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dsrtao_Dragon Champion_, E.E. Knight
(Yes, I'm planning on mentioning all the books I read this year. I skipped last year out of, erm... the inertia of laziness, I guess.)
Take one standard fantasy universe -- medieval technology, humans, elves, dwarfs, orcs. As usual, add dragons and a few other weird beasts with no obvious evolutionary lineage. Make the dragons intelligent, slightly telepathic, capable of winged flight and flaming breath.
All of that is bog standard. Now let's cant it sideways a bit. We'll have a dragon as our viewpoint character. There's magic, but we don't actually see any, and every time it's mentioned, the speaker notes how useless it is -- Message bottles that can hear your voice and relay it to a listener? Cheaper to use paper and pen. The dragons can run out of flaming fuel, and if they aren't well-nourished, they can't produce more. The great dwarf empire is structured as a limited partnership corporation -- every dwarf's ambition, rarely realized, is to make full Partner. The elves are bloody useless forest poets. And the orcs are not evil. Part of this book's appeal to me is that nobody sees themselves as evil, even the Evil Wizard whom, it gradually becomes clear, is our dragon protagonist's nemesis.
(Yes, I'm planning on mentioning all the books I read this year. I skipped last year out of, erm... the inertia of laziness, I guess.)
Take one standard fantasy universe -- medieval technology, humans, elves, dwarfs, orcs. As usual, add dragons and a few other weird beasts with no obvious evolutionary lineage. Make the dragons intelligent, slightly telepathic, capable of winged flight and flaming breath.
All of that is bog standard. Now let's cant it sideways a bit. We'll have a dragon as our viewpoint character. There's magic, but we don't actually see any, and every time it's mentioned, the speaker notes how useless it is -- Message bottles that can hear your voice and relay it to a listener? Cheaper to use paper and pen. The dragons can run out of flaming fuel, and if they aren't well-nourished, they can't produce more. The great dwarf empire is structured as a limited partnership corporation -- every dwarf's ambition, rarely realized, is to make full Partner. The elves are bloody useless forest poets. And the orcs are not evil. Part of this book's appeal to me is that nobody sees themselves as evil, even the Evil Wizard whom, it gradually becomes clear, is our dragon protagonist's nemesis.
