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Voyage of the Basilisk by Marie Brennan. This is the third in a series of alternate-history and alternate-natural-history books about a woman who is fascinated by dragons, traveling around the world to study them. She has to put quite a bit of her energy into being allowed to do the work, and dealing with various sorts of scandal based on nothing she has done, just sexist assumptions and the desire for interesting gossip. "Widow travels with her son and studies dragons" isn't nearly as good gossip as assumptions that she has taken a lover. What actually goes on is quite enough material for a story or fifty, between exploration, dragons, and shipwrecks.
This volume had, it felt like, more politics, more musings on taxonomy and relatedness, and fewer actual dragons than the previous two. This time around she spends a lot of time on sea serpents (are they dragons?), is blocked from some other research by politics, and takes a side trip to see komodo dragons (the ones that exist in our world); and once she gets a good look at a komodo dragon she concludes that, name aside, those are not dragons, or especially interesting. Definitely a page-turner, but this is a series to read in order: volume 1 is A Natural History of Dragons: a memoir by Lady Trent.
Voyage of the Basilisk by Marie Brennan. This is the third in a series of alternate-history and alternate-natural-history books about a woman who is fascinated by dragons, traveling around the world to study them. She has to put quite a bit of her energy into being allowed to do the work, and dealing with various sorts of scandal based on nothing she has done, just sexist assumptions and the desire for interesting gossip. "Widow travels with her son and studies dragons" isn't nearly as good gossip as assumptions that she has taken a lover. What actually goes on is quite enough material for a story or fifty, between exploration, dragons, and shipwrecks.
This volume had, it felt like, more politics, more musings on taxonomy and relatedness, and fewer actual dragons than the previous two. This time around she spends a lot of time on sea serpents (are they dragons?), is blocked from some other research by politics, and takes a side trip to see komodo dragons (the ones that exist in our world); and once she gets a good look at a komodo dragon she concludes that, name aside, those are not dragons, or especially interesting. Definitely a page-turner, but this is a series to read in order: volume 1 is A Natural History of Dragons: a memoir by Lady Trent.
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