Temeraire/Headscratchers

• Okay, I get the whole In Spite of a Nail aspect but... how on Earth is the whole Woman Dragon Rider bit still a state secret? Liz Tudor figured out the Longwing problem over two centuries earlier, and despite the whole subculture aspect there has to be at least a few in the Dragon Corps who communicate with thier families on the outside even presuming no leaks in the Court/Government/Admirality for all this time. I can see it still being an embarassing scandal not spoken of in polite company and subject to ribald jokes in rude company, but the utter shock and ignorance the Rolands and Captain Harcourt's very existence are met with surprises me.
  • Never underestimate how far ignorance can stretch, especially in periods where even traveling a few miles from one's home town was a rare thing. It's one thing to hear about X from a friend or by reading it in the news, and another to actually confront X in person. Besides, as you said, those who do know still prefer not to talk about it.
    • Not to mention that many who didn't have direct contact with a female captain would simply dismiss it because obviously that wouldn't be proper behavior for a woman, even one associated with the Air Corps.
      • All of this is well taken but... no letters to family? No loose tounged parlimentarians? No casualties picked up by Army or Navy personnel? For over two centuries with a couple of civil wars and multiple coups? Kinda stretches things a little.
  • It's not really a matter of "no one's ever seen a female captain." Because, clearly, every so often somebody does, as is repeatedly shown and referred to in the books. The difference is, people are generally not told that this is a (relatively) commonplace, necessary practice. As long as the individual sightings are kept few and far between, it's easy for them to be handwaved away, in in-universe terms. I.e., if someone tells the story, his listeners assume he's just telling tall tales; or the captain is assumed to be an exceptional, Joan of Arc type person; or they just think it's someone's mistress dressed up in uniform, or whatever else. Parliament doesn't know. The Admiralty probably didn't know until 'recently' (they certainly have a lot of trouble with Jane Roland reporting to them as an admiral). And all this is a time period where something could actually be an "open secret," in that it was simply improper to talk about in polite company. You know what you saw, and I know what you saw, but we can never actually discuss what we saw...
  • Also, as of Eo I there's only three harnessed Longwings in all of Britain. That's three female captains in the entire corps, which doesn't interact much with society at all.
    • Not quite. It's mentioned that there are a few other species that will only accept a female captains it's just that Longwings are the most important. The other species are presumably light/medium-weights that don't come up much.

• I know that it is just part of the way that this story is written, but the Woobie status of Laurence is just a bit too much at times. Why does he have to have all the bad stuff happening to him! And I know that future plot will probably turn this around but still, it bugs me. Even if he is fictional, sometimes it's just too much for me.
  • For the sake of your own mental health, never pick up The Dresden Files. It's a good series, but, man, actually committing treason and then getting a lenient sentence for it would be a good week for Harry.
    • That's the price you pay for being a fictional protagonist. If there's any shit flying around, it will land on you.

• The Harcourt being pregnant via Captain Riley plot in the later books kinda annoyed me. In the end it seemed pretty pointless.
  • I found it an amusing inversion of the usual "Shotgun Wedding" plot - due to somewhat contrived circumstances and the rules of this fictional world, she couldn't care less about propriety while he couldn't have illegitimate children running around. Not the most important thing, just an illustration of the difference between this world (or at least, the culture of the Aerial Corps) and Real Life.
• I haven't checked a map from the time period yet (the borders would be different than in the modern day), but how exactly does a dragon fly from the Ottoman Empire (around Turkey) to Austria overnight?
  • At the time, the Danube was the border between the two.
• One thing that's bugged me for a while is dragon travel times. IIRC, it's mentioned at some point that Temeraire can fly at about 35 miles per hour, which is on the fast side for dragons. This would make overland flight a hell of a lot faster than it's shown to be in the books. For example, their trip back across Australia at the end of Tongues of Serpents is said to take two months, which is ridiculous. From the description given, it sounds like their starting point was near modern-day Darwin. This gives them a distance of about 1400 miles in a straight line, which is what they were doing. That's 40 hours of flight time. That shouldn't have taken them two weeks!
  • I thought they had to wait in hiding on occasion to avoid troops or something.
    • Not at that point. In fact, they would have wanted to stay in the air as much as possible, since on the ground they had to worry about Bunyips.
  • First of all, according to Google Maps the most direct route from modern-day Darwin to New South Wales is 2,380 miles. That's by road rather than as the dragon flies, so Temeraire's route would be a little shorter, but I doubt it would have been 1,000 miles shorter. (I could be wrong, I don't know, I've never been to Oz myself.) And as for their route, I don't have the book in front of me, but their route from New South Wales to modern-day Darwin wasn't a straight line, they detoured by Uluru, so if they retraced their original route that would have made it almost twice as long as the straight-line route. So let's take the median and assume a 2,380-mile route. Second, the average speed for the entire trip would have been much slower than Temeraire's maximum speed. He can't carry the men, the equipment and the other dragons at his maximum speed; the other dragons would fly separately, so the top speed of the whole group is the top speed of the slowest of those. Two are barely newborns, one was deformed and just recently learned to fly at all, and none of them are particularly well-disciplined or cooperative, so overall their top speed will probably be around half Temeraire's, or 17.5 miles per hour. And while Temeraire can fly around the clock, he gets tired, and so do the men. And on this return trip they weren't in hot pursuit; they had important messages to carry but it wasn't an immediate life-or-death thing, so they wouldn't have pushed themselves too hard. So assume that they'd only fly eight hours a day and the rest of the time would be spent resting or foraging for food or water. (By this time they had figured out how to placate the bunyips without a fight, which makes the trip safer but slower.) That's more than two weeks right there, assuming a 2,380-mile route. To summarize, they probably could have made the trip in a bit less time than two months, but any less than one month would have been pushing it hard indeed for the young dragons.
  • I'm not up to doing the maths, but just to confirm that they don't take a straight-line route on the way back. They take it in stages, flying from major landmark to major landmark, Darwin to Uluru to Lake Eyre to Sydney, which takes them quite a distance out of the direct route.

