrill rides.
John Grant (a pen name of the Paper Tiger acquisitions editor Paul Barnett) is best known for nonfiction, including his contributions as joint editor of The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, which earned the Hugo Award, the Locus Award and the World Fantasy Award, among other honors. Also a critically acclaimed fiction writer, Grant has written novels including Albion (1991), The World (1992) and the recently released illustrated novel The Far Enough Window.
With Dragonhenge, which came first: the art or the text?
Eggleton: The word: "Dragonhenge." I was penciling a small piece that ended up not in Dragonhenge but in Greetings from Earth. It was a dragon with a Stonehenge-like structure, and I stuck on the words and literally said, "Dragon-henge!" and wrote it down. It sounded cool. An idea was born.
Grant: They both came more or less at the same time, to be honest. We seemed to be working so closely most of the while that it's now very difficult to work out which came first for any particular piece of the book. Usually the text of a myth would precede the art that went with it, but on the other hand, the myth itself would have been affected by stuff that Bob was doing with the art or with the myths written earlier and so on. ... In my own head I find it easiest to think "joint creation" when the book comes to mind, because as soon as I start thinking "I did this bit and Bob did that bit" I realize it's a false picture.
Did you always envision Dragonhenge as an illustrated book?
Eggleton: Yes. How it would be written—or who would write it—was another matter. Then it just sort of stuck as a project idea, and I proposed it to Colin Ziegler and Cameron Brown [of Chrysalis Books], who also liked the word "Dragonhenge."
Grant: For me it had to be a joint words/pictures work. Bob and I have also talked about it very seriously in terms of a multimedia presentation of some kind, either as an animated/CGI movie, or as a CD-ROM/DVD with images and read text, or a live presentation with screened images and music alongside a reading, or ...
At the 2002 JerseyDevilCon, while the book was still unfinished, we did a presentation whereby I read a couple of the myths as Bob projected slides behind me. It was a bit of a shambles—the projector arrived a half-hour after we'd been scheduled to start, we couldn't get the lights low; but unless the audience members were flat-out lying to us afterwards it was still pretty effective.
How did the partnership work?
Eggleton: Lots of banter back and forth. At one point it was to be more of a darker thing—like a Lovecraftian romp—but we decided that was not the way to go.
I think it even started off with "It was a dark and stormy night ...," jokingly. Then Paul threw this curve ball and came up with this "sketch" about Quinmeartha's Dream, and I said, "That's it!" I also had a sketch in my sketchbook that was an early concept of this idea—a dragon vomiting forth a fountain of fire; this of course became the creation myth of the universe being brought forth. It was fluid, and the drawings came out as such.
Once the collaboration was full swing, how much give and take was there between the art and the story?
Eggleton: Well, I threw ideas at [John]. And he threw chunks of "legends" at me. One problem we both had was the fact that other projects required our attentions, and this was complicated by the fact that Paper Tiger has a relatively short turnaround time when they want stuff in for production.
However, that has one a good side effect. I hate projects that go on forever. I like a start and a finish, and I like the lead time to be relatively short so that the project doesn't become monotonous. I know artists who work on projects that go on forever and they never finish them. I can't work that way. I set deadlines for myself. In fact, as I recall we ended up getting this in before the final due date was at hand. I was really amazed at what [John] wrote. He's truly a master wordsmith, and I was even worried that I might not measure up!
Bob, your Dragonhenge paintings appear to incorporate everything from oils to what looks like melted wax fused to the painting surface. What prompted you to try so many media in a single project?
Eggleton: Art is exploration. Exploring a new technique keeps you fresh. I had seen some work by Yoshitaka Amano, a Japanese artist and found he was inspired by Gustav Klimt. I wanted a more "Eastern" feel to the work, in fact. It was "out of the box" thinking. Well, let's face it, [John] wrote an "out of the box" bit of prose. I got very fired up thinking of working again in media I hadn't in years.
Some of the work was done in china markers, which are kind of like concentrated crayons. About 22 years ago I learned how to work with them, in art school. I also used some collage with the use of torn, handmade marble papers, and I put sumi ink onto this. Anything to get away from the traditional way of doing something, though I did a few "traditional" paintings for good measure in the book so there would be something for everyone. But even those are very impressionistic. Also, a lot of artists are out to explain mysteries, and I think the fans expect that. I wanted to create and maintain mysteries for once ... keep people guessing and thinking.
Does this represent a new direction for your fine art projects and commissioned illustrations?
Eggleton: Very much so. I love doing cover art and the "traditional" work that people seem to expect, but this represents a different way of thinking. And that is what true art is all about, to take a different approach.
Did you have a clear idea of your visual themes when you began the work, or the repeated motifs of eggs, crystals and world pearls develop organically as the work progressed?
Eggleton: The crystals thing has been a motif of mine for years. I can endlessly stare at the fractures in a crystal and see different things. I can also believe that they may have indeed hidden powers to them. I like repeating motifs in every work I do. I tend to work in a spiral way, with everything spiraling out from one center. The cracked eggs and crystals represent, perhaps, dreams on the verge of shattering. Then again, they could represent new dreams born.
John, the text for Dragonhenge reads differently than your other fantasy projects. What made you choose this prose style for the intelligent dragons who narrate and populate the book?
