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.
