Firedrake by Richard A. Knaak. Questar / Popular Library, 1989. Dragonrealm 1.
Table of Contents
Reading Firedrake
What to Do with Knaak?
Final Thoughts
The materiality and circumstance of our reading certainly affect our reception of what we read.
Some novels that I could not stand to read as a print book, I’ve found palatable, even enjoyable, as an audiobook, afforded new context, mediation, and of course the performance element of the narrator’s voice. Some nonfiction is difficult to follow in the audio format, but an ebook or print book allows me to slow down, take notes, highlight important sentences. And sometimes I find that an ebook strips the novel of… something, I’m not sure what exactly, that makes it difficult for me to connect with the prose or the narrative, to take it seriously as a novel; somehow, the novel as ebook seems more ephemeral, less real, and certainly less tangible. Not always; I don’t mind reading some things digitally, especially nonfiction, but I find the digital format a barrier to my fuller engagement with a narrative especially when a novel predates the ebook. Perhaps it’s a subtle psychological thing, a recognition that the novel shouldn’t be here, that it was meant to be in print—a somewhat silly, if psychologically powerful and materially significant, fetishization of the book as a physical object. But I freely admit I’m a bit obsessed with print, as my essays here testify, since print offers an unparalleled material connection to the literary past.
All of this is preface to a discussion of a novel that many would agree—with no disagreement on my end—represents something like the apotheosis of mass market fantasy publishing’s worst traits and gives us a glimpse at what fantasy, as a print publishing phenomenon, had become by the end of the 1980s: Richard A. Knaak’s Firedrake, the first volume in an eight novel series, Dragonrealm, which spun off two prequel trilogies, a line of eight novellas, and several story collections between 1989 and 2023. The original Dragonrealm novels and first prequel trilogy were all published by Questar, the colorful mass market sff line belonging to Warner Books’s Popular Library imprint, founded in the mid-1980s and replaced roughly a decade later in the mid-1990s by the Aspect imprint of Warner Books.
I’ve tried to read Firedrake three times. The first two times were on Kindle. But I persevered in print, with a third reading, because the novel is somehow highly rated on Goodreads and Amazon, and it was suggested I give it another try when I posted on social media about finding the book too bad to continue on my first two tries. I also decided to finish the novel because it was part of a rather lengthy series, was obliquely connected to D&D’s Dragonlance novels via its author, and I can’t very well ignore something that was so tremendously popular that folks are still leaving positive reviews based on decades’ old fond memories, so popular that the novels are still being reprinted in omnibus format almost 40 years later. In fact, it was these new omnibuses released by Gallery Books (a Simon & Schuster imprint) between 2011 and 2013, and led to the publication of another Dragonrealms prequel novel, Shade, by the same imprint in 2012, that made me aware of Knaak. I saw them on a Barnes & Noble shelf, their covers proclaiming the return of the classic series, and thought “What the hell is this classic I’ve never heard of?”
Ultimately, I can’t say reading Firedrake in print changed my taste for the novel. It is, to be blunt, a very bad novel, just so hilariously poorly written. As fellow sff collector, Will Aickman, put it to me on social media, Knaak lays out everything a novice writer should learn not to do. But reading Firedrake in print confirmed for me again the importance of having the physical object in hand when studying fantasy’s vast dragon’s hoard of the great unread—after all, in print, with slick, artful covers and a fancy dragon logo adorning the series, I can see the appeal, the excitement that the physical objects alone must have generated. Firedrake may be quite bad, often gratingly so, as a literary achievement (or failure), but what truly matters to me as a historically minded critic is not whether a novel is “good” or “bad”—and, certainly, there are many people who thought Firedrake and the Dragonrealm novels were good, even amazing, as evidenced by how many books Questar published in the series and its fond remembrance among fans today—but whether it is interesting, by which I mean whether a novel affords insights into genre or literary or cultural history.
