In ‘George Falls Through Time,’ a modern man meets a medieval talking dragon

Riddled by insecurities and passivity, George is a modern guy whose self-sabotaging behavior has cost him his job, his boyfriend, and his happiness.

Now a dogwalker, a job he also botches, this Londoner suddenly finds the 21st century gone – and he lands in the year 1300. There, he finds hostile and violent locals speaking a language he can barely comprehend, and even more terrifying, a chance at true love with a young man named Simon. Oh, and what with his name being George, he naturally encounters a dragon.

“George Falls Through Time” is the second novel from Ryan Collett, an Oregon native who has lived in London for ten years. Collett started in the visual arts (and still does some animation), but he realized, “I could express myself better with words,” he says.

“If the gray cat is sitting in the window, it’s easier to write that than to draw that,” he explained in a video interview. “I can accomplish a lot more visually by writing than I can with the artistic struggles of making it look how I want it to look.” (He’s also an avid knitter, putting out YouTube videos on the subject.)

Collett’s first novel, “The Disassembly of Doreen Durand,” came out in 2021; he says he’d been contemplating a time travel novel for years but kept putting it off.

“I thought, ‘This isn’t my lane,’” he says. “Then when I finally dived into it, I just thought I’d go at it without any expectations and without any genre considerations.”

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

Q. Why the year 1300?

When I finally bit the bullet and decided I’m actually going to chase this idea, I thought about the most reasonable year where someone could time-travel and figure out the language slightly easily. I landed in 1300 just because I wanted a nice round number, and the language was transitioning from Middle English into something someone could reasonably figure out and assimilate faster from a language perspective. 

Then everything fell into place. It’s a great time period – King Edward and Edward II have this incredible story, but that was just dumb luck. When I read about Edward II and his possible gay relationships, I knew I wanted to fold some of that in at least in the background. 

I thought, if I’m audacious enough, I can loop it into the book. My guiding principle was to put George on the ground and focus on his immediate experience and see where the story took me. It happened to involve encounters with these historical people, but in a natural way – obviously, if someone like George showed up, there’d be awareness that would go up the chain of command in England.

Q. How much research did you do, and how did you know when to ignore it for the sake of the story?

I did a lot of research, but there’s a lot of freedom – any good historian will say, “We have no idea what actually happened there” about events. I felt a lot of creative liberty, but I did cling to silly things like records of where the king was every single day, so if King Edward is somewhere in the book, he was actually there then in real life. That wasn’t for historical accuracy but to help me like a talisman, to almost spiritually get into the mode of writing about these people. It made them feel more real. 

Q. Is the book different because you’re an American living in England?

I wonder if a British person would feel too cringe adding in the elements about King Edward and Edward II. As an American, I think I have the right amount of distance. I don’t have a starry-eyed view of Englishness, but I still have a bit of the tourist in me. I appreciate the history of it, and still go into the city and look at the medieval churches.

Q. Did you name the character George and then add a dragon or come up with the dragon and then change the name to George?

He was always going to be George. The idea is that a guy goes back in time and his preconceived notions of history are completely different, and his modern ignorance gets the best of him. So I thought, “What if something really out of the ordinary happened in the past?” And I thought of dragons, and then I realized there was George and the dragon.

Q. The dragon is a talker, with his own take on modern society and George’s personal failings. Was that planned?

That evolved. Just as I was resistant to writing a time travel novel. I was resistant to going full dragon for a while. So in earlier drafts, he was more of a literal representation of a dragon. But once I turned him into this talking dragon, it just flowed and was really fun. 

He’s 500 years old and travels in time and has seen everything. He eats trash. So it’s a very miserable existence. So I imagined him as this bitter, harsh, misanthropic creature. And when he criticizes George, I see the dragon as showing his real teeth, pun intended, his real awfulness, the monsterness. 

Q. If you could control it, where would you want to time-travel to?

I would like to go to 1300. The book is a kind of wish fulfillment. It’s for all the same reasons that I think George enjoys it. On the surface, being ignorant, it feels like camping all the time, a back-to-nature thing. Obviously, it would not be – you’d have the brutal reality, which George kind of comes to face with.

I was interested in the more emotional aspects of the history that he finds himself in. 

I wanted to make history feel as real as possible and make it as relatable and close as possible. A modern person would have this sense of entitlement, thinking you’re better than the people around you. So George has to realize he actually has no idea how to really just live and be a person. And these people back then are more emotionally in tune with themselves than he is, even though they are undereducated. 

Q. At one point, George lists things he misses – Pringles, Snickers, pizza, pickles, a couch, TV, emails. What would you miss the most?

Those are all the things I would miss, but honestly, I would probably miss the convenience of fast food. So a Big Mac.