Black Powder War by Naomi Novik [*]. 2006. Del Rey, 2022. Temeraire 3 [*].
Also read in this series:
Empire of Ivory (2007) (Temeraire 4)
It was the synopsis of book three, Black Powder War (2006), that convinced me to read Naomi Novik’s Temeraire series, a nine-book alternate historical fantasy series set during the Napoleonic Wars in a world where a great many things are the same as in our timeline, except that there are dragons. And they talk. And they fight in wars under the command of humans as battleships of the sky.
I’d long been familiar with the series, having edited a special issue on different subgenres of “punked” sff that included an essay by Megen De Bruin-Molé on “mannerpunk,” which discussed the Temeraire series at length and used the story of William Laurence and his dragon Temeraire as an example of how mannerpunk uses the trappings of 18th- and early 19th-century society to denaturalizing social hierarchies, showing them to be the product of social systems and political power, usually by staging an encounter between the nobility, or at least those privileged by the society and devoted to its hierarchies, and marginalized figures, whether gender or racial others. In the case of Temeraire, Novik uses the gentlemanly figure of Laurence as an eye into the gender, class, racial, and colonial hierarchies of Regency era Britain, though the focus is much more so on the military culture of a world with dragons and is set almost entirely about the Napoleonic Wars. Only rarely—at least in the first three novels—do Laurence and Temeraire glimpse life outside of the Service, and even then it is usually a mimic of Austenian themes.
It’s worth noting that there is a strongly gendered divide between fictions of the Regency period (officially 1811–1820, but often understood as c. 1795–1837) and those of the Napoleonic Wars (c. 1803–1815). The Regency period is best captured in the novels of Jane Austen and the many historical fictions by more recent writers set during that period, calquing Austen’s romances among the gentry, and even sometimes extending the stories of her characters. The Napoleonic Wars are the obsession of military history “buffs” and readers of Patrick O’Brien (Aubrey-Maturin series), Bernard Cornwell (Sharpe series), and C.S. Forester (Hornblower series). Rarely do the two meet, though the latter occasionally (if rarely) include romantic elements.
Temeraire is essentially Hornblower but make it dragons. It lacks the seriousness and attention to historical detail of O’Brien’s Aubrey-Maturin novels. Laurence is not cut from the same cloth as the up-and-coming figure of Sharpe, a lower class man brought up in the ranks of the British army through sheer merit. Laurence is much the figure of Hornblower, a child of the gentry who buys his position in the Navy and then, by happenstance, winds up with the egg of one of the rarest dragons in the world, a Celestial dragon from the Chinese imperial family, which is unknown in the West and was intended as a gift from a rebellious faction in the imperial family to Napoleon. The egg hatches as the overly smart Temeraire, who becomes bonded with Laurence, and the two go off into the Royal Aerial Corps, have adventures all across the world, and eventually—or so the synopses say—bring about representative democracy for dragons in the West.
Temeraire interested me not because of its Napoleonic setting, which I’ve never much cared for, but because of the promise that each novel would explore a new region of the world, a new geo-political front in the globalized world of colonialism and commerce of the 19th century. Temeraire promised trips to alternate historical fantasy China, the Ottoman empire, southern Africa, Japan, Russia, Australia, South America, and more, all within the context of this truly global conflict that has so often been cast as a purely European one. And with nine books to spare, I felt the series would make an excellent companion over the next part of my life. So I dove in.
The series is, up to and including book three, a rather fun jaunt that somehow manages to balance mediocrity with just enough interest to keep me going. I’m simultaneously invested in the stakes of the story—that is, in how Laurence, Temeraire, and their crew get on through their journeys first in Britain, then in China, and, in book three, back from China across Central Asia to Istanbul, then up through Germany, Prussia, and back to England—and also not particularly invested in any of the characters. Temeraire is annoyingly naive and buffoonish, meant to be young and full of ideas, but he comes off mostly as childish. Laurence, for his part, makes decisions that seem always perfectly calculated to complicate or extend whatever plot piece the characters are in, and which are written off as due to his noble, gentlemanly, whatever nature. And Black Powder War introduces a new dragon, Iskierka, who is even more annoying than Temeraire, though it’s meant to be cute that she’s a tiny little baby dragon always scratching for a battle—a feisty little lady, teehee. Mostly, the characters read as rather cartoonish, and they often spend quite a long time langoring about on ships or in captivity or between battles talking and talking about how empire requires duty, how Napoleon is a Really Bad Guy, how dragons need rights in the West like they have in China.
