The Dragon Waiting is a book out of time. First published in the mid-nineteen-eighties, it's multi-faceted and complex, managing to lay out a complex, believable alternate history, layered over with literary and classical allusion, and then populate it with human (and...ahuman) characters with all the depth, the wants and needs and tragedies and joys of real people. And on top of that John M. Ford builds a story that has you turning pages in anticipation of finding out what happens next and also leaves you wanting more, wanting the end to never quite arrive. And to his credit, while there is an end, there's a sense of roads not taken, of paths unexplored, of possibilities unplumbed - a sense that this is a story in a larger, wilder mosaic. I think it's been in rights hell (or something similar) for some time, having only recently seen a reprint. But it's now available in both regular and e-book form for us all to enjoy, and so here we are.

John M. Ford sets out to portray a world where the Roman Empire (or at least the Eastern half) never fell, where Emperor Justin didn't get himself ill-advisedly murdered in an eastern war, and instead rolled back the adoption of Christianity as a state religion - leaving all the other religions as equal, or more so, than the dominant theology of our modern West. The cult of Mithras is especially present, and delving into their rites and roles is a joy - they're strange, but not alien. And there's other elements at play as well. The Milanese republic rears its head, faced with a resurgent and expansionist Byzantium. But so does Britain, held together by a semi-mythical Arthur, warring on the Welsh and their mountains and their wizards, while holding a border in France - no longer a powerhouse in its own right, but a medieval Casablanca, with a captive and (mostly) impotent monarch.

Oh, did I say wizards? Well yes. Here there be dragons. And magic.  The kind of magic that can kill you quite dead, that allows for moving faster than seven-league boots, but always demands a price, in blood or sanity or, well, something. But they're there, the wonder-workers, if not common then known, incorporated seamlessly into their societies. And with them come, of all things, vampires, one part monster, one part human, struggling for control, regarded as a sickness, as a horror, but not as a legend. Whether they are, whether they can be considered human is something the text explores, while also marvelling at their monstrosity. And again, this feels perfectly natural, in the tale itself, because the history, the context, the story supports it with a mixture of obviously deeply researched detail, and a richly vivid sense of place and person that makes those elements stride off the page, possibly to bite you in the neck or use you as a magical sacrifice. It's a world with he kind of layers of meaning and thought that you usually find take ten books to set up, and here it comes at you from the first page.

 The same can be said for the characters; we have the son of a Byzantine aristocrat, unexpectedly on the run, we have a Welsh Wizard, we have an Italian apothecary, we have a Germanic vampire, and a host of nobles and schemers and noble schemers (and the reverse). And we see them across time and space, and also delve into their motivations and what they want and how they got to be who and what they were, and the price they paid, or are still paying, and the choices that define them - or don't.These are people, and you can feel when they have an agenda, revel in their joy, see their long-held trauma winding tighter, see their tragedies and the way it shapes them. In short, you can see them as people, and in each case there's more to be seen and felt than is said on the page - this is a book that isn't afraid to leave the unspoken word right there for the reader to pick up (or not), isn't afraid to have inference and background behaviour drive the story while the foreground does a magic trick and manages to be both a distraction and vitally important in itself. These are people who have, much like the rest of us, too much going on to see it all realised on the page. They're wonderful and terrible and horrible and delightful all at once, as we all are, and that makes them real, and it also makes us care.

The story I shan't spoil, except to say that it approaches itself from about ten different directions, all of them vital, all of them somehow as important as the others, all of them fascinating - with a denouement which delivers.

This is a book filled with big ideas, which expresses them cleverly, and is not afraid to ask that its reader think, pay attention, and think again. It's also filled with lavish, literary prose and the kind of world and characters that will leave you in a daze as you wrap up, wanting to know more, to feel more. It is, in short, a very good book.