REVIEW: Naomi Novik's HIS MAJESTY'S DRAGON

Naomi Novik's His Majesty's Dragon is on the short list for the 2007 Hugo Award for Best Science Fiction Novel. Last year I enjoyed reading some of the 2006 nominees (especially the eventual winner Robert Charles Wilson's Spin) although I found some of them perfectly awful. This year is no different. I refuse to read anything by triple-nominee Charles Stross after nearly choking on his Hugo-nominated Accelerando last year and this year I have tried to read Eifelheim by Michael Flynn but coudn't get past the second chapter! Since I started this review I have also tried to read Peter Watts Blindsight but failed to finish that also. Not a good year for the Hugo nominees.


I was able to get to the end of His Majesty's Dragon, but this is faint praise. The story is a re-imagining of the hoary fantasy motif of talking dragons telephathically or emotionally connected to their chosen dragon rider. Teen phenom Christopher Paolini has recently energised this topic with his best-selling Inheritance trilogy featuring Eragon and his dragon Saphira. The first two books, Eragon and Eldest have been released and Mad Professah has greatly enjoyed them both, even though they are putatively intended for young adult readers(then again, so were the Harry Potter books!). Of course, the classic "dragon rider" books are the beloved (by some people other than Mad Professah) Pern novels by Anne McCaffrey.


Sadly, although Novik's work falls into this honored oeuvre, it is not as compelling as the Paolini books, although it is probably better than McCaffrey's work. Novik's innovation is that she sets her "dragon rider" books during the Napoleonic wars between France and England. This is a creative and clever twist on the typical dragon rider motif and the first-time author does a good job of invoking the social milieu of the time. It's interesting to have features of historical fiction and fantasy melded together in the same book. However, the depiction of her characters is a crippling weakness. Both the the dragon Temeraire and his rider (called an "aviator" in the parlance of the book) Will Laurence are simply not that interesting to this reader, and there's a secondary flaw in that the dragon is a more compelling (and likable) figure than the human. Paolini avoided this mistake more adroitly and makes Eragon (slightly) more compelling and animated than his dragon Saphira. One can even note this difference in the title of the books. The initial publication title of His Majesty's Dragon was Temeraire in theUnited Kingdom, while Paolini's book was (self-published) as Eragon, and eventually went on to become a publishing phenomenon (and a badly made film released in 2006 starring newcomer Edward Speelers amd Jeremy Irons, Djimon Honsou, John Malkovich and Joss Stone). Since Eragon was superior source material that produced an inferior film adaptation, Mad Professah does not have high expectations for the possible movie version of Temeraire, even if it is made by Lord of the Rings' Peter Jackson.

His Majesty's Dragon is clearly the first book in a trilogy (or more), but one sign that the book fails to connect strongly with readers, although I initially listed Book 2 (Throne of Jade) and Book 3 (Black Powder War) as books I wanted to mooch on bookmooch.com, when one became available I hesitated to have the book sent to me, even for free!

His Majesty's Dragon is still the best of the 2007 crop of Hugo-nominated books that I have read this year and I am not upset that I read it, but instead of reading its sequels, I would rather re-read Peter F. Hamilton's latest books in the Commonwealth Saga (Pandora's Star and Judas Unchained) before his new book comes out in the Fall.

GRADE: C+.