I came late to Naomi Novik’s celebrated series. I’d heard of it, of course: it was a huge bestseller, and everyone was talking about it. By the time I worked my way down to it in the TBR pile, the epic was five or six volumes in. On the one hand, late to the party. On the other: marathon read!
I’d known from the beginning that I had to at least try it. Patrick O’Brian meets Anne McCaffrey—that’s two of my favorite fandoms intersecting. Not to mention the spirit of Jane Austen wafting over it all.
There’s always a worry when a younger author pays homage to the Great Old Ones. Will it work? Will the homage come up to the expectations of its lineage? Bestsellerdom is no guarantee. Lord knows how much Jane Austen fanfic has topped the lists, purely because of Austen’s name. Some of it is actively painful to read, if one has any sense of the original at all.
Fortunately Temeraire’s series, like the dragon of that name, has bred true. It’s the real deal. It not only gets it right, it does so through nine volumes.
It starts off pretty much where Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey and Maturin series does, with a British Naval captain during the Napoleonic Wars. We meet Captain Will Laurence on the deck of his ship, fighting the French. He wins the battle and the prize, a ship that carries unexpected and disconcerting cargo: a dragon’s egg.
This is a world full of dragons. They’re numerous in the wild, and they’ve been domesticated for use as weapons of war. From Laurence’s perspective however, the Aerial Corps is very much inferior to the Navy or even the Army, and aviators are a universally despised class. To be an aviator is to be a kind of outcast.
But dragons are tremendously valuable to the war effort, and a dragon’s egg is a major prize. This egg is perilously close to hatching, but the ship is weeks away from any dragon covert. Someone on board will have to harness the hatchling immediately or, Laurence is assured by the ship’s doctor, the creature will escape and go feral. This cannot be allowed to happen. Britain needs every dragon it can get.
It’s an unhappy situation. Laurence knows his duty, as distasteful as it may be. He gathers his officers to draw lots, and the loser will harness the dragon.
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Or at least that’s the plan. As often happens in war, the plan does not survive engagement with the enemy—or in this case, a very young, very articulate, very self-willed creature who has no use for the terrified and effectively helpless would-be dragon-tamer. Laurence has no choice but to do it himself.
He knows what this means. He’s killed his naval career. He’s pretty completely shut down his relationship with his father the Earl, who is already less than thrilled with Laurence’s original choice of occupation. He’s sacrificed his entire future for the hatchling who requests that he give it a name; rather in desperation, Laurence calls it Temeraire, after a famous ship of war.
What begins as a grudging sacrifice and a great comedown in the world transforms gradually into a profound and lifelong bond between man and dragon. Laurence is a man of unshakable integrity and unflinching honor. He does his duty no matter what the cost. But he is also a person of deep feeling, and he comes to love Temeraire as a fellow sentient being.
At first no one on the ship even knows what kind of dragon this is. When Laurence has occasion to consult an expert, he’s told that this is a rare and valuable Chinese breed, an Imperial. But as Temeraire matures, it becomes clear that he’s something far rarer still. He’s a Celestial, one of the tiny handful of dragons reserved exclusively for the royal family of China.
In the meantime Laurence goes into training as an aviator. He takes a crash course in dragon handling and aerial warfare, learns the secrets of the service into which he has so reluctantly fallen, and fairly quickly is thrown into combat against the armies of Napoleon. He also discovers Temeraire’s draconic gift and inherited talent, which is called the divine wind: a sonic wave that can flatten trees and bring down mountains and sink ships.
Laurence and Temeraire’s journey of discovery spans the whole world. The core of it is the war against Napoleon, and the role that dragons play on both sides. Laurence is tremendously loyal to his country, but his strong moral compass sometimes brings him into conflict with Britain’s politics and its politicians.
The more he learns about dragons, the more his allegiances shift. What at first he perceived as ferocious and dangerous, barely conrollable animals turn out to be thinking beings. Some, like Temeraire, are more intelligent than most humans, and more erudite and better read as well.
By the time the series concludes, it’s taken us from the high seas to Great Britain to China, along the Silk Road to the Ottoman Empire, all over Europe, to Russia, to the Americas, to Australia—when Laurence is transported for treason—and to Japan. Laurence and Temeraire serve as a catalyst for change, not only to bring down Napoleon, but to make great strides for the rights of dragons in Britain. Dragon laborers on equal footing with humans, drawing wages. Dragons in Parliament.
There are hundreds of species, of all sizes and shapes, with all sorts of talents and attributes. Dragons that breathe fire. Dragons that spit poison. Dragons so huge they can only live in the sea. Dragons whose scales take almost the shape of feathers.
