Schierer Space

Due to the final arrival of winter, I had plenty of time on the way in to work today to stare at the license plate of the car in front of me.  I still don’t know what it means. 

Seen on a black (maybe dark blue) Saab: “EMDR HAP”

Anyone? Anyone?

Throne of Jade, by Naomi Novik, I enjoyed as much as the first, and perhaps more. This story certainly has much less direct action, but fills in much of the background history of this version of our world. As a negative it certainly doesn’t stand alone, with not enough explanation of how the characters came to be in their current situation. This is a pretty weak criticism to be certain, and the alternative is usually that annoying exposition that we find in some other series books to fill in what happened previously.

It’s nice to see the dragon main character expand a bit beyond the world of his Captain, but the obsessive nature of all of the dragons to their ‘partners’ borders on sociopathic. I guess this is our hero’s required fatal flaw, but to see it in most of the race lessens them a bit, I think.

There is enough back-reference into the first book’s story to remind us of humorous or noteworthy events in the previous story that they hold together nicely. On to the third: Black Powder War.

Thanks to Bill’s recommendation, I have just completed His Majesty’s Dragon by Naomi Novik. It was a quick read but a fun story with an interesting take on the human-dragon relationship. I see a lot of Patrick O’ Brian’s Captain Aubrey in the hero, especially at the start of the story, and the author does list Mr. O’Brian as an inspiration. It may be that what little I know of British captains in the early 1800’s comes in some large part from Mr. O’Brian’s fiction, so the perceived similarity may be on my part.

I was hoping for a more first-hand experience of what dragon vs. tallship action would be like, but perhaps she’s saving this for a later book (and simply teases us with the second hand stories heard by the characters in this one).
There was also a fair bit of feminine political liberty taken within the Air Corp, as the dragon riders are referred. Mostly I suspect this is to insert heroic female figures into the story line which despite useful exposition to explain I found strangely hard to digest. It’s not that I have any issues with females in the roles portrayed, but I just can’t imagine the circumstances by which this would have happened within the context of early-1800’s Britain. It seems to me that if such liberties were required for the dragons, that these liberties would have propagated into the rest of society by now (since the story states clearly that dragons are not a new discovery by far). Perhaps I would have found it more believable if dragons had been a “New World” phenomenon, only recently incorporated into the Old World culture.

As always I over-analyze, and shouldn’t give the impression that this in any way diminishes the story. I will almost certainly begin on the second in the series, Throne of Jade, tonight.

Somehow I knew it would be Bill who would first comment on the whale. I am somewhat amused and pleased that he most appreciated this one of all the choices. Stay tuned for more options in the future (and at various times of the year)!
If this post makes no sense to you… well I’m not going to explain it, you’ll just have to visit more often.

In case you didn’t know, we’ve been transferring over to a blog & gallery approach rather than the more conventional site we had before. The two sites are connected and will continue to be cross-linked heavily. [Update:] The sites link back and forth via a link at the right side of the top header bar.
I’ll try to post when major new content is added. Most of the image content from the previous site has been moved over at this point.

New additions: Corning Glass Museum (see also post) and pictures from Tasmania (previously on Flickr, but higher resolution now).