Naomi Novik. His Majesty's Dragon.
Del Rey, 2006.
ISBN: 0345481283.

Novik's Temaire series now numbers five volumes; His Majesty's Dragon is the first. The cute way to describe these books is to say that they're essentially Pern meets Horatio Hornblower (or Patrick O'Brian), but in actuality that does at least this first volume a disservice. Novik, while retaining much of the eighteenth century in terms of the Napoleanic wars, society, language and cultures, has in her characters, Captain William Laurence and the dragon Temeraire, created something special.

In Novik's re-imagined Napoleanic wars, the French and the English (and pretty much everyone else, including the Chinese) have an air force of sentient dragons, ridden by crews of aviators. The dragons and their crews perform vital service in peacetime as transport and couriers, but in war they serve much as a modern air force does, including aerial combat. Captain Laurence is on the deck of his ship, the H. M. S. Reliant when his ship vanquishes and seizes a French ship. Part of that ship's cargo is a dragon egg. The difficulty is that the egg will hatch, soon, and need care and feeding to become an eight or nine (or more) ton fire-breathing, ocean-crossing, flying dragon, capable of carrying a crew of aviators on missions of war and peace.

The thing is, once you become an aviator, even though you are a gentleman born, your life is governed by the dragon, the dragon's needs, and the rules of the Corps. You do not live the life of a gentleman, and you absolutely do not serve in the British Navy. The services performed by the aviators are crucial, and valued, but their lives and morals are, at the very least, not those of gentlemen; in fact aviators largely keep to themselves and live with their dragons in restricted enclaves, shunned by their own families.

But once a dragon hatches, and someone puts a harness on the hatchling (assuming the dragon allows anyone to put a harness on), that individual is tied to the dragon for life, and to the Aviator Corps.

And that is exactly what happens to Laurence, to his chagrin. What makes the book more than a fun adventure—is that Novik creates interesting characters, and deals with some complicated issues around society, and class, and gender, and does it without being boring, preachy or didactic. I'll be reading the rest of the books, I expect, and if you're curious, you can read an excerpt of His Majesty's Dragon here.

You might want to start reading; Peter Jackson has optioned the film rights for the first three books, and speculated about a miniseries.