This is worldbuilding on a truly grand scale. Nor is it just about taxonomy. The effect of dragons on history, their use in war, is detailed and intricate and thought out down to the minutiae of supply lines and the challenges of feeding legions of giant predators.
The worldbuilding itself is amazing, the meticulous research, the weaving of dragons and their capabilities into historical war and politics. What brings it truly to life is the cast of characters. Laurence and Temeraire are a wonderful pair, fully as much so as O’Brian’s Aubrey and Maturin, and they’re supported by a host of greater and lesser characters.
I’m particularly fond of Jane Roland, the fighting captain whose existence at first appalls the very traditional, patriarchal Laurence. Hammond the diplomat is a slippery and frequently exasperating personality, but he’s always interesting. Tharkay the spy is complicated and mysterious and ambiguous in his loyalties. Napoleon is a malignant narcissist and a monomaniac and he can be brutal and ruthless, but he can also be charming and considerate and even empathetic.
The dragons more than hold their own among the human characters. Huge, loyal, phlegmatic Maximus; fiery and opinionated Iskierka; the Japanese river dragon who is almost a goddess, and irresistibly amiable; lovely Mei and terrifyingly pragmatic Ning. The white dragon Lien is evil, but she has reason to be. We can sympathize with her even while we hope she fails completely in her campaign of vengeance against Laurence and Temeraire.
This is one of the great alternate-historical series of the new century. What puts it over the top for me, along with all of its other significant virtues, is the prose. It captures the essence of its period. The language, and the mindset behind it, the world view that informs all of its characters and most especially Laurence, is pitch-perfect. I really did feel, as I read, that I had been transported to the world of the early nineteenth century—with dragons. So. Many. Dragons.
Judith Tarr is a lifelong horse person. She supports her habit by writing works of fantasy and science fiction as well as historical novels, many of which have been published as ebooks. She’s written a primer for writers who want to write about horses: Writing Horses: The Fine Art of Getting It Right. She lives near Tucson, Arizona with a herd of Lipizzans, a clowder of cats, and a blue-eyed dog.
I was captivated by the first book, and continued to be fascinated through several more. But I confess I grew weary of…what?—plot? characters? author’s voice? something—before the end, and dropped the series before it concluded.
I need to re-read this series. I truly loved the first few books of the series but got bogged down later on and never read the last few books. I think Tongues of Serpents was the last one I read? You’re correct in that the world-building in this series is truly remarkable. I love a good alt-history, and this delivers satisfactorily. If I remember correctly, there’s even a fun sequence where Laurence gets to observe Napoleon himself!
And the dragons. Oh the dragons are the best part of this. I love all of them (well most of them) and really admire the work Novik does to imagine and hypothesize how dragons would be supported and how they’d be used in war. I do remember loving the prose too. These to me are what I call “cozy” books in that the characters are for the most part decent and upright individuals who are trying to do The Right Things. the first book especially is just a lovely comfort read.
One of my favorite series. Reread it periodically.
They go to AFRICA in book 4. Africa isn’t the dark continent. It’s the FORGOTTEN continent.
What killed the series for me was reading one of the short stories – the one about Marcus Antonius taming a dragon. My immediate reaction was to think that if the Roman Empire had dragons and by extension, aerial combat capability, the history of the world would have completely changed… That was I think sometime after book 3 was released.
@1 I felt the same way. The first couple of books were fascinating and, as she says, well written, but before the end I stopped caring. It wasn’t as tiresome for me as Wheel of Time and certainly far better than Game of Thrones (threw the first book away halfway through it.) but something worse – it got boring.
This was a fun set of books but I was putoff by a fault it has in common with a lot of alt-histories: all those different choices made and events happening and we still have Napoleon and other figures from our own world
Books 1 through 4 are wonderful but the series weakens after that. I found the trip to Japan to be poorly researched, starting with how Lawrence figures if he knows Chinese, he’ll know Japanese too. Yes, written Japanese evolved out of the Chinese character set but that’s pretty much where any similarities end.
The first four books are good, then the series gets worse. When eventually it resorted to “main character amnesia”, I decided I was more than done.
