Yeah, I thought of Novik's books - I love love love those books while being a tad worried about what she's going to do with the Americas - and also Jo Walton's wonderful Farthing series, in which there was a pact between Britain and Germany in place of the Hitler-Stalin pact. But one of the brilliant things about both these series is that the authors made relatively small changes in the world's past. Walton is especially good because she merely made a political change, rather than a major upheaval (or a series of them) in the material world.
Novik is playing a more complicated game on a longer timescale. But I'm impressed with how she limited the dragons' powers by making them dependent on humans for transoceanic travel, plus susceptible to disease. So it ... kind of works. Sort of. I would be happier if I knew how recently dragon-based warfare had arrived in Europe, in Novik's universe - did it come along with gunpowder? But I can make her universe work if I pretend that there were dragons with relationships with humans for centuries in Asia, but that Europeans only developed warlike uses for dragons after, let's say, the French Revolution. This no doubt contradicts some of what Novik has implied or stated in the books or elsewhere, but, um, please don't tell me. Because I love those books.
And then there's KS Robinson's Years of Rice and Salt. Now that is what comes of taking a huge (but plausible) demographic change seriously. The poor guy had to drag in reincarnation to get the timescale to work at all while still telling a half-way coherent story. Well, sort of a half-way coherent story. I love that book too.
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Date: 2009-05-12 01:08 pm (UTC)Novik is playing a more complicated game on a longer timescale. But I'm impressed with how she limited the dragons' powers by making them dependent on humans for transoceanic travel, plus susceptible to disease. So it ... kind of works. Sort of. I would be happier if I knew how recently dragon-based warfare had arrived in Europe, in Novik's universe - did it come along with gunpowder? But I can make her universe work if I pretend that there were dragons with relationships with humans for centuries in Asia, but that Europeans only developed warlike uses for dragons after, let's say, the French Revolution. This no doubt contradicts some of what Novik has implied or stated in the books or elsewhere, but, um, please don't tell me. Because I love those books.
And then there's KS Robinson's Years of Rice and Salt. Now that is what comes of taking a huge (but plausible) demographic change seriously. The poor guy had to drag in reincarnation to get the timescale to work at all while still telling a half-way coherent story. Well, sort of a half-way coherent story. I love that book too.