Reading Firedrake
If Firedrake is interesting as an insight into genre and literary history, we have to acknowledge that it is interesting and worth pausing over simply for having been popular and widely read, certainly popular enough for Warner to publish 10 Dragonrealms books between 1989 and 1997. And, moreover, to go beyond the norm for most mass market paperbacks and design a series logo for Dragonrealms, complete with a little dragonhead icon to print on the spine and along the bottom of the front cover. That sort of attention was rare even for titles from well-known authors and demonstrates how strongly Warner felt the books would sell. And they had every reason to believe they would sell well, since at just 27 years old Knaak was a New York Times bestselling author of the Dragonlance novel The Legend of Huma (TSR, 1988). Knaak’s association with TSR’s bestselling Dragonlance books no doubt convinced Questar that Knaak was, if not an emerging talent, at least a good bet for a return on investment, and they appear to have been right. Warner cemented the association between Knaak and the TSR/D&D brand further by commissioning one of TSR’s most famous artists in the 1980s, Larry Elmore, to paint the cover art for all of Knaak’s Dragonrealms novels—a smart move, given how beloved Elmore’s art was, how strongly it was associated with D&D, and how it had come to define (for better and worse) the visual representation of dragons in the 1980s and 1990s. (Personally, I quite dislike Elmore’s art and I especially hate his dragons, which look ridiculous and doofy to me; Elmore was, however, highly accomplished as a landscape artist and so his paintings’ backgrounds always look absolutely incredible.)
Today, Amazon and Goodreads reviews gush about Knaak’s Dragonrealms series, fondly recalling Cabe and the Gryphon in particular (though I have a hard time imagining why; Cabe is as bland a wet noodle as Luke Skywalker), and praising Knaak for his inventive worldbuilding and aggressively dense plotting. I could not disagree more, as I’ll explain shortly. But as a colleague who, like me, also read many Forgotten Realms novels in her youth, pointed out to me: most folks remembering Knaak’s novels so fondly likely read them in their preteens and teens, and their interpretations of the novels are bound up with their nostalgia for that period in their lives. Of course, that sort of nostalgia and especially of fantasy’s ties with youth reading habits is a really important part of the genre’s history, something to reckon with, to both celebrate and critically question. Also, it has to be acknowledged that what people value in writing differs widely not only from critic to critic but certainly outside of the academic-trained or -adjacent literary critic spaces. Many folks value writing that is entertaining for entertainment’s sake, and no more; we might take a note from Merve Emre’s book and take seriously the kind of “bad reading” practices, habits, and investments that lead to the popularity of a book like Firedrake.
And to be fair to Knaak, he wasn’t aspiring to literary greatness as a critic might have it. He wanted to spin a good yarn and sell books. When asked to comment on his career as a fantasy writer for the St. James Guide to Fantasy Writers, edited by David Pringle (St. James Press, 1996), Knaak responded:
First and foremost, I have always tried to entertain my readers. I do not go out and try to write the “Great Novel,” preferring to work on something enjoyable to both myself and others. Yet, while I am a story-teller first, if one reads carefully, one will see the other points I am trying to get across. My main characters are generally the “Everyman,” the regular person, perhaps with abilities he does not yet understand, who becomes caught up in impossible situations that he must solve. The heroes of my Dragonrealm novels […] are prime examples. Whatever one gets out of reading one of my works, I hope that they have at least been entertained for a time. That means I’ve done my job. (336)
And why not? People ate up Michael Crichton books by the truckload, and he could hardly be counted among the literary cognoscenti.
Despite Knaak’s aspirations to entertain, I was most certainly not entertained by Firedrake. It reads like 268 pages of the most annoying guy you can imagine—that one guy you know who thinks he’s magnificently clever because he endlessly quotes “classic” lines from Guy Movies, who has read The Silmarillion but understands that “you just wouldn’t get it” (did he?), and who sees himself mirrored in the faux-genius (read as actual genius) of Big Bang Theory—cornering you so he can tell you about the “awesome” novel he wants to write (only, he actually wrote this novel and it sold thousands of copies), wherein the main character (about age 30, though intellectually and emotionally 16) is clearly a self-insert who just happens to be the most powerful, most talented, most bangable wizard in the history of magic. And he didn’t have to work hard for it; his skills just appeared overnight. Also, the bebosomed ginger elf falls instantly in love with me and wants to bang me. I mean him. Definitely him. This story isn’t about me. It’s about Knaak and every self-insert teenage/twenty-something/thirty-something guy who pines for the Everyman figure to feel valuable in a society that has made being a dude confusing—is it bad to hit on women now?! why don’t they like it when I neg them?!—and has obliterated the American dream while proffering the lie that you, dear reader, can still become whatever it is you dream of being. Like, I dunno, a super-wizard who fucks.
