I love dragons and the subset of dragon known as “sea monster”. Despite all the debunkers and skeptics I like to hope that there truly is a Loch Ness Monster and that its existence is proof of something wonderful. We don’t like to believe in magic anymore, and we take comfort in science–more comfort than science deserves, I sometimes think.
I know I’ve mentioned this here before because the ponderence of dragons is one of my favourite pastimes. But I honestly believe that when the Bible talks about the Serpent who tempted Eve that the serpent was what we now call a dragon. I think Lucifer the angel of light breathed fire. I also suspect that’s where we get the myth of Prometheus.
I’m not quite sure why I’m so fascinated by all things dragon. I suspect it may have something to do with Walt Disney’s Sleeping Beauty. She was the villain who scared me the most as a child; as an adult she’s the Disney villain who most fascinates me. I don’t care about Scar or Shir Kahn or even the Wicked Stepmother. They all seem like weaksauce sisters compared to the primal green fire of Maleficent. And of course she transformed into a dragon, which when you think on it is much cooler than grounding someone from a dance. 
I often puzzle over why dragons exist across so many cultures if they aren’t real, have never been real. It seems like too much coincidence for all of us to dream up what is essentially the same sort of mythical beast. Other mythical creatures are highly localised–the Chupacabra*, Bigfoot, Banshees, Selkies–but everybody has a dragon.
Oddly enough, with as crazy as I am about them, I’m endlessly picky about dracofiction. I won’t read just anything that sports some version of the firebreathers. Fantasy authors are overly fond of throwing dragons into their work sometimes, and it doesn’t always work. I find myself especially annoyed with hackneyed dracobits that are tossed into the story to spare the author from coming up with a more inventive villain or threat.
The best dragons are of course in George RR Martin’s A Song Of Ice And Fire series. He captures them just right–both as mythical totems of a lost magic and real creatures improbably reborn into a growing chaos. Martin’s dragons are great and terrible, as they should be.
Daniel Abraham’s dragons in The Dagger And The Coin series are headscratchers. They are the extinct creators of a world left behind for the genetically engineered slaves they created to serve them. The whole idea is strange, as it combines the traditional dracology with Ancient Aliens. I think it works, but I’ve only read the first book in the series so far.
The most adorable winged fellows are in the Dreamworks movie How To Train Your Dragon. It’s probably coincidental that Toothless looks so much like my dog Gob. I don’t have a lot of practice writing fantasy, but I often toy with the idea of having dragons that are less lizardlike and more canine. Warm-blooded, winged and four-legged, my personal brainchild would be a sort of giant batdragon. After all, dog-faced fruit bats look like Gob too.
Dog Faced Fruit Bat
Dog-faced Schipperke
There are several fantasy series I’ve not read that feature dragons, and I welcome input from anyone who has read them. The Dragonriders of Pern and Naomi Novik’s Temeraire series often tempt me but also make me nervous.
I think that dragons are a special treat for people of faith. Like God they are wondrous beings you can’t see but believe in because of their wondrousness. Now, I believe that God is real. I don’t know about dragons. But I like being able to fully cling to the faith of wonder.
Just Another Pretty Farce 
I loved the stories of the dragonriders of Pern (and most of their spinoff side-series). For me Pern consists of the books I read in the 70s:
Dragonflight (1968), first novel written, a fix-up of two previously published stories
Dragonquest (1970)
Dragonsong (1976) —during Dragonquest, closing almost simultaneously
Dragonsinger (1977) —during seven days following Dragonsong
Dragondrums (1979) —closing before the end of The White Dragon
The White Dragon (1978), incorporating the short “A Time When” (1975)
As Science Fantasy (or speculative fiction), there’s nothing better. The characters, the lore, the dragon names…
Temeraire is just fun.
Not to be contentious, but among other issues the Pern stories are very rapey. I’m not sure Coble would enjoy them all that much, despite the dragons.
My memories of the core stories date back 30 years – I confess that the elements I remember fondly were the other things; F’lar and Mnementh, Lessa and Ramoth, the concept of Thread, Menolly and the fire lizards, Piemur and the dragondrums.
Somehow, Johne, I don’t see you as loving the rapey elements. That doesn’t seem your style. ;-p
Also, I thought of you this morning as I put the 148th book into my TBR folder. You are so not the only one who is book-acquisitive. (At least a good chunk of those 148 were free.)
Pardon the brevity and the typos. This was sent from my iPhone.
I confess, I don’t even remember them, but I haven’t read the entire series, and what I did read of the earliest contributions were multiple decades ago.
Also, a TBR folder sounds grand. I have literally stacks of books piled around damning me and taunting me with their presence; in the garage, by my bed, in the Dining Room, under the bathroom sink… I should sell them and only buy TBR ebooks from now on. Perhaps their silent disapproval would be easier to bear if they weren’t as visible…
You’d think…but that ever-looming parenthetical number weighs pretty heftily after bit. 😉
Before I switched to kindle I had much the same infestation. One could call it The Touble With TBRles. ;-p
Pardon the brevity and the typos. This was sent from my iPhone.
