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Temeraire Discussion starter 3) Humans and dragons
Were the dragons different enough from humans? Or did they feel like people in fancy dress? A great many different sub-species of dragons are described - did this variety work for you? What about the aviators? Did the description of their enclave within the wider society make sense?
Comments
That's an interesting idea (maybe suggest it to Naomi Novak
) to do a prequel series of the "long species war". Maybe this word's equivalent of House of the Dragon?
This is a case of "... write the story as you would want to do it, then go back and remove the first chapter or two". Novik did not want to write about the long species war and skipped it.
Like @Apocryphal , I thought the worldbuilding of dragons was too contrived. I could believe that many weren't that intelligent, but... they were intelligent enough to become fluent in a human language by just eavesdropping on it from within the egg. And they were competitive apex predators who just happened to form intensely close, monogamous relationships with individual humans. Plus the fact that the dragons didn't seem to have much personality themselves, instead being almost wholly submissive to their human handlers.
They were very much in the mould of ships, who may have a "personality" that reflects their individuality, and sailors and commanders will anthropomorphise them as is the way with any such artefact.
I think the connection between human captain and "intelligent vessel" was done much better in Robin Hobb's Liveship Traders trilogy.
I haven't read those books - I tried one of Robin Hobb's very early books and didn't really get on with it, so haven't gone back to her later ones (which may well be a mistake). I was also thinking of a book you chose a while ago, Red Scholar's Wake as another vaguely similar pairing.
Ancillary Justice, too.