With that frame in mind, then, you can probably tell why Firedrake is a hell of a slog for a book that runs so short. But, fascinatingly, it is packed with plot. A nightmarish amount of plot, really. In fact, that’s all there is to Firedrake, which could be understood as a list of plot points dressed up in cliched phrases and the silliest purple prose, where characters are more like stats-driven D&D character sheets than actual characters, and if there’s any thought or emotion—or, I don’t know, motivation!—behind what’s happening, Knaak has left that offscreen. (To be fair, Knaak was a Dragonlance writer and Benjamin Robertson has argued that part of the appeal of those novels was how D&D-y they were, how you could “see the dice rolls” and even imagine the characters as PCs controlled by TRPGers, allowing players to think of the story as just one possible iteration of the narrative. I disagree to some extent with Robertson’s reading, though it is an interesting one that usefully and importantly remediates a form of “mere genre” fiction that can be difficult to tackle as a literary scholar; I hope to engage his work more fully in due time, but not today.)
The plot of Firedrake concerns a fantasy world, obviously drawn from D&D stock, divided into kingdoms ruled by Monster Manual-esque colored dragons: ice, red, blue, storm, black, crystal, green, gold, brown, iron, bronze, and silver (there was a purple one, but he was killed). Each of the Dragon Kings rules over clans composed of a hierarchy of dragonkind, including fire- and airdrakes, wyverns, and drakes used as mounts (here we see Dragonlance’s idea to put the dragons back into Dungeons & Dragons reduplicated). The Kings can also shapeshift into humans, as can some of the more powerful firedrakes, and they can use magic. The Kings’ subjects include humans, elves, dwarves, ogres, and other fantasy species, but one city—Penacles, the City of Knowledge—remains free from dragon rule, watched over by the bird-headed, lion-maned, human-bodied Gryphon (not an actual griffin, but descended from them). The Kings and the Dragonrealms are ruled over by the Dragon Emperor, the gold Dragon King. The dragons, we are told, are vicious and oppressive, but Knaak never really gives any indication of this. Aside from a few scenes where the dragons go to war and commit war crimes against human cities (par for the course in fantasy novels), there are never any descriptions of the tyranny of the dragons, but I think this is part of a larger problem with Firedrake and Knaak’s overly plot-heavy style, since it affords no real glimpse of the world of the Dragonrealms outside of the necessary facts that make the plot tick.
The novel starts with an ominous meeting of the Dragon Kings during which Gold reveals that a new purple Dragon King might hatch soon, and other Kings reveal they are worried about the potential rise of new Dragon Masters, especially a hidden grandchild of Nathan Bedlam. This scene is a clumsy opener; it is unmotivated plot-wise and serves only to introduce the geopolitics, the Kings, and some background—a war generations ago between the Kings and some powerful wizards, called Dragon Masters—that will be revisited throughout the novel. The scene doesn’t make sense in the story itself, since the Kings have to travel hundreds of miles to this meeting (instead of teleporting, which we learn later is a common magical skill), they all arrive at the same time, and then after five minutes of saying things they know (for our benefit), they leave… It feels like an attempt to create a cinematic intro and it is, to be fair, easy to visualize in dramatic fashion: Dragon Kings in human form riding through disparate landscapes, converging before the towering Tyber Mountains, their pace never slackening as the plunge into dark caverns of Kivan Grath, transforming into their massive dragon forms to hold council about Very Important, Ominous Things, before leaving to their separate duties. But it doesn’t make sense at all as a scene for this novel, this world, these people. Regardless, by scene’s end, we have a catalyst for the plot: there’s someone out there who could cause a problem for the Kings. And that problem is Cabe Bedlam (a stupidly good name for a different kind of character than the one Knaak gives us). Cabe is your average, slightly attractive bartender at a fantasy inn, complete with rowdy drunken ogres and mysterious strangers hiding in corners. Of course, he doesn’t know he’s special. Just thinks he’s a farmer’s son. Fucking—annoyingly—classic.
Cabe is introduced on page nine. By page twelve, a mysterious figure reveals to Cabe he’s the grandson of Dragon Master extraordinaire Nathan Bedlam. By page fifteen, the brown Dragon King has Cabe in his clutches. By page seventeen, Cabe and Brown are hundreds of miles away in the Barren Lands, having traveled there in mere minutes? hours? (Knaak doesn’t keep track of time and space well) by horse. By page nineteen, Brown is dead by mysterious forces (we later learn it was Cabe, using his powers without knowing it!) and a Very Special Sword, a cursed blade made by his evil father, is in Cabe’s possession. By page twenty-one, Cabe has set off on horseback for the safety of Penacles to join with the only living antagonist to the Dragon Kings, the Gryphon. There ends the second chapter. The pace is break-neck, devoid of character, emotion, logic, scale, anything narratively or literarily valuable. Just plot facts listed out ad nauseum: this cool thing happens, then this badass thing happens, then this totally rad thing happens, then—you won’t believe it—this even more super awesome thing happens! Occasionally Cabe will wonder, as all Chosen Ones inevitably do in an attempt to convince readers that there is actually something at stake, how he could ever survive against this or that monster, egads, but he always does; there’s never any doubt and Knaak doesn’t want to take the time to even suggest that Cabe will do anything but triumph awesomely. Thanks, I fucking hate it.
Long, too long, story short: Cabe meets some sexy chicks who are actually evil dragons. His sword is scary to them. He uses it to free a hot elf chick, Lady Gwen, who has been encased for centuries in a green gem and was Nathan Bedlam’s lover. Cabe’s horse turns out to be a super-powerful celestial being called Darkhorse, a living embodiment of the void of the multiverse between realities, who is essentially unkillable. (He’s also written to be super quippy, but it’s incredibly unfunny.) Cabe and Gwen get to Penacles and become best friends with the Gryphon. Cabe’s hair increasingly becomes silver, because that’s the mark of a mage’s power—the more silver, the more magic. Dragon Kings attack human cities because… because they want to stop Cabe from existing? And also maybe kill the Gryphon? But they could have done that at any time during the last several hundred years? Anyway, they do that. The black Dragon King brings an army of drug-zombies to attack Penacles. Cabe’s dad—an evil wizard named Azran who has some serious daddy issues with his own father, Nathan—kidnaps Cabe and tries to turn him evil. Doesn’t work out. Cabe’s hair becomes even more silver. Azran makes a new Very Special Sword, kills a Dragon King, and slaughters thousands of lesser dragons. Cabe is kidnapped (again) by Shade, a wizard who is reborn on the other end of the good/evil spectrum every time he dies, and he just happens to have died at the right moment in the plot to be evil now. Shade tries to human-sacrifice Cabe to awaken a slumbering ancient lost empire of armadillo-people, the Quel, so that he can use them to defeat the dragons and take over the Dragonrealms (Quelrealms?). But instead it makes Cabe more powerful. Now his hair is completely silver—the most silver any wizard has ever had in their hair (pretty cool, right? so badass!). Some elves help Cabe so that he arrives exactly where he needs to be.
Meanwhile, the Gryphon kills a Dragon King. He arrives exactly where he needs to be.
Still meanwhile, Lady Gwen has been doing some recon on why Cabe isn’t old as hell, given that he was born centuries ago, and learns that he was put under a protective spell by Nathan; it fused Nathan’s essence with baby-Cabe, giving him all his powers and some of his soul, and requiring a lengthy incubation period. Convenient (almost as convenient as Gwen being put in stasis in the green gem by Azran at the exact same time, to be freed by Cabe just when he starts to gain his powers). Then Gwen is captured by Gold’s son, the sorcerous firedrake Toma, who secretly orchestrated the whole war so he can become the Dragon Emperor after deposing his father. This is the big revelation of the novel, the reason it’s called Firedrake (the back cover copy actually gives this away…), but it doesn’t really matter. The revelation comes too late to be interesting and Toma could be removed from the novel almost entirely without affecting the overall story. Gwen then arrives exactly where she needs to be.