• Dragons eat far too much to maintain a sustainable food supply for any country that doesn't have magical cloning powers. It's the only part of the series that truly, truly bugs me. A dragon needs a cow's worth of meat at least every 2 days. That's 182 cows worth of meat each year PER dragon, of which there are a sizable population.
  • Thinking about this, ocean fishing could mitigate the dragon population's food concerns down to reasonable levels, but very few of the dragons are shown fishing when to keep a sustainable population of dragons that would need to be their primary food source.
  • Actually, it may not be. The population of dragons in England as of the early 1800s isn't that high, with a peak (I believe) of 200 or so including ferals. Even assuming that they each required the same amount of food--which they don't--that's 36,400 cows' worth of food per year. According to Google, as of 2004 there were approximately 2 million cows in the UK. I don't know the history of cattle in the UK, but even if their herds were just 5% the size they are now, they'd still have 100,000 cows. That seems to be more than enough for separate populations of cattle for dragon consumption, human consumption, dairy, and breeding. Of course, these numbers don't take into account the other livestock (i.e. pigs and sheep) that dragons eat, Using the same 5% numbers for those herds, we get an additional 1.8 million sheep and 250,000 pigs. Personally, I think that 5% number is likely to be on the low end of livestock population of the early 1800s, but in any case, it's still sustainable.
• Why do the dragons allow themselves to be treated like pets and draft animals? I mean, would they not find it degrading if they openly heard some aviators casually discuss breeding dragons for certain traits in front of them?
  • They don't seem to mind the breeding discussion because dragons have no real sense of family, only friends and acquaintances. There is no parent-child bond amongst dragons since dragons think of baby dragons as able to survive on their own, quite a bit like a lot of species of real-life reptiles. The only dragons in the series who have a concept of familial loyalty are the Chinese royalty .
  • And even them are more preoccupied by how their "royal blood" is used and property than Temeraire itself. And why they allow to be treated as animals... simply, culture. Its what is proper in their land and their captains and Dragons are nothing but extremely adaptative. The same reason why Chinese dragons are the quintessential Noblesm, Polish dragons mock Temeraire "soft preferences" and why Tswana dragons act as the reincarnation of deceased warriors, down to the point that Mokhachane declared a World war to liberate her "subdites". Dragons for all their intelligence and deadliness, are defined by the very humans they bond and is the only way they improve and change. Take for example the ferals to see how a "natural" dragon would act and is a far cry from even the English dragons. Also remember Temeraire POV with the eggs, before and after they hatched.
  • Also, remember that most dragons don't know any other life than being treated as they do. After going to Napoleon, Lien is highly offended that several heavyweights are sent to her with the hope that she'll breed with them, so it's probably an upbringing thing.
• I think I might need a genetics primer. I'm pretty sure I understand how the Imperial-Celestial thing works (Celestial genes are recessive, so you'd need two Imperials with the presumably rare trait to have even a one in four chance of giving birth to a Celestial). What I don't get is why Temeraire can't give eggs to any other breed of dragon. Are Celestials and Imperials different enough that they're an entirely separate species?
  • I personally think Temeraire might be infertile.
    • That may be, but if he is it's not typical of Celestials. The old one from Throne of Jade is mentioned as having sired all the others, and Qian produced Temeraire.
  • I always assumed that different dragon types were different species, not breeds as people called them. The ones in Europe may represent one species in a genus while those in China represent another. Temeraire is probable the first Chinese dragon to ever be in Europe, so how would people know that a breeding with him wouldn't work?
  • I always assumed that it was less "can't" and more "hadn't yet." Not all matings result in offspring, after all.
• Okay, am I the only one who thinks that China in the books is a Mary Sue? I'm not sure what the standard of living was like in our world's China in the early 19th Century, but the fact that it's the ONLY nation stated to not treat its dragons like crap, and have a relatively high standard of living just seems a little off. Not to mention Temeraire constantly reminding us in the later books about how much better everything is in China. It seems to me like they could easily beat any of the European powers in an instant if it came to actual warfare. Seriously, Prince Yongxing is the only Chinese character I can remember who is portrayed negatively in the entire series. This is probably why Throne of Jade is my least favourite book out of all of them.
  • China isn't the only place were dragons are treated better and/or have a higher living standart than in our timeline. In Africa they are honored "elders" and drove the colonists out (the big empire isn't that different, see for example the Oyu Empire, only bigger because dragons allow faster communication), Japan is mentioned somewhere to be similiar to China, South America thwarted the conquistadores and in North America the natives control more land than normally at that point in time. France has made some progress in the right direction, too (which is also not that far fetched. While Napoleon was a power hungry and turned most parts of Europe into a war zone, he also brought some improvements with him, like the Code Napoleon. China isn't a mary sue, Europes real advantage, technologic advancement is just somewhat negated through the use of large amounts of dragons. But as soon as cannons and rifles can reliably kill a dragon fast Europe will be able to win agains thos tactics too. If anything the book series is a Take That against a Europe that tried to colonice everything it could get its hands on.
• Why does Jane Roland become an admiral? --More accurately, why does the Aerial Corps use naval ranks? (Then again, We Are All American, and Yanks With Tanks give landlubber ranks to their air force. Maybe I'm biased.)