Science and Fiction Collide in the Dragon-Rich Memoirs of Lady Trent

As the book opens, six years have passed since Isabella’s outing to the Jungle of Mouleen in Eriga, and she is preparing for a two-year sea voyage to study dragonson both water and land, from the sea serpents of the arctic to the fire dragons of island mountaintops. She’s joined, as always, by her colleague Tom Wilker, but this is the first expedition for her son Jake. Reflecting on her life at a distance of some years, Isabella has long alluded to the criticism she received for her unusual parenting choices, so it is interesting to see her interacting with Jake. He is very much his mother’s son, both intensely curious and focused when it comes to the things that interest him, and often impolitic with things that don’t. A somewhat mad ship captain, the usual sailors, and Jake’s governess round out the complement.
On their voyage, they also pick up the archeologist Suhail from a southern country; his scientific inquiry is good complement to Isabella’s investigation of dragon naturalism. The presence of the archeologist also adds grist to the rumor mill, as he is both foreign and another unmarried man,both suspect in the eyes of alt-Victorian Scirling society. The in-world speculation about Isabella’s love life is funny because it mirrors the reader’s: as far as I’m aware, we have not met the man who will become her second husband, and I know I’m looking. Given how sly she is as a narrator, I wouldn’t put it past Isabella to obfuscate his identity at first introduction.

Isabella is a relentlessly charming narrator, with a tendency for conspiratorial asides with the reader and a self-deprecating amusement at of her younger self’s missteps. Though by the time she put pen to paper, Isabella was one of the foremost the authorities on dragons, at the start of her career, she had to bluster her way into an alt-Victorian scientific community that privileged the male peerage over merit. Her scientific partner Tom, an educated man from the working class, is an interesting foil, as he’s looked down upon for this birth, while she’s discredited for her gender.
Isabella has always been a scandalous figure in Scirling, as she must violate both spoken and unspoken expectations of her gender in order to study dragons. On this voyage, she takes that talent for upsetting expectations to other countries. After a shipwreck in a Hawaiian-esque island, the islanders have trouble fitting Isabella into their own gender paradigm, though their ultimate solution to the problem is much different (and in some ways more flexible) than those preferred in Scirling.

The books delight in building an interesting ecology as well as interesting characters. The dragons of this world are non-magical, routinely biological creatures. They don’t riddle or scheme, but instead fit into zoological taxonomy alongside the more mundane dragonflies and birds. I’m having a hard time coming up with another book which deals with non-magical dragons, or with dragons but not magic. The Lady Trent memoirs end up being an unusual form of science fiction: a fiction about how the practice of science is irrevocably bound up in politics and culture. Isabella’s ongoing scrapes with everyone from her family to foreign governments end up being a sort of coded Leibniz-Newton controversy, or perhaps the Bone Wars (indeed, you could call the near-arms race around dragons bones exactly that); science is never simply science, but colored by the personalities involved. In her investigations of the natural world of dragons, Isabella Camherst has personality to spare.
Voyage of the Basilisk is available now.