To Shape A Dragon's Breath
Mar. 20th, 2024 11:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psocopteraTo Shape A Dragon's Breath, Moniquill Blackgoose, 2023 YA novel. Why didn't anybody tell me this was a chemistry fantasy?? If I had read it in time to Hugo-nominate it, I absolutely would have; luckily it seems to have gotten some buzz and made the Norton ballot, so I think there's a good chance we'll see it on the Lodestar. An extremely enjoyable book, which I would like to recommend to people who like school stories, locals who will enjoy the local alternate-history setting (the protag is more or less a Wampanoag from ~Nantucket, attending school somewhere south of the greater ~Boston area, and there's a bit where I think she goes out to ~Waltham), fans of Tamora Pierce (there is a lot of tonal/thematic similarity to the Alanna and Kel books here, and it would not shock me to learn Blackgoose was a Kel/Lalasa shipper), fans of Pern, fans of "Uncleftish Beholding".
Behind the cut I am going to talk more about some of Blackgoose's choices around tone, handling of racism and colonialism, and chemistry worldbuilding. I don't think any of this is massively spoilery for big plot points, but it's probably more detail than you want if you like to read things cold, ymmv.
I had no idea what to expect from this book but I was in the mood for something nice and it was so nice that it was nice. I mean, it deals with some heavy topics, more about that, but mostly it seems (so far at least, it's the first in a series of unspecified length) to be more like the kind of YA where nothing unbearably awful happens. There was a scene very early on where the protagonist's little sister accidentally gets some minor burns that it's not clear whether they're more like sunburn, thermal, or radiation burns, and in a Hunger Games or Poppy War book, that might have been signalling an agonizing death from radiation poisoning because fuck you, but, spoilers, nope, she's totally fine (by the end of this book at least). Likewise, part of the fantasy chemistry/alchemypunk is use of something that I thought at first might be uranium but in other details seems to be radium, which could have been setting up a radium girls situation, but, no, it seems to be well understood that it's dangerous and there are known precautions about lead containers and such, and we can enjoy the steampunk fun without being punished for it. (Ok, I should say, I don't think it's wrong for authors to want to tell tragic stories! Just not my favorite thing in fiction. I can get plenty of despair in, like, the news.) (I also liked that the protagonist is a pretty calm and matter-of-fact narrator - I've been feeling too old for certain kinds of YA, but this voice really worked for me.)
All that said this is still very much a book which is happening in the shadow of a genocide a few generations ago (the "great dying", pretty clearly the arrival of European diseases, although I don't think the book directly connects it to colonization - it wasn't clear to me whether that was understood in the book's world or not) in which further genocide is very much an open and central question. Specifically, Blackgoose slowly develops the conflict between the "nice" colonizers who just want *cultural* genocide, and the more vicious who would like a physical genocide (and of course the third position, opposed to both, of indigenous survival/freedom). Some really interesting choices here - the school's headmistress is an older woman who would have been the protagonist of an earlier generation's fantasy - she disguised herself as a boy to impress a dragon (definite Alanna vibes here), she's a lesbian, we are clearly predisposed to like this character. But she's also one of the "nice" colonizers who wants to "civilize the savages", and I think one of the interesting questions of the series (to me at least) might be whether she (and other similar white characters) can get over that and become true allies. In Babel, she definitely wouldn't. But as I said above, Blackgoose is writing a more hopeful world than Kuang, and to the extent that Blackgoose intends this as a bit of a callout of older white women fantasy fans - my generation, and the authors we read - I think it's possible we'll get to see this character learn and improve rather than stay frozen in her racism. And I really liked that there's more focus on that than on clashes with the unsalvageably hostile. Like, there is a cameo of an obligatory Joren-style Asshole Blond (if you remember him from the Kel books) but he's refreshingly mostly absent, and we spend a lot more time with the white roommate who seems to have a good heart and may (or may not) be able to unlearn her racism.
And now I get to talk about chemistry! I thought Blackgoose did a really nice job of putting in just enough detail for it to be fun, and not so much that people who aren't certified chemistry nerds would get bored. (And I was amused by her handling of math, where it's important that the character be good at math, but Blackgoose clearly doesn't want to talk about math, so just occasionally drops in that she was doing very well, without any details.) I had a great time figuring out what elements all of Blackgoose's athers corresponded to - there's a periodic table with the map, to clear up anything unclear from context. Her world has 24 identified elements right now, and I thought she did a really nice job of naming mostly everything that would be familiar to people, without cluttering it up with too many. I mean, I spent some very enjoyable time arguing with myself about whether it was really plausible that a world with that level of industrial development wouldn't have identified magnesium or aluminum yet, or more of the transition metals (titanium, manganese, cobalt, nickel) - these are all minerologically significant - but Doylistically we didn't need any of them for the story or to sell the worldbuilding, and Watsonially maybe the use of dragon magic rather than smelting/chemical methods has had an effect on the progress of science in this world. And it's maybe a direction things could go in future books - it could be very neat if our protagonist got to discover aluminum. Or if aluminum isn't sexy to the average YA audience, maybe helium - there's a whole sub-plot with some secondary characters working on an airship design, helium would fit into that very nicely - or possibly uranium/plutonium. I mean, it seems clear that one of the things the series is building up to is the protag being able to figure out how to do things nobody else can do, and will probably be heading west at some point to encounter free indigenous peoples or the front lines of the settlers' war of expansion (currently somewhere around the Iroquois and the Great Lakes - even money whether she's more like fleeing, or conscripted) - although, ha, "what if you gave the Iroquois a nuke" is probably more of a Kuang storyline than a Blackgoose one. Anequs does not want to be violent and I think maybe Blackgoose won't make her be. Because I think this is the kind of nice series where the protagonist gets to keep her soul.
