If you’re going to visit Middle Earth, then you need to visit Gondor. I’m staying in a nice little apartment next to the ratcatcher. I first read Lord of the Rings when I was in High School. It was the book that everybody was reading. It was kind of the Harry Potter of its day, I suppose. I still love it.
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Right now The Steel Dragon is in the slush pile at Baen books waiting to be read. It’s been there for four months and so I don’t expect to hear anything else for another five at least. When I wrote the book, I thought of it as one long novel (about 660,000 words). Once I was done, I decided it needed to be a trilogy and I began to think of it as my Lord of the Rings. In either form, it has a long and complete epilogue which tells what happens to all the characters for the rest of their lives.
When I finished writing, I really felt bad about not being able to write more about the world and the characters that I created, so I plotted out a story which goes between volumes two and three. Now after reading O Pioneers, I feel like even that is not enough and I want to write much more. I want to take off that epilogue and write out what happens to the characters in book form. I’m still thinking about this, so I don’t know what I’ll decide.
There are a number homages hidden within the text of The Steel Dragon. I think most of them are so well hidden that a reader wouldn’t notice them. Here are some of them.
Percy Shelley’s Ozymandias: I love this poem, so in the third book of the series, I had the characters come across an ancient monument with a very similar inscription.
The Lord of the Rings: There are several little tributes in the story, the most obvious is the title of the third book– The Two Dragons. Besides being obvious, because there are two dragons in the story, it is a tip of the hat to the second volume of The Lord of the Rings– The Two Towers.
Stephen King: I wanted a little Stephen King in my book, so I added him. Most of the characters are not patterened, at least physically, after any particular person. I used Stephen King’s picture as a reference for one character– a wizard.
Honor Harrington: I love the Honor Harrington books by David Weber. I had already created two characters named Hero and Hertzal, so when they needed a sister, Honor seemed a perfect name.
The Princess Bride: I added one word as a tribute to this great movie– Inconceivable!
Hamish Macbeth: This great British show was a source of inspiration for my characters who were police constables. Because of this, I added a little dog, like Wee Jock, to the story. I of course named him Hamish.
Nellie Bly: The girl reporter Nellie Bly is a hero of mine and I used her last name as the last name for my main character. If I write a fourth book in the series, I plan to have a character who is a girl reporter.
Edgar Rice Burroughs: There are dinosoaurs in the story. If that’s not enough, I had a character read a book that was very much like an ERB story.
Sherlock Holmes: There are a string of murders in the book. I set one on a foggy waterfront as a deliberate tribute to A. Conan Doyle’s hero and I gave the inspector a double-billed hat and a pipe.
E. Gary Gygax: I plotted out all three books together as one continuous story. I only added one chapter and that was a dungeon crawl. This was a tribute to the creator of D&D.
William Shakespeare: I have loved the name Hero for a woman ever since I watched Much Ado About Nothing. I had decided I would name a character Hero. The fact that she is a twin is also due to my love of the Bard and his penchant for twins.
Tom Swift: I used the Shopton as the name of the town where some of my characters lived before the story begins. Shopton, NY was the home of Tom Swift.
City of Amathar 