Nominally, Laurence's moral code is shared by his fellow gentlemen and officers, but where most of the world - all the way up to the Lords of the Admiralty - pays lip service to this code, Laurence truly believes in it.

9/

But there is something of Godel's Incompleteness in Laurence's Georgian morality, in that to be completely true to his ethics, Laurence must - again and again, in ways large and small - also *violate* his ethics, often with the most extreme consequences imaginable at stake.

10/

Novik spends nine volumes destruction-testing Laurence's morality, in a series of hypotheticals of the sort that you could easily spend years arguing over in a philosophy of ethics seminar - but these aren't dry academic questions, they're the stuff of fabulous adventure, great battles, hair's-breadth escapes, and daring rescues.

11/

Next, there is Novik's historicalness, which is broad, deep, and also brilliantly speculative. Novik has painstakingly researched the historical circumstances of all parts of Napoleonic Europe, but also the Inca empire, colonial Africa, settler Australia, late-Qing China, and Meiji Japan.

It would be one thing if Novik merely brought these places and times to life with perfect verisimilitude, but Novik goes further.

12/

She has reimagined how all of these societies would have developed in the presence of massive, powerful, intelligent dragons - how their power structures would relate to dragons, and how the dragons would have related to colonial conquest.

13/

The result is both a stage that is set for a Napoleonic War that is recognizable but utterly transformed, a set of social *and* strategic speculations that would make for a brilliant West Point grad seminar or tabletop military strategy game or an anticolonial retelling of imperial conquest, but is, instead, the backdrop for nine exciting, world-spanning novels.

14/

Next, there's Novik's action staging. I have the world's worst sense of direction and geometry. I can stay in a hotel for a week and still get lost every time I try to find my room. I can't read maps. I can't visualize 3D objects or solve jigsaw puzzles. Hell, I can barely *see*. Nevertheless, I was able to follow every twist and turn of Novik's intricate naval/aerial/infantry battles, often with casts of thousands. Not just follow them! I was utterly captivated by them.

15/

Next, there's Novik's ability to juggle her characters. While these novels follow two main characters - William Laurence and the dragon Temeraire - they are joined by *hundreds* of other named characters, from Chinese emperors to the Sapa Inca to Wellington to Napoleon, to say nothing of the dragons, the sea captains, the Japanese lords, the drunken sailors, the brave midshipmen, and so on and so on.

16/

Each one of these people is distinct, sharply drawn, necessary to the tale, and strongly individuated. I am in awe (and not a little jealous). Wow. Just wow.

Finally, there's Novik's language: the tale is told primarily through Laurence's point of view, which is rendered in mannered, early 19th century English.

17/

Again, this is the kind of thing I usually find either difficult or irritatingly precious or both - but again, it turns out that I just hadn't read anyone who was *really good* at this sort of thing. Novik is *really, really* good at it.

18/