[taosaur]

Moving on to the next Temeraire book (and continuing, surely for some time to come, with Stephenson), it's truly the oddest pairing. I'm more or less always listening to one book and reading one or two others, along with being involved in continuing TV narratives, adventure games, and possibly a graphic novel or two, but I can't recall experiencing such a persistent feedback loop from any other combo.

Having come of age in the days of grunge, I'm not entirely averse to feedback, and in fact am finding it a source of entertainment in addition to the entertaining content of both series. Very frequently upon returning to one or the other, there's a moment of narrative vertigo as my mind struggles to arrange the chess pieces, not so much of the foreground characters as the political backdrop of changing European conflicts and alliances, and the historical figures involved in each. More than the similarities, though, it's the dissonance between the two worlds that's striking. While superficially set in many of the same cities and in not dissimilar eras (from a modern perspective), with many of the same nautical, martial and political preoccupations, the two diverge on fundamentals like what forces drive history, what makes up a person's character, and what details are important or interesting in historical events. The presence or absence of dragons is rather a quibble.

Granted, in Novik's case those elements are probably more a secondary effect of stylistic choices than any kind of coherent theme or thesis. She mashes together nautical adventure and epic fantasy, but subverts each only insofar as ships have been substituted with dragons and fantasy nations with historic ones.