The Dragon and the George

Gordon R. Dickson published The Dragon and the George in 1976, and it opens the sequence of novels he called the Dragon Knight. A shorter version of the story had appeared in 1957 as a short story in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and the novel was loosely adapted into the animated film The Flight of Dragons in 1982.

Jim Eckert has a doctorate in medieval history, and he is hoping for a teaching post of his own at the university in Minnesota where he works as an assistant to a professor. He is engaged to Angie Farrell, who is working towards a doctorate in English literature and earns money as a laboratory assistant to a psychology student called Grottwald Weinar Hansen.

During one of Hansen's experiments in astral projection, Angie vanishes. Jim puts on the apparatus she had been testing in order to find her, and his consciousness is projected into a world that runs on the rules of medieval fantasy. The comedy of the novel comes from the collision between his training and that world, and between what he knows about the Middle Ages and what it is actually like to be in one.