The thing that annoyed me most (even more than the “let’s make the British look gradually worse with every book that passes” element) was the fact that European territorial possessions and dynasties almost exactly match those of the real world at the start of the series, despite the fact that the series itself shows just how much dragons affect warfare. Why does Britain hold Gibraltar in this universe? How is a covert of dragons supported on Gibraltar, which isn’t exactly known for its good cattle grazing? Why is George III on the British throne? Why even is there a British throne and not still separate English and Scottish thrones (or alternatively, why wasn’t Britain unified way earlier leading to the rule of an entirely different dynasty)? How did William the Conqueror cross the Channel unmolested? Would having dragons able to land behind his lines not have been enough of an advantage for Godwinson to cancel out the disadvantage of having had to forced-march his army south to Hastings after the Battle of Stamford Bridge? Was Caesar still the first Roman to cross the Rhine, if there might have been territorial dragons around to destroy his bridges?
The effect of dragons on warfare has been well thought out, but not followed to its logical conclusion. The staggering effect dragons have on history from the moment Temeraire hatches throws their complete lack of effect on the course of history before that time into sharp relief.
@9 I agree with much of what you say. It seems that the idea of Regency dragon series overtook the effect they would have had on actual history. Having said that I love the changes she subsequently built into the world – the African dragons, the Incan dragons, North America etc. Not to mention the women in the air corps. And I really enjoyed Tongues of Serpents with the early focus on Australia. Overall a very satisfying series which has pride of place on my shelves despite the annoying change of covers and formats
Sigh … I have managed to avoid this series so far, but it seems now I have no other choice but to add it to my ever-growing TBR pile …
I find this criticism odd given that (IIRC) Lawrence is wrong and is clearly shown to be wrong. Do you think that wasn’t a realistic mistake for Lawrence to make, that he should have known better? There’s hardly any level of ignorance about Asian cultures that I would put beyond a Brit of the time, but maybe that’s because I’m also an O’Brien fan and he exaggerated Jack’s ethnocentrism for comic effect?
Anyway, I greatly enjoyed this series, but I have to admit the point about its history being too similar to our own is a valid one. Either you accept it for the sake of the cool stuff it will lead to or you don’t, but it’s not “realistic” as that term is used in alt-historical circles.
My problem was that it starts out with a Turtledove-style alt-history that closely mirrors history except for the dragons then switches to a more comprehensive alternate history.
I loved the first two or three. I didn’t make it all the way through.
I strongly recommend the first one to almost anyone. The voice, the world, the characters of Lawrence and Temeraire, the relationship between them,..,
This is a series I revisit often. It’s a palate cleanser. I will admit that Tongue of Serpents is a bit of a slog. I think every series has at least one book that’s hard to get through. That’s been my experience. Once I finished it on my first read I haven’t returned on my subsequent rereads.
There are lots of things that would be different if dragons had been around as long as this book suggests. We are reading a series about sentient dragons during Napoleonic times after all. That in itself should lead to a suspension in belief. I think it’s enough that Naomi Novik put so much research towards getting most things about the times right.
It had peaked my interest enough that it has lead me to start doing my own reading about Napoleon. He is an exhausting subject to cover but one I wouldn’t have considered reading about until this series.
I can understand why more hard-sf-nal readers might have a problem with the alternate history here. It’s the problem with any alt. hist., in that the earlier the change happens, the farther away the timeline will diverge. Safest route for a writer is to set one’s work as early in the cycle as possible, either at the point of change or soon after. If you do move further down the timeline with this frame of mind, you accept that the whole world will be different. You can’t do what Novik does here.
The whole point of this series is Napoleonic Wars With Dragons. It’s not supposed to be a meticulous reconstruction of a millennia-long timeline. It’s focused on one period, and it introduces the alternate element, and plays with it within that specific period.
I love what she does. Same as I love Bridgerton, even though I know perfectly well that there’s nothing seriously historical about it. It’s a concept. It’s grand fun and she does it splendidly.
I couldn’t find my copies of books 5-7, so for this article I read 1-4 and then skipped to 8 and 9. That worked pretty well.
Novik said her original plan was to have the Napoleonic war with dragons. She knew the world-building didn’t make sense.
I ran out of interest in the series, too, though I’m pleased that that the dangling thread about rights for dragons gets picked up.
I’m not sure what went wrong for me. I think there was a novel about a plague, and very knocked out characters don’t move the plot forward.
It was interesting to see dragons tucked into various cultures, but it didn’t work as well as just plain having dragons.
This thread does suggest that there’s a market for Rome With Dragons. Though it’d also be tempting make them like elephants: impressive, expensive, and relatively easy to beat with the right tactics. On the other hand, it’d be fun to use dragons to highlight how Rome’s expansive ideas about citizenship helped them succeed.
Well, GoT is the War of the Roses, with dragons. This series suffers from the ubiquitous current malady of sci-fi and fantasy authors and movie/show makers: the absolute inability to let a good idea be finished. Three books are good, but let’s exhaust the trope as long as the readers will consume it.