“The Touble With TBRles.”
rotfl. We have a winner for the quip of the day!
Rapey?!? They are?!!? I thought they were aimed at young adults.
Yeah…I am not much loving rapey storylines. Now I’m curious though. I may HAVE to at least give the first one my 92 page rule.
Wow. Are they like Gor rapey?
Pardon the brevity and the typos. This was sent from my iPhone.
OK, my memory also is hazy. There were both adult and YA books in the series. The adult ones were published first, and they were the ones I read. And they were quite rapey, especially the first one. I don’t remember the titles that clearly, but I think it was Dragonrider or maybe the Dragonflight that Johne mentions. OK, Wikipedia is my friend. The early adult books were Dragonflight and then Dragonquest. The rape isn’t graphic, but it’s presented as being very hot and not treated as rape on that account, which I found offputting, to say the least.* If you are going to read them, I don’t know how to say more without giving away too much of the plot of the first book.
*McCaffrey has a trope of women who are sexually attacked but who find the sex so wonderful that it’s OK, and the rapists become their dominating boyfriends/lovers/husbands. It shows up in others of her books and stories from that period. Slightly later in her oeuvre the creeps turn into seducers rather than rapists, but I’d say that the woman has issues.
Oh. The “Luke and Laura” deal.
Not really my thing.
I’ve still got to read one of these now. I’ll file it under Work Reading, because in curious to see her technique.
Pardon the brevity and the typos. This was sent from my iPhone.
You could read her Ship Who Sang stuff, in which the heroine has no body at all. Like I say, issues. I used to read a lot (not all) of her stuff, but once I noticed the issues, I couldn’t read them any more.
We don’t like to believe in magic anymore, and we take comfort in science
I like to think that science doesn’t take away from the magic, just moves it to a different resolution. Science has opened us up to untold amounts of magic that had never been seen before.
the idea of having dragons that are less lizardlike and more canine. Warm-blooded, winged and four-legged
You’re talking about a luck dragon.
Actually, the presence of dragon stories across Eurasia isn’t that surprising. We can trace the way the stories spread. China (presumably prompted by dinosaur skeletons, which we know form part of Chinese medicine), to the steppes, to the Roman Empire. The idea that dragons breathe fire comes from the association of the dragon, flying beings with long tails, with comets. In particular, it is suggested very tentatively that the English awareness of dragons is especially deep because the Sarmatian troops stationed in Britain by the Romans used dragon standards.
As a child, I wanted to be the evil queen from Sleeping Beauty. She was scary, but in a way I wanted to be.
I have literally wasted hours of my precious time studying dragons and dragon myths. They simultaneously frighten me and fascinate me. They are ancient archetypal figures–so, as well, they should do both.
I don’t know if it’s a waste if you do something with it.
I don’t know what it says about me that I am not generally afraid of a lot of the archtypes that seem to cause fear generally. I’m cool with dragons, spiders, snakes. My fears are all experiential–clowns, dentists, heights.
Pardon the brevity and the typos. This was sent from my iPhone.
You are obviously slightly more logical than I am because I’ve suffered from really bad spider bites (including the dreaded brown recluse) and I’m still not all that afraid of spiders. 🙂 I’m afraid of the unknown, but I’m also, as I said, fascinated by it. About time-wasting–you probably know all about research rabbit trails and how they turn into wasted time. It’s all fun time, but I have other responsibilities that don’t include knowing the various cultural adaptations of dragons. Well, okay, my kids are kinda into dragons, too, so we can have family time discussing them (how’s that for rationalization?).
I have read every Pern book. It is a complete universe. Fantasy meets science fiction. Dragons, telepathy, magic, astronomy (planetary mechanics), culture wars, intelligent dolphins. The action is better than the dialogue, which now seems kind of Rowling-ish in it’s obviousness. Favorite characters get old and pass. This surprised me, and is a good thing. I am now going to go re-read them…..
I really like the Termeraire books. They are fun to read, and the events in the books inspired me to brush up on my history.
Dragons are tough in that they seem to be like elves. Hard to escape stereotypes, and they get used so often you risk people getting tired of them. They are also hard to change or put a personal mark on them.
My own favorite dragon comes from a videogame series, rather than a book. Panzer dragoon created a world that was a hybrid of Nausicca in the Valley of the Wind and Dune, and the titular dragoon was designed well enough to be iconic-a fusion of beetle and dragon. The games kicked butt too.
I loved the Dragonriders of Pern series because it transported me into that world.
The TEMERAIRE books (at least up to Book 4, which is as far as I’ve read yet) are great, and on the whole feature less questionable content than most adult fantasy. I don’t think you’d have any problems with them, unless you decide you simply don’t care for the faux-Regency style of the writing.
I devoured McCaffrey as a teenager but I really don’t think I could stomach the Dragonriders books now (see aforementioned comments about rapeyness, etc. It’s a soft-peddled kind of rape, but nonetheless there are major consent issues going on there, and overall the series’ treatment of male and female relationships is not ideal). Love the Harper Hall series, though — DRAGONSINGER and DRAGONSONG at least I would gladly recommend to anyone.
I love dragons. Great blog