Grant: First, I wanted the text to be an oral mythology. Oral mythologies have various stylistic characteristics, such as repetition of stock phrases and reliance on the sounds of words—basically so that they're easier to remember, and thus to pass on to the next generation. Hence, too, rhyming tales—a.k.a. ballads—but I didn't want to go that far.
Also, I wanted this to be a set of tales a dragon might recount, not a human. That meant I had to try to perceive the world as a dragon might perceive it—which meant, of course, devising a dragon mindset—basically, designing a dragon!—before I could go any further. What would be important to a dragon? What sorts of things would a dragon draw upon for metaphor? I gave my dragons things like very keen eyesight—you'll find a lot of visual metaphor—a somewhat dreamy sense of time and dimension, and so on. All of this profoundly affected the prose style as well.
Most of all, I wanted the words to be heard. By this I don't mean I wanted them necessarily to be read out loud—although they work really well that way. No, what I was after was that the reader of the book, who's also the viewer of the illustrations—the "experiencer" of the combination, in short—could "hear" the words and the flow of the "spoken" language just by reading.
How hard was it to get into and out of that mindset?
Grant: Once I was into "dragon-thought" it wasn't too hard to maintain consistency, although obviously at the end I re-edited everything to make sure I had the "voice" right throughout. Of course, as always when I'm writing, this meant that I spent a large chunk of my time, even when not writing, thinking like my hypothetical dragon—disturbing for my wife! Friends and others must have had some stylistically very curious e-mails during those months, as the mode of thinking, and hence of writing, trickled over into the rest of my life.
Many of the dragons' names in Dragonhenge bear a striking resemblance to the names of the gods and heroes of your books Albion and The World. What relationship do the characters in Dragonhenge bear to their forebears in your other works?
Grant: People who've read a lot of my fiction will know that much of it fits into an elaborate fantasy cosmology connected with a structure that I call the polycosmos—which has something in common with Mike Moorcock's "multiverse" but is far more of a physical reification, not just a purely conceptual, almost meta-fictional one.
There are two main, overlapping strands to this comology/mythology: One is developed most strongly in Albion and The World, the other saw its first full flowering in a short novel written some while ago but only just recently published by Cosmos: Qinmeartha and the Girl-Child LoChi. There are ripples from the whole construct even in such seemingly quite separate fictions as the also recently published—this time by BeWrite—novel The Far-Enough Window. That book looks like merely a "fairy tale for grownups of all ages," as it says in the book's strap-line, and it can certainly be read as such. But there are underlying themes from, particularly, the Qinmeartha/Girl-Child LoChi part of the cosmology.
The full unification of the two branches is planned for a novel called The Spider, but both are fairly strongly present in Dragonhenge as well. It's far, far more than just the same names resurfacing, this time being given to dragons rather than more conventional characters. In other words, Dragonhenge is part of this overall fantasy construct of mine.
How much do the musings on music, laughter and love in Dragonhenge reflect your personal philosophies?
Grant: I'm not sure how much they do—but then, if you think about it, I'd be the last to know if they did! As far as I'm concerned, the philosophies are dragon philosophies, not mine.
Eggleton: To me, part of it was to explore, part of it was my love of kaiju—Japanese word for "mythical monsters"—and part of it was to turn some of my previous thinking on its ear. I'm very spiritual, but not in the "religious" sense. I do believe in something beyond all this that science can't explain and shouldn't try to.
Would you ever consider collaborating on future projects?
Eggleton: Funny you should ask that. ...
Grant: We're at an advanced stage in planning a follow-up to Dragonhenge, this time called something like The Stardragons. I'd better not talk too much about it, but we're taking something that would normally be thought of as very much in the province of hard SF and making fantasy out of it. It's all Very Cosmic, man, spanning millions if not billions of years, and it's about dragons but in a way you wouldn't expect, and we're both very excited about it.
What are you working on now?
Eggleton: A lot of things. Soon, a new movie I will be conceptual designer on. Some book covers. And of course, Dragonhenge 2.
Grant: At the moment I'm finishing off a colossal art book, done with Association of Science Fiction and Fantasy Artists president Beth Humphrey, called The Chesley Awards: A Retrospective. After that I have some art books to commission for Paper Tiger, which I'll be doing alongside writing the first version of the text for The Stardragons and editing the texts of the first three novels in the Legends of Lone Wolf series, which I wrote a decade or so ago and which are to be reissued next year by an Italian publisher—a chance for me to get the texts into the form I'd like them to have. Then I'm going to be editing some books by other people and writing two or three short stories that have been aching to be written, before, I hope, finally having the time to write The Spider.
If you could ask your Dragonhenge collaborator one question about the work, what would it be?
Grant: Probably something like this: "Um, Bob, how the hell do you manage to put up with me?"
Eggleton: In answer to John's question, let's just say I have a soft spot for anything Scottish. And, in answer to your own, I guess I'd have to ask him: "Can you ever stop 'logicking' things right out, John?"
Grant: I think that's a rhetorical question. But if you'd like the 5,000-word rant about logic systems and their use in fantasy ...
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Also in this issue:
Ira Steven Behr of The Twilight Zone