With Cabe, Gwen, and the Gryphon conveniently where they need to be—that is, all in the same place at the same time—they kill the bad guys (it doesn’t matter who or how, because after 260 pages of build up, nothing the bad guys have done could match up to this trio of completely OP good guys). Cabe learns how to control his magic and is, like, the best fucking wizard of all time now. Bad guys dead, they celebrate their victories and Cabe and the hot elf chick bone. Knaak leaves some purposeful loose ends for a sequel. Or ten.
Sorry, I must have left out the incredible moments of characterization? The scenes where Cabe comes to terms with his father Azran’s cruelty, having been abandoned and left near death before he was rescued by Nathan? The moments of his reckoning with what it means to share the power and memories and soul of his grandfather? Or the scenes where Gwen wrestles with her love for Nathan and now Cabe? Where the chemistry between Cabe and Gwen simmers and finally boils over, making theirs a love for the ages to match Cabe’s extraordinary powers? Or perhaps I left out the scenes of war that scar the land, that demonstrate how terrible the Dragons’ rule has been or, alternatively, how rule by the Dragons has essentially been a deal with the devil, bringing peace and stability but ultimately technological and cultural stagnancy for the humans? (All of these things are said by one talking head or another, but never shown to, much less experienced by, any of the characters.) I must have left out the emotion, the motivation, the character building, the dramatic tensions, the anything that could animate Firedrake beyond the bare bones plot summary above? You’re free to read it for yourself, but aside from a really pathetic scene where Azran has a too-late heart-to-heart with Nathan-as-Cabe about how he was jealous of his older brother Dayn’s magic skills and so became evil, there is nothing more to Firedrake than the barebones above.
What to Do with Knaak?
Firedrake is frankly a bad novel. It is atrociously written and plot-heavy to a nightmarish extreme. I cared about very little in this novel. But despite wasting hours of my life, Firedrake isn’t all worthless and, more importantly, it tells us quite a lot about fantasy fiction at the end of the 1980s.
If we put Knaak’s novel in historical context, we see that Firedrake and the Dragonrealms series debut at a rather interesting moment in fantasy’s history. Or, rather, at a rather notorious moment. If the 1960s and 1970s brought fantasy into the limelight as a knowable, saleable, nameable mass market genre in the publishing industry, the 1980s are often thought of as a fantasy boom that produced some of the worst-quality novels replicating the same ideas ad nauseum and offering little of literary or cultural value. A lot of this gets blamed on Del Rey, the sff imprint of Ballantine Books, for selling some of the more widely published authors who were considered hack imitators of Tolkien. But in the 1980s every mass market publisher had a fantasy line if not a dedicated fantasy imprint and some publishers, like TSR, the publisher of D&D which stepped into fiction publishing in the mid-1980s, pumped out dozens of novels a year. Fantasy was ubiquitous by the end of the 1980s. And with so many novels, there were definitely duds, hack writers, copy-cats, and others who inexplicably sold well, even as there were an equal number of incredible, artful, inventive writers who also sold well (though perhaps not always as well).
It’s the 1980s that many critics gesture to as proof positive that fantasy is a poorly written, intellectually bankrupt genre: nothing good here, just warmed-over Tolkien mimics devoid of style and craft, theme and invention. Pure, unredeemable pablum. The critics who take that tone invariably don’t seem to have actually read much fantasy from the period and thus have not noted its regular inventiveness, including the development of multiple subgenres, let alone the emergence of innumerable talents during what was a ridiculously productive and artistically generative decade for the genre. I’m not interested in gesturing to Knaak’s Firedrake as, say, symptomatic of the “state of fantasy” by the end of the 1980s, but obviously the novel represents amplifies fantasy’s worst qualities to their logical extensions (and even then I’m sure there’s worse out there!). But though Knaak offers warmed-over Tolkien by way of warmed-over D&D, and though he lacks a great deal of skill, he is nonetheless occasionally inventive and wrote novels in a style that captured readers for decades.