(Also it looks like we are at the verrrry beginning of fandom activity for this book - two stories on AO3... I don't have, like, an actual plot bunny, but "can I write a thousand words of something shippy enough that people would read it that also smuggles in some fun fantasy chemistry" does seem a bit like the kind of thing I might do. As a Yuletide offer, if nothing else...)
Behind the cut I am going to talk more about some of Blackgoose's choices around tone, handling of racism and colonialism, and chemistry worldbuilding. I don't think any of this is massively spoilery for big plot points, but it's probably more detail than you want if you like to read things cold, ymmv.
I had no idea what to expect from this book but I was in the mood for something nice and it was so nice that it was nice. I mean, it deals with some heavy topics, more about that, but mostly it seems (so far at least, it's the first in a series of unspecified length) to be more like the kind of YA where nothing unbearably awful happens. There was a scene very early on where the protagonist's little sister accidentally gets some minor burns that it's not clear whether they're more like sunburn, thermal, or radiation burns, and in a Hunger Games or Poppy War book, that might have been signalling an agonizing death from radiation poisoning because fuck you, but, spoilers, nope, she's totally fine (by the end of this book at least). Likewise, part of the fantasy chemistry/alchemypunk is use of something that I thought at first might be uranium but in other details seems to be radium, which could have been setting up a radium girls situation, but, no, it seems to be well understood that it's dangerous and there are known precautions about lead containers and such, and we can enjoy the steampunk fun without being punished for it. (Ok, I should say, I don't think it's wrong for authors to want to tell tragic stories! Just not my favorite thing in fiction. I can get plenty of despair in, like, the news.) (I also liked that the protagonist is a pretty calm and matter-of-fact narrator - I've been feeling too old for certain kinds of YA, but this voice really worked for me.)
All that said this is still very much a book which is happening in the shadow of a genocide a few generations ago (the "great dying", pretty clearly the arrival of European diseases, although I don't think the book directly connects it to colonization - it wasn't clear to me whether that was understood in the book's world or not) in which further genocide is very much an open and central question. Specifically, Blackgoose slowly develops the conflict between the "nice" colonizers who just want *cultural* genocide, and the more vicious who would like a physical genocide (and of course the third position, opposed to both, of indigenous survival/freedom). Some really interesting choices here - the school's headmistress is an older woman who would have been the protagonist of an earlier generation's fantasy - she disguised herself as a boy to impress a dragon (definite Alanna vibes here), she's a lesbian, we are clearly predisposed to like this character. But she's also one of the "nice" colonizers who wants to "civilize the savages", and I think one of the interesting questions of the series (to me at least) might be whether she (and other similar white characters) can get over that and become true allies. In Babel, she definitely wouldn't. But as I said above, Blackgoose is writing a more hopeful world than Kuang, and to the extent that Blackgoose intends this as a bit of a callout of older white women fantasy fans - my generation, and the authors we read - I think it's possible we'll get to see this character learn and improve rather than stay frozen in her racism. And I really liked that there's more focus on that than on clashes with the unsalvageably hostile. Like, there is a cameo of an obligatory Joren-style Asshole Blond (if you remember him from the Kel books) but he's refreshingly mostly absent, and we spend a lot more time with the white roommate who seems to have a good heart and may (or may not) be able to unlearn her racism.
And now I get to talk about chemistry! I thought Blackgoose did a really nice job of putting in just enough detail for it to be fun, and not so much that people who aren't certified chemistry nerds would get bored. (And I was amused by her handling of math, where it's important that the character be good at math, but Blackgoose clearly doesn't want to talk about math, so just occasionally drops in that she was doing very well, without any details.) I had a great time figuring out what elements all of Blackgoose's athers corresponded to - there's a periodic table with the map, to clear up anything unclear from context. Her world has 24 identified elements right now, and I thought she did a really nice job of naming mostly everything that would be familiar to people, without cluttering it up with too many. I mean, I spent some very enjoyable time arguing with myself about whether it was really plausible that a world with that level of industrial development wouldn't have identified magnesium or aluminum yet, or more of the transition metals (titanium, manganese, cobalt, nickel) - these are all minerologically significant - but Doylistically we didn't need any of them for the story or to sell the worldbuilding, and Watsonially maybe the use of dragon magic rather than smelting/chemical methods has had an effect on the progress of science in this world. And it's maybe a direction things could go in future books - it could be very neat if our protagonist got to discover aluminum. Or if aluminum isn't sexy to the average YA audience, maybe helium - there's a whole sub-plot with some secondary characters working on an airship design, helium would fit into that very nicely - or possibly uranium/plutonium. I mean, it seems clear that one of the things the series is building up to is the protag being able to figure out how to do things nobody else can do, and will probably be heading west at some point to encounter free indigenous peoples or the front lines of the settlers' war of expansion (currently somewhere around the Iroquois and the Great Lakes - even money whether she's more like fleeing, or conscripted) - although, ha, "what if you gave the Iroquois a nuke" is probably more of a Kuang storyline than a Blackgoose one. Anequs does not want to be violent and I think maybe Blackgoose won't make her be. Because I think this is the kind of nice series where the protagonist gets to keep her soul.
(Also it looks like we are at the verrrry beginning of fandom activity for this book - two stories on AO3... I don't have, like, an actual plot bunny, but "can I write a thousand words of something shippy enough that people would read it that also smuggles in some fun fantasy chemistry" does seem a bit like the kind of thing I might do. As a Yuletide offer, if nothing else...)
