Naomi Novik’s latest collection came out last September without me noticing, which is a shame because I loved her Scholomance series and I’ve been meaning to read a lot more of her work.
I really enjoyed the collection, even the stories I didn’t 100% understand. Below are some (much too short) summaries: you can’t really distill Novik’s work down to a few sentences, these are just the impressions I got from each one.
Vici
There’s a neat bit of world-building going on here; it’s a very detailed and realistic look at ancient Rome, except sometimes you have to send a legion or two to kill a dragon that’s terrorizing the countryside. Sometimes that “legion” is just a drunken dice-cheating cad with so much debt it’s either kill a dragon or get thrown in the arena. And sometimes that cad gets very, very lucky and walks away with his life, a hoard of gold, and an egg he’s certain won’t hatch anyway.
This story (and one more in this book) are examples of how good Novik is at writing dragons. (I haven’t read her Temeraire series yet, but you better believe I’m gonna.) I just love her dragons: they’re fascinated by humans, and they have some fundamental misunderstandings about what is and isn’t acceptable behavior, but they’re so loyal you’ll forgive them just about anything.
Fans of the Roman Empire (or, let’s be honest, anyone who pays the tiniest bit of attention to history. Or watched the show Rome. Or watched Cleopatra. I have no excuses.) probably figured out who Tony was right from the beginning. I had a pleasant ah HA moment at the end, so I’m not complaining.
Araminta, or, The Wreck of the Amphidrake
This is basically about a magical princess who thinks damsel-in-distress stories are stupid. Araminta isn’t too concerned with what people think of her, and she’s definitely not waiting around to be rescued. She also has a lot of grown-up fun with a spell that can swap your gender, so this is a pretty sexy story too.
Seven
“Kath’s work seemed like a joke when one of her squat cups was put next to one of the grandmaster’s triumphant fragile pieces, but if you looked at it too long, you began to feel the terrible sneaking suspicion that you liked the cup better.”
I love all the details about the city of Seven and their singing statues, and I’m a sucker for a story about a craftsperson who’s quietly brilliant with their art; no ego or grandstanding, they just make beautiful things and everybody falls all over themselves trying to buy them.
Like a lot of the stories in the book this one ended more abruptly than I’d like, but only because I was enjoying it and wanted it to keep going. I’m still puzzling out the ending, but I think Novik is saying you don’t have to be so gosh darned precious about your art to make something that makes someone happy, even if that someone is just you. It’s about giving up a regular life for your art, and giving up your art for a regular life.
Blessings
This is about the dangers of inviting too many fairy godmothers to a party. (Especially when they get completely sauced.) And even when fairies aren’t involved, none of us can control the blessings we were given, and the secret to happiness is making the best of what we got. I hope Novik comes back to this one, I’d like to see what Magda gets up to.
Lord Dunsany’s Teapot
I think this one’s the saddest in the collection. It’s a wonderfully bittersweet story about war and friendship and taking comfort where you can find it. I didn’t feel like the ending was as abrupt as some of the others, even if I didn’t completely understand it. I thought it ended exactly where it should.
Seven Years From Home
This story is equally beautiful and bleak. The details about Melidan life and their life-shaping skills are endlessly fascinating, and the depiction of capitalist war-mongers is way too close to real life for comfort.
It’s about the meddling of colonizers who play both sides against the middle in a war, and only the colonizer wins. It’s about people who’ve switched sides and “gone native” and can’t kid themselves anymore: they’ll never wash the blood off their hands. And it’s pretty cynical, because it seems to say the only way to end a war is to make sure the other side can never ever recover, and you can only do that if you don’t think any one life, even yours, is more important than the cause. And you might not even be wrong.
Buried Deep
When I was in junior high I was so proud of myself for figuring out that Ariadne was the Minotaur’s half-sister, and I wrote a story about how she loved her little brother and wished she could protect him.
Turns out a lot of other people figured that out a long time ago and Novik writes a story that’s much better than anything I came up with, because here they find a way to protect each other.
I wasn’t entirely sure what was happening with the ending, but I’m guessing it has a lot to do with the fact that a labyrinth is different from a maze: there’s only one path to get to the ending. As Novik points out, the only way out is through.
Spinning Silver
This is the short story that became the novel Spinning Silver, though it has a different ending. It’s still immensely satisfying to watch Miryem solve a problem not with magic, but with good business sense and a craftsman who really knows what the hell he’s doing. (I’ll never get tired of all the details about jewelry made with fairy silver, it makes me want to start sketching designs or learn metal smithing.)
Commonplaces
This is a romance, but a very grounded one. It’s about one of Novik’s favorite Sherlock Holmes characters, who she feels was never written quite correctly. I love how you have to read between the lines to pick up bits of everybody’s history; there was never a huge info dump but by the end I understood everybody’s choices. (Also I don’t think it’s necessary to imagine either Benedict Cumberbatch or Robert Downey Jr. in this role, but that certainly worked for me.)
Castle Coeurlieu
I think it’s way too simple to call this a high-fantasy ghost story and fairy tale, but I guess that’s what it is. I think I understand the bargain at the end? The main character did the best they could, but I think the message is that you can’t save everybody. It’s a magical allegory about what it’d be like to survive the Black Death when up to 50% of the population of Europe died. That’s just a statistic, it’s much worse when the statistics have faces.
The Long Way Round
“We sail on the finest ship ever built, under the hand of the finest navigator – and with the bravest crew,” he’d added, with a grand gesture sweeping over six wooden-faced men who’d all been considering whether they could club him to death before he could scramble their brains…”
I love a good sea story, and this is a fun one, where a practical sister and her dreamer brother are trying to find a shorter trade route to make their fortunes, and there’s monsters and magicians and deserted islands with some really strange ruins. It’s also part of a project Novik is working on called “Folly,” and it’s got an impressive amount of world-building already, I look forward to seeing more of it.
Dragons & Decorum
This was my second-favorite one in the book, because it’s a retelling of Pride and Prejudice, but not a word-for-word one like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Novik has taken a little more freedom with this story, because this one has all the dragons. This and “Vici” convinced me to start reading Novik’s Temeraire series, because I can never get enough of how she writes dragons.
After Hours
This was hands down my favorite story in the book, because I’ve missed the world of the Scholomance so much, and this was a wonderful return to a school that’s only slightly less dangerous than it was in the original trilogy.
I love the details of life in the school; the bargaining between students for spell components, the unexpected friendships, and how a disagreement between roommates can get pretty ugly when someone can literally turn your possessions to dust so would you PLEASE PICK UP YOUR CLOTHES.
This fits in perfectly with the world of the trilogy, and makes me really hope she’ll return to the Scholomance in the future.