dwaginnes!

For the most recent book club I actually wandered into the bookshop with a list, in a desperate attempt to head off my usual disoriented angst. Naomi Novik's His Majesty's Dragon was on it because I'd heard good things about it from random blog reviews; it was also a Hugo nominee, and won the John W. Campbell award for best new writer. Despite these intimations of quality I had a vague sense that it was a fairly fluffy read, being basically Napoleonic alternate history with dragons: I was thinking Anne McCaffrey's Pern meets Master and Commander. High concept. Fun.

In fact, it's not as fluffy as you might think. It's a pretty darned gripping read: having acquired the first volume for book club (Temeraire in the UK printing), I went straight back the following morning and acquired the second (Throne of Jade). But it's far, far more towards the Master and Commander end of the spectrum than Pern. It's well-written, with a well-sustained voice that reflects the period perfectly; it's also well researched and comes across with a certain amount of gritty historical accuracy. Even the dragons feel gritty and accurate, which is quite a feat. There's none of the fluffy McCaffreyesque telepathy: the dragons are complex individuals with sufficient alienness to be interesting and realistic, and the details of their history, breeding and training feel true to life. They're also bloody enormous, and are crewed by a whole crew with a captain, surgeon and riflemen rather than a Lone, Noble, Heroic Rider. It makes for particularly interesting battle scenes.

The two huge strengths of the series, though, are its central character, and its politics. The main character starts off as a Navy captain, and he's a wonderful creation: a competent, well-born, rather repressed Englishman who fits perfectly into the social structures of his time. He's got a stick up his butt, but you can't help liking him anyway. Watching him come to grips with the very different, and far more relaxed, world of the aviators is fascinating. The political backdrop, and the mere idea of what Napoleon might have achieved with an aerial dragon army, is amazing, but what I really love is the slightly warped but very compelling rewrite of British society (cool gender politics!), and the marginal and ambiguous place accorded the aviators. There's real nastiness and angst, just the way real societies work. The whole thing gets thrown into very interesting relief in the second book, which, as the title suggests, goes buggering off to China. I'm really looking forward to the rest of them.

Oh, and on a vaguely similar theme: courtesy of Making Light, wonderful cartoons drawn for the Guardian Saturday Review by an artist called Tom Gauld. He does cool robots, and has a pleasingly approving attitude to the science fictional: