Captain Will Laurence has spent his life in the Navy, and expects it to continue that way. However, being currently embroiled in the Napoleonic Wars, that life soon comes to an end – but not through death. Instead, having captured a French ship, Captain Laurence’s ship takes its cargo as a prize…a large dragon’s egg, whose inhabitant decides upon hatching that Captain Laurence will do nicely for a handler. In this alternate history, dragons that aren’t paired with handlers tend to go feral, therefore losing […]
From the East to the West
While the novels are all divided into three parts, in some the breaking points between the parts are much more obvious than others – for example, His Majesty’s Dragon basically divided as the initial time between Laurence and Temeraire, their military training, and their time on active combat duty. For others, it was less clear and the stories bled over between parts a lot. This novel almost feels like three novellas united in one book, but in a good way. After the mostly successful mission […]
Now We Know What Would Have Happened if the Conquistadors Had Faced Dragons
Fortunately after the slog that was the sixth novel in the series, Crucible of Gold has many of the elements that made the earlier novels so much fun – lots of interactions between different dragons and an introduction to another part of the world with some very well thought out analysis of how the presence of dragons would have affected global and local history. Over the past few novels, Napoleon has taken advantage of the Tswana dragons’ hatred of slavery and desire to get their […]
In a land down under
With the French pushed back in the last novel, it is now time for Laurence to face the consequences of his treason. After Temeraire and Laurence are crucial to the British victory, rather than continued confinement, the government chooses to deport them to the penal colony of New South Wales, or Australia. After all, Temeraire refuses to go back to the breeding grounds, and the government feels more comfortable sending a rebellious and politically minded dragon to a far away corner of the globe where […]