"Although the wombat is real and the dragon is not, nobody knows what a wombat looks like and everyone knows what a dragon looks like." Not a novel, not a book of short stories, "Adventures in Unhistory" is a book of the fantastic - a compendium of magisterial examinations of mermaids, mandrakes, and mammoths; dragons, werewolves, and unicorns; the phoenix and the roc; about places such as Sicily, Siberia, and the moon; about heroic, sinister, and legendary persons such as Sindbad, and Aleister Crowley, and Prester John; and - revealed at last - the secret of Hyperborea. The facts are here, the foundations behind rumours, legends, and the imaginations of generations of talespinners. But, far from being dry recitals, these meditations, or lectures, or deadpan prose performances are as lively, as crazily inventive, as witty as the best fiction of the author, a writer praised by Gardner Dozois as "one of the great short story writers of our times." Who, on the subject of Dragons, could write coldly, dispassionately, guided only by logic? Certainly not Avram Davidson.
Certain facts, these facts, deserve more than recitation; they deserve flourish, verve, gusto, style - the late, great Avram Davidson's unique voice. That prose which, in the words of Peter S. Beagle's preface to this volume, "cries out to be read aloud."
- ISBN10 076530760X
- ISBN13 9780765307606
- Publish Date 28 November 2006 (first published 1 December 1993)
- Publish Status Out of Stock
- Out of Print 13 December 2008
- Publish Country US
- Imprint Tor Books
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 320
- Language English