So what is good or worthwhile or interesting in Firedrake? I’ll point to a few things: one at the level of narrative structure, one at the level of worldbuilding and theme, and one at the level of what a cultural-historical reading of Firedrake might get us.
First, while Knaak is one of the worst prose stylists I’ve read—his habit of picking a phrase, a description, or a sentence structure, and using it over and over and over is especially grating, e.g. the “He was almost X. Almost.” structure, which establishes psychological stakes only to immediately deflate them—and while he tries to occasionally, if a bit randomly and very unevenly, capture the pseudo-satirical stylings of authors like Robert Asprin through nonchalant, devil-may-care dialogue (all the characters sound the same), Knaak employs one structural habit in his narrative style that I find rather compelling. I’m not sure what to call it, but it is almost certainly borrowed from filmic storytelling. The technique involves a sudden paragraph break which takes us to a completely separate, usually quite distant scene focused on a single action, exchange, or object. Often we don’t know what’s happening or who these people are; everything is new to the narrative and described, like everything else, sparsely. Typically, Knaak’s lack of description is grating, but here it works to his advantage. The spliced-in scene will last a few paragraphs, maybe a sentence or two, then cut either back to one of the major plot threads or to another of these “flavor” scenes. Ultimately, the mysterious events described come into play later. Remembering such scenes and connecting the dots is part of the fun, no doubt, of Knaak’s style for readers who enjoy his work and these flavor scenes, because of their sheer novelty, break up the otherwise absolute tedium of the rest of Firedrake. Moreover, such scenes are among the few that actually give us a sense of the lived world of the Dragonrealms, of regular people and of daily life, especially early in the novel. They demonstrate a kernel of real literary skill where narrative structure and worldbuilding knit seamlessly together.
Second, at the worldbuilding level, Knaak isn’t doing much that is new—unless kingdoms ruled by chromatic/elemental dragons are exciting, but I hardly think so—but he gestures throughout the novel to (mysterious, mostly unexplored) layers of social and political history that together create a deeper sense of the Dragonrealms, a place where the past seems almost to haunt the present. We see this in the Seekers, a species of avian humanoids reminiscent of D&D’s aarakocra (first introduced in 1983), and the Quel. Both are described as ancient peoples who once ruled the Dragonrealms before the coming of the Dragons, who left ruins and secret magics hidden throughout the kingdoms, and who as a result of their antiquity and their magical prowess are incredibly powerful and dangerous. The Seekers are enthralled to Azran by magic and feared by both the Gryphon and Shade. The Quel are seen by Shade as a force powerful enough to overrun the Dragon Kings and establish a new empire over the lands. Both are evil. We also see this theme in the mysterious libraries of Penacles, which give it the moniker City of Knowledge. These libraries are ancient, created by unknown people, staffed by mystical gnomes, and its tomes answer the exact question researchers have in mind, but only in riddles. In the end, the Gryphon comes to the realization that the knowledge of the libraries is more like a trick, that it is not actually knowledge as such, not a source for power that can be exploited; if there is power in those books, the library protects it from everyone—good or evil. The past, here, refuses to give up its secrets, remains mysterious, gestures to greater power that came before, but hides it.
Unfortunately, the past is only manifested in the novel insofar as it is relevant to the plot; plot is all that matters. The great beings and forces of the past amount to little in the face of the heroes of the present. So, too, the Dragon Kings—haunted by the toll of the Turning War against the Dragon Masters centuries ago, waning in power and motivation, increasingly taking human form over their dragon forms, and declining into in-fighting—prove unable to stand up to the challenges of the present and so fade in the light of Cabe and the Gryphon. Though as sparse as his prose and nearly as flat as his character, Knaak’s worldbuilding becomes the source of what is very clearly a narrative theme—a great boon in a novel woefully uninterested in anything but plot—but unfortunately one that does not get developed, rendering inert whatever Knaak might be trying to say (if indeed he was trying to say anything) about history or the nature or power.