Only the latter—that dragons should be full members of European society, not just war machines hidden from public view—is an interesting undercurrent in the novels and serves as a rather simplistic point of interest for the liberal imagination: dragons can think and talk and do contribute to society, so they should have rights, right? Temeraire is not wrong, and Laurence agrees, but asserts that change must come gradually, after the war, and slowly with the cooperation of the very people who don’t want dragons to have rights. They must be convinced not to fear those whom they deprive of rights, in other words. It’s set up as a point of tension between Laurence and Temeraire that change for dragonkind will not come fast enough. I admit to being interested in seeing how this dynamic plays out and whether this necessitates any major social changes down the road.
Yet, after three books, the ideas about dragon rights and why they should or shouldn’t have them, have hardly progressed toward anything like an interesting political comment. If it is meant as an allegory for colonized peoples or racial others, it’s about as well-made (read: tone-deaf) as the Na’vi of Avatar, since the literal British Empire is the setting of the books. As far as having radical or even liberal politics goes, as a novel series, Temeraire and Laurence never even consider or confront the racial inequalities that exist around them or the fact that the British Empire has subjugated most of the same territory it did in our world. It’s simply a non-issue for both Temeraire and Laurence, at least by the end of Black Powder War, a third of the way into the series. At most, when it comes to radical or liberal politics, the novels address gender by simply including women as pilots of dragons and making that a bit shocking to Laurence, who quickly gets used to the idea—though it doesn’t spark anything like a consideration of gender equality. Temeraire occasionally makes the smart mention of everyone being equal (re: gender) or of him seeing all humans as part of the same whole (re: race, ethnicity, or nation), but such comments have the political backbone of a jellyfish.
One reason I was drawn to the Temeraire series, as mentioned, is that it promised to explore not just an alternate historical fantasy Europe during the Napoleonic Wars, but the whole world. Book one, His Majesty’s Dragon (2006), is set firmly in Britain, with Laurence and Temeraire bonding, training in the Aerial Corps, learning about the kind of dragon Temeraire is, and then defending England against a French invasion. Book two, Throne of Jade (2006), sees Laurence and Temeraire travel to China by boat, south around the Cape of Good Hope and India, because the imperial family has demanded Temeraire back (he was intended as a gift for Napoleon and is the rarest dragon breed in the world, not meant to be piloted by a lowly English officer as a military asset); they go and after shenanigans, Laurence is adopted into the Chinese royal family and allowed to leave with Temeraire. In book three, Black Powder War, Laurence has orders to return to Britain with a stop in Istanbul to pick up two dragon eggs purchased by the British from the Ottomans—fire-breathing kaziliks, important for the British war effort because the British have never managed to breed a fire-breathing dragon. They travel across Central Asia, meet “feral” dragons untrained by humans, and get stuck in Istanbul where the Turkish no longer wish to give them the dragons, as they’ve allied with France now. After shenanigans, Laurence and crew steal the eggs intended for them and try to return to Britain but get caught up in Napoleon’s invasion of the Holy Roman Empire and Prussia. They witness the downfall of the Germans and Prussians, and return to Britain with the newly hatched Iskierka.
The first three books are certainly a whirlwind tour of this alternate historical fantasy world. In terms of worldbuilding, we get very little sense that this is a particularly different world; the introduction of dragons did not upset the currents of historical change, but balanced them roughly the same way. Novik is not particularly big on the worldbuilding details, does not give us many glimpses into how things might be different in a world with dragons, but sticks instead to the details of military life, how dragons would fight, and to the relationships between Laurence, Temeraire, and crew. In this way, the books are again very much like Hornblower, with the narrative limited closely to Laurence’s experience and not allowing readers much opportunity to grasp the world beyond duty to king and country.
