The Natural History of Dragons
The Natural History of Dragons is the memoir of a woman who spent her life traveling the world to study dragons -- and getting into trouble along the way. The setting is based on the nineteenth century, but it doesn't take place in our world.
Why is the book the perfect read on Valentine’s Day?
As a woman in a Victorian-type society, Isabella is, of course, expected to marry. The way in which she gets a husband, however, and what happens after she does, are not quite usual. If you like unconventional (and somewhat nerdy) romances, it's a good match for the holiday!
What appealed for you mixing the genres of thriller and feminism?
"Pulp adventure," always seemed to match well with feminism. On the one hand, you have iconoclastic protagonists who get outside the normal strictures of society and do crazy things; on the other hand, you have the way that pulp adventure has often been all about men. Which means there's a lot of room on there to explore what it means to be a woman who ignores societal conventions.
The book has been described as Downton with Dragons so how does that make you feel?
I think it's a good comparison! The idea for this series is years old, so I thought of it well before Downton Abbey came along. But it definitely fits into some of the same boxes, in terms of how it looks at class and gender and so on. (Though I have yet to see any dragons in the show . . .) And a lot of readers have imagined Isabella in her later years looking and sounding a lot like Dame Maggie Smith, which fits pretty well.
When did your interest in dragons begin?
I've been reading fantasy since I was knee-high to a grasshopper, so I can't really point to a single "beginning" for it. I know I read Anne McCaffrey's Pern books when I was in junior high school, and more recently Naomi Novik's Temeraire series, so there have been a lot of influences along the way.
Please tell us about the character of Lady Isabella Trent.
She's an old woman when she writes her memoirs, which means she has the kind of freedom that comes with being an old lady and being famous; she can say pretty much what she likes. But at the same time, she's writing about her youth, and all the foolish things she did then, so her voice is a mixture of youthful recklessness and the perspective that comes with time. She takes a lot of risks, but isn't blind to their costs: she recognizes that there will be consequences for unconventional behavior, even if she ultimately decides she's willing to accept them. The tension between those various impulses makes her a lot of fun to write!
Why did you want her to be brilliant but also have eccetricities?
Being eccentric almost seems de rigueur for the period . . . one of the things that attracts me to the nineteenth century as a period for storytelling is how crazy people were. Victorian history is full of larger-than-life personalities, for reasons I can only begin to speculate at, and so it seemed natural to make Isabella like that. I knew from the start that I wanted her to be someone who made ground-breaking discoveries, so brilliance was always a given; the specific eccentricities developed as I went along, and were often inspired by similar women in real history.
Though, to be fair, I should say that some of her "eccentricities" simply amount to being an intellectual woman who wants an opportunity to use her brain. We'd consider those things fairly normal today.
Please tell us about your research process into the book.
I actually tried not to let myself research too much. My previous series, the Onyx Court books, were straight-up historical fantasy -- those are set in London, in time periods ranging from the sixteenth century through to the nineteenth. For that series, because I was taking the "secret history" approach, I poured a lot of effort into getting every mundane detail as right as I could, then slipping the fantastical elements into the gaps between them. But because the Memoirs take place in a secondary world, I deliberately chose not to tie myself in knots over certain kinds of details, like when specific technological or social developments happened. If they're in the right time period generally, then it doesn't matter to me whether A happened fifteen years after B in real history. It's allowed to be different in Isabella's world.
What I've done a lot more of is reading on the natural sciences. I have a climatology textbook on my shelf, to help me make the ecology and geography sensible, and I browse lots of articles and blog posts on evolution and dinosaurs and things like that. The different dragon species are very much inspired by their environments. Basically, if I'm going to write about my scientist heroine studying things, I need what she's studying to make sense!
What is next for you?
The second of the Memoirs, The Tropic of Serpents, will be out in the U.S. in March of 2014, and I think June or thereabouts in the U.K. At present I'm writing #3, and have a contract with my U.S. publisher for two more after that, making it a five-book series in total.