Review of Naomi Novik's Temeraire
Dragons have taken many faces in science fiction and fantasy literature, including St. George and the dragon, Smaug on his treasure heap, and Anne McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern. With Temeraire, the first of a trilogy, Naomi Novik moves the tradition in an interesting new direction, although perhaps not as far as one would like it to go.
Temeraire, which is titled after the dragon who is the center of the story, is a fantasy set during the Napoleonic Wars in an alternate reality where dragons not only exist, but have been co-opted to use in the military. This is a fasinating era, which Novik has successfully captured: the book is full of nifty little technical details, from the initial naval battle to the composition of the dragon crews and the rivalry between the different branches of the military. The dragons bear names like something from an English birding book, and different breeds are suited to different labors: French dragons, for example, are entirely different beasts than their Chinese counterparts.
In this, Novik is satisfyingly successful in creating a charming and entertaining book. The only place where it falls short is the structure of the human/dragon relationship, which draws too deeply on the McCaffrey model of dragons impressed by a single person who they will be bonded to for the rest of their lives. While unlike McCaffrey's pairings, the dragons can be persuaded to switch riders, it is an intensely emotional and difficult to break attachment.
The story is engaging and well-plotted, promising much for the two volumes that will follow it, but it would have been interesting to see what emerged without using McCaffrey's framework. As on Pern, the female dragons demand female riders, but there is little exploration on how this might affect gender norms - the dynamics of women in the military is barely touched and the conclusion seens to be that military life would render them to essentially, male soldiers in skirts.
The book more successfully uses the English social stratification of the era - the protagonist moves from the high status position of a Naval captain to the lower status position in the Dragon Corps - only to find out there are considerable benefits to what had initially seemed a disastrous change for him.
The physics of the dragons might be explained in a more convincing way - it becomes hard to envision dragons aloft, bearing entire crews of soldiers, and this sometimes makes the aerial battles less engaging, but despite my small quibbles, Temeraire is an enjoyable and innovative read. I look forward to reading more about Temeraire and his Captain.
