Quote:
Originally Posted by Lasereth
I don't understand trying to disprove something in a book about...dragons. Dragons are fake, so maybe the gas that keeps them in the air is something that doesn't exist in our world?
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First of all, dragons aren't fake; they're mythological. A fake is something attempted to be passed off as real. Mythology, however, is a collection of stories largely symbolic, and it is diversified by culture but it usually maintains similar trappings: it often explains the unexplainable. Whether these explanations are true or not no longer seems to be the point. Maybe they never did.
Creation myths explain how the world came to be, and they did so long before humanity had the means to measure the universe. Mythological creatures are largely symbolic of our greatest fears and how we must overcome them. This is where dragons fit in.
Even within the American milieu there are running mythologies, one being the glorification of war. But then you have a great American writer such as Hemingway writing such things as, "They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country. But in modern war, there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason." Even now we have this disparity between what is real and what is hoped.
Modern fantasy isn't the same as what is known as "mythology," but it finds its roots in it, and so we still find many references to dragons. The difference now is that we have scientific knowledge.
I don't know anything about the Temeraire series, or the work of Naomi Novik in general, but there are a few questions that arise out of this exercise. First, I should note that I found this quite amusing when we apply the science to the parameters given. However, I'm wondering about the characteristics of Novik's storytelling: Is the information about dragons given in the narrative? Is the narrator reliable? Is the narrator omniscient (which is rather old-fashioned now)?
Either a) there are interpretations of text that can explain why the earthly science doesn't seem to work, or b) the author has made grievous errors, for which we can blame both the author and her editor(s).
Either way, this is all rather fascinating.