Third, I want to suggest that Knaak’s Firedrake can be read as deeply concerned with masculinity and therefore is very much symptomatic of a late-1980s crisis of masculinity. This is especially obvious in Knaak’s investment in the idea of the Everyman, so prominent in 1980s popular culture, embodying the fantasy in Reagan’s America that the good old days are not behind us, that although war and poverty threaten, although the American dream seems to be dying, although Middle America is more a fiction of television than the reality on Main Street, USA, you still can be whatever you dream to be. You are still worthwhile. You have not been emasculated. You may not be the hard-bodied hero, but you are worthwhile. Women will want you, the talented, insatiable, Everyman you. The Everyman is a comfort blanket, an assurance of value in the atomizing, value-draining, rugged-individualist hellscape of neoliberalism. It is a decidedly reactionary fantasy that seeks to claw back meaning for men at the intersection of patriarchy, capitalism, and race, rather than challenging the systems of power that produce the dehumanization and oppression that the Everyman fantasy reacts against.
In the most generous reading, then, Firedrake is a novel primarily about men’s relationship to power and secondarily about fathers’ duties to sons and the harm done when sons are (or feel) neglected. These two themes intertwine in the stories of Nathan/Azran and Gold/Toma. In both cases, father (Nathan and Gold) and son (Azran and Toma) are alienated from one another by the father’s association with power, since the duties of those in power distract from or interfere with the duties of a father to his son. In Azran’s case, he takes Nathan’s busyness as a sign that he isn’t good enough as a son, despite being much loved by Dayn and Nathan, despite having been given all the privileges of an elite life, and so he turns to evil, kills the ones he loves, and loses himself. These are instructive and powerful themes. Or they could be, if Knaak did anything with them beyond exploiting them as hinges for the plot. That this concern about masculinity and fatherhood in particular hovers at the edge of the narrative, haunting it as a critical possibility untouched by Knaak, makes it all the more interesting. And it suggests just how deeply and subconsciously this novel is both about and produced by a crisis of masculinity and especially of fatherhood circulating in the 1980s.[1]
Firedrake is quintessentially a male power fantasy. One where an ancient armadillo-people empire once held dominion. Where your cruel dad might break down and confront the harm he’s inflicted on the world because of his own unresolved daddy issues. Where you don’t have to work hard to be powerful and get everything you want; you were born this awesome, this magical, this incredible, just like momma said. And where bosomful elf maidens want to bang you, yes, YOU.
Final Thoughts
Writing this piece gave me a greater appreciation of Firedrake. It was a slog that, in the midst of it, felt completely unrewarding. But as the foregoing suggests, despite being one of the worst novels I’ve read in a long, long time, Firedrake is not without some merit, however minutely measured. If one were writing, say, a critical look at why critics think of fantasy fiction of the 1980s as “bad,” Knaak would have to be on your reading list (and if you walk away from this imagining Knaak is wholly representative of 1980s fantasy, we gotta talk). And if one wants to understand the influence of TSR and D&D on fantasy fiction from the mid-1980s onward, Dragonrealms has to be part of that story. Moreover, if one wants to study the Everyman/Chosen One/Special Boy figure of fantasy fiction, Firedrake is absolutely essential reading. And as the third example above demonstrates, Firedrake is a fascinating text about masculinity, fatherhood, and 1980s male fantasies that, unfortunately, became a meme about what the generic fantasy narrative looks like.
So, yes, Firedrake is a worthwhile novel. It has something interesting to add to our understanding of fantasy and its development, especially in the booming years of the 1980s. It’s not a novel I’d recommend to folks for the reading experience, nor do I think it’s central to every fantasy scholar’s or critic’s work, but there’s a there there.
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Footnotes
[1] Perhaps this theme is a reversal of the parental concern for children’s engagement with fantasy, especially D&D fantasy, during the Satanic Panic: a repudiation of the parental ethics of care that sought to demonize fantasy—fatherhood as anti-fantasy. That seems to be a stretch too far for my critical tastes, but I’ll leave the thought there in case it’s a useful seed.
Sean Guynes 
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