In Throne of Jade, Novik provides some detail as to how the Chinese in particular make dragons a regular part of all levels of society, from common laborer dragons to the Celestials who are partnered with members of the imperial family and become great sages. All of this gives Temeraire great ideas about dragon rights and freedoms that could be brought to Europe, a sort of reversal of the Western idea that the East is a land of unlearned barbarians who do strange things—and also an embrace of the Han Chinese imperial ideology that China is the center of civilization, that all others are barbarous. And yet, the second novel never really falls anywhere interesting, politically, with regard to the dueling imperial and colonial ideologies at work on both sides. Instead, Novik presents the ideas at face value and, before they can be addressed in any complexity, she shunts them aside for shenanigans and battles and a need to be dutiful to Britain, events which always conveniently interrupt the possibility of worthwhile political discussions and leave Temeraire and Laurence’s debates about politics and rights very shallow, as though the questions at play were a mere drawing room dispute.
Perhaps that isn’t totally fair, but after roughly 900 pages I find myself disappointed with the missed possibilities lurking everywhere in these books. Despite his trip to China and even his adoption into the imperial family, Laurence remains essentially convinced that the Chinese are strange beings whom he can never fully understand, and what he does understand is all of the common stereotypes Westerners have about East Asia—the somewhat contradictory idea that these are a people with an ancient culture, yes, and many wise teachings, yes (at least, for their people), but they still eat disgusting food, speak unfathomably complex languages, have strange and silly customs, and so on. Despite going to China and spending the better part of a year there, Laurence learns and appreciates next to nothing, except that porcelain is much cheaper here and it will please his dad, and maybe that some Chinese cuisine is sometimes ok (or at least something that one can get used to, if needs must). There is no serious engagement with the possibility that Laurence, like Temeraire, could enjoy Chinese culture and cuisine, that he could feel anything but mild contempt for it all. There is no growth for him except insofar as he comes to grudgingly admit that it might be better if dragons were treated in Europe more like they are in China.
Novik does the same with the Ottomans in Black Powder War, but with broader and quicker strokes. We get only stereotypes of dark skin and thick hair, of the sultan’s harem, and of treacherous people who cannot be trusted, who steal Britain’s gold and refuse to give up the eggs Britain paid a fortune for. These are old, silly, Orientalist stereotypes and it is lazy. Laurence is a learned man traveling the world on the back of a fucking dragon, and yet his experience of these cultures—I should say, Novik’s presentation of these cultures to readers—is not more sophisticated than Hollywood films at midcentury, where every interesting foreign character is a white guy in brownface. Moreover, the Ottomans take up less than a third of the book, a huge letdown since I was particularly interested in their inclusion; as a major world power and, apparently, one with rare fire-breathing dragons, there was an opportunity for Novik to do something a little more interesting than present the typical narrative of a greedy, lecherous empire in decline.
Of course, we might question whether this sort of Orientalism is the message of the text, that is, whether the text produces this Orientalism or is about the Orientalism, especially given that the novel for the most part maintains a limited third-person perspective that cleaves tightly to Laurence’s experience of things. This is what in filmic terms might be called a subjective perspective, that is, it’s not written in first-person, but we know everything we are reading is experienced from Laurence’s perspective, we hear only his internal monologue, and we never read descriptions of things that happen outside of his senses. While it’s certainly possible that there is something slightly more complicated happening with regard to how Novik presents China as compared to the Ottomans, on the whole both are bumbling and lazy to the point that the text produces and parrots Orientalist ideas much more than it contests or even lightly questions them. The villain of Throne of Jade is a picture-perfect Fu Manchu type baddie, for example. To be fair, though, Novik’s Temeraire books mostly feature cartoonish characters with little character development who stumble from plot point to plot point. It can be exhilarating, but the excitement of some scenes, especially when Temeraire and crew seem to be truly in danger, doesn’t really counter the overall popcorn quality of the novels.
And despite my reservations and severe annoyances, I’ll read on. There remains something compelling about a multi-book series with an interesting premise, in some ways all the more so because it is so ripe for critique when it fails to live up to the premise, to squander the bounty of its field of ideas. And at least these novels aren’t 600+ pages each.
So we beat on, boats against the current of junk food fiction, borne back ceaselessly into wondering why we are so invested in this tasty mediocrity.
Next stop: Novik’s alternate historical fantasy vision of southern Africa.
Sean Guynes 
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