[The Scholars of Night] should have been marketed like The Name of the Rose. You needed to go, ‘We have a great writer who is really fucking brilliant and he has written a book that combines high and low culture.’” —Neil Gaiman
“So easy to get lured into the world of death and double-dealing. Quite an artistic job we have here by Ford, crafty and complex.” — The MYSTERY FANcier, Vol. 11, No. 1, Winter 1989.
“There's a slight Tom Clancy air to the plot, but it's unmistakably a John M. Ford book. It's a technothriller in the same way that The Final Reflection is a Star Trek novel—it has all the requisite elements put together in more or less the usual way, but everything ends up at an odd angle, creating something that is entirely different.” — Science Blogs
“A wonderful kaleidoscope of the imagination." —Poul Anderson
“Extraordinary…both original and dazzling.” — The Cleveland Plain Dealer
PRAISE FOR THE DRAGON WAITING
“An unfolding cabinet of wonders. . . Provokes that rare thrill that one gets from the work of Gene Wolfe, or John Crowley, or Ursula K. Le Guin.” — Slate
“Lots of historical fantasies and alternate histories play games with history, but most of them are playing tic-tac-toe while The Dragon Waiting is playing three-dimensional Go.” —Jo Walton
“A glittering tapestry of passion and betrayal, magic and intrigue. Exhilarating.” —Philadelphia Inquirer
“An exceedingly fine, intelligent, powerful novel.” —Chicago Sun-Times
“Rich and splendid.” —Kirkus Reviews
10/01/2021
Ford, who died in 2006, was best known for science fiction and fantasy (Growing Up Weightless; The Dragon Waiting), but this reprint of a 1988 novel hearkens back to the classics of Cold War—era espionage thrillers. The Scholars of Night were the real-life historians who worked hand-in-glove with the intelligence services—the CIA, MI5, and MI6—solving problems past and present, undercover and under the radar. Ford's complex, convoluted spy thriller follows one games master, American college professor and covert op Allan Berenson, along with his protégé Nicholas Hansard and his lover Ellen Maxwell. After Berenson's death at the hands of the agency most responsible for his work and his ultimate disenchantment with it, Maxwell and Hansard attempt to play—or thwart—his last game. All the while, they are shadowed by their enemies, their masters, and each other. The riddle they're attempting to solve reaches all the way back to the dawn of modern spycraft, buried within the lines of a long-ago secret agent who was more famous for the plays he put on the stage than the acts he carried out for queen and country backstage. VERDICT Highly recommended for readers looking for classic spy stories such as those by John le Carré and Len Deighton, because this work stands up to the best of the genre.