Early 19th Century Sea Stories With Dragons: The Good And The Bad
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His
Majesty's Dragon (UK title Temeraire)
Throne
of Jade
The
Black Powder War
Naomi Novik
Del Rey, March/April/May 2006
ISBN 0-345-48128-3
ISBN 0-345-48129-1
ISBN 0-345-48130-5
Midshipwizard
Halcyon Blithe
James M. Ward
Tor Books, August 2005
ISBN 0-76531-253-0
Review by Lynn Calvin
Naomi Novik's first three books, His Majesty's Dragon (UK title Temeraire), Throne of Jade, and The Black Powder War, got tremendous early buzz from a variety of sources. This included positive reviews in places like Time magazine that rarely review genre fiction at all, and positive blurbs from a variety of writers including Stephen King. When I first heard about them, I flinched (I flinch easily) because some publicists had come up with a "high concept" of "Patrick O'Brian crossed with Anne McCaffrey" or the slightly less overwrought and more accurate "Dragons in the Napoleonic Era."
Now I like well-done close alternate world fantasies that add fantastic elements to worlds that are similar to the real world. Some are set more or less in the present day and others in various sorts of historical eras. This isn't new, with examples like Poul Anderson's Operation Chaos dating back a number of years, but we are seeing many more of them, with varying degrees of success. Once you add the elements of the fantastic, they aren't alternate history but a sometimes pleasant subgenre of their own.
It is not uncommon that books with comparatively similar concepts get published more or less simultaneously, with the timing making it clear that the authors could not have been inspired by one another. So I also noted the existence of a book called Midshipwizard Halcyon Blithe, by James M. Ward, in hardcover from Tor, with the promise of more to come. (This raises interesting marketing comparisons with the publication of the Novik books in the US as mass-market paperbacks in three successive months, and the UK publication of the three Novik books in hardcover in Britain over a year and a half. Marketing is changing, but from what and to what is less than obvious.)
The Novik books are remarkably well done, and deserving all the positive reviews, and the Ward book an ordinary and undistinguished effort, full of small failures of language and imagination.
Some of the failures in Midshipwizard Halcyon Blithe are those of tone. Early in the book the dialog of common sailors was so reminiscent of the kind of thing you hear on National Talk Like a Pirate Day, that I almost hoped it would turn out to be satiric, but that was not the case. The world is a thinly disguised analog to the naval wars between Britain and France, with Britain being Arcania and France being Maleen. The single-note theme of France/Maleen being the bad guys is not limited to the unsubtle naming conventions.
The hero Halcyon is a late blooming wizard, a seventh son of a seventh son, and rushed through a short course and put on the dragon ship after only limited training, because his family has generations of service to the Navy as wizards. The Arcanian Navy has mixed gender crews with no real explanation of how this is carried out, except for brief references to "the women's wardroom" for midshipmen.
Halcyon is portrayed as alternately clueless and brilliant, with never any explanation of how he can have missed what would seem to be basic magic principles. He commits major magical stupidity that puts the ship in danger, then saves the day from a spy during a battle, and makes friends with the dragon, on whose back the ship is carried.
In the end I really didn't care. The book is too closely modeled on Britain to ignore, but the changes made are full of infodump details that don't matter. I am utterly sure that the Articles of War in this book, which include references to Wizardry, were all figured out by the author but so what? It isn't a game manual. The Arcania portrayed in the background is a stereotype of Britain and British history and society, evidently based on a skimpy reading of fiction rather than any understanding of the history of either Napoleonic-era Britain or the wider world in which it existed. A throwaway mention of a titled female member of the nobility running an inn is an example. I find myself unwilling to believe that nobility in this society might do that sort of thing, or that the noblewoman in question was doing what she did through need or caprice.
It is possible that the author may yet be able to shake off his history of writing Dungeons and Dragons-related materials, and look more deeply at his source materials. Tor also did him no favor in that it seems clear that the book was more nearly pointed at a youth and young adult market, and yet there no formal indication of that other than the age of the protagonist. But even youth and young adults need more story in with their setting and they won't get it here. Ward is clearly a fan of C. S. Forester, Dudley Pope, Patrick O'Brian, and Alexander Kent, but fails in evoking similar interest.
So why are the Novik books so much better?
Will Laurence of the Novik books is a fairly ordinary man, second son of a noble family in a Britain that is very like our of the first couple of years of the 19th century, in a sea war with France. The difference is that in there a limited air corps of enormous dragons, crewed and fought rather like small ships. He's a ship captain, but rather than being special he's a smart ordinary man whose world suddenly gets rearranged by circumstances. He has to meet new challenges to both his world view and his plan for his life. Temeraire, the dragon who is the other major character in the books is a delight, with the characteristic once proposed for good science fiction aliens, thinking as well as a human but not the same as a human.
His Majesty's Dragon starts with the capture of a distressed French ship with a dragon's egg on board. When the egg begins to show signs of hatching, the duty of the ship, and ultimately of its captain is to bring it under control, so it doesn't become feral and useless to England. The closest apparent element to the Pern series is the assumption that the newly hatched dragon will imprint on one person, but setting that aside, most of the first book is the development of Will's relationship with the dragon Temeraire and Will's transition from becoming a sea captain to the captain of a fighting dragon.
What makes this work so well is that Novik weaves the elements of the influence of dragons so seamlessly into the society we know, and that the individual characters and their personal struggles ring true. In particular, Novik manages to take a much clearer look at what it might be like to have a relationship with something large, intelligent, and non-human like a dragon. Particularly in the second and third book, Temeraire, the dragon, asks questions and raises issues about why dragons are treated as they are that make Will uncomfortable. He has no good answers, but that he knows that changing society, especially in the middle of a war, will not be possible.
Novik's history is clearer, more nuanced and more accurate and much less heavyhanded, woven into the books almost invisibly, in a way that leaves you feeling as if the alternate Britain is as real as the real one. In the second and third books Novik goes beyond the commonly used European setting to Macao, China, and the Ottoman Empire. The egg from which Temeraire hatched had been sent by the Chinese to Napoleon, for a variety of reasons that become more clear in The Throne of Jade. The alternate Chinese history we see in the second book is accurate at least to the Emperor, Prince and some of the major intrigues of the Imperial Chinese Court at that time, with some interesting variations on what is going on. Throne of Jade also explores more about the relationships of dragons to humans and the capabilities of dragons as poets and sages.
The third volume, The Black Powder War, again takes place partly outside the milieu of England, with time spent in crossing China and in the Ottoman Empire, before moving up into Europe, spending some time fighting in Prussia including the disastrous battle at Jena. Through all the books the development of Temeraire's character and thought, and Will Laurence's gradual understanding of both the wider world beyond England and issues of right and wrong, make for page turning fascination as well as food for thought.
Another strength of Novik's world is that it is so completely biological and non-fantastical once you get over the dragons, even if we don't really understand how they fly or where they come from. The biology and care and feeding of them feels absolutely real, and in this particular world, there are no additional fantastical elements, and it is not at all clear that the dragons are in any way magical or supernatural. In fact they are treated in rather the opposite fashion in some reasonably brief supplemental appendices, which add to the charm of the books.
I wouldn't say the Ward book is completely worthless, but read about Temeraire and Will Laurence. If you haven't read Forester and O'Brian or even Kent and Pope, read them and skip the Midshipwizard or leave it until you have run out of other better options.
