2015 read #19: Voyage of the Basilisk by Marie Brennan.

Voyage of the Basilisk: A Memoir by Lady Trent by Marie Brennan
348 pages
Published 2015
Read from April 15 to April 21
Rating: ★★½ out of 5

Another entry in Brennan's competent (but not revolutionary) series of speculative natural history adventures. The formula -- our heroine, Isabella Camherst, the future Lady Trent, frets at home before launching on an expedition to study dragons, has globe-trotting adventures, meets (thinly disguised) cultures without the Victorian burden of racial chauvinism, unwittingly gets mixed up in her nation's diplomatic efforts, and saves the day with some rash (and dragon-related) act of heroism -- is still winsome, but growing stale after a third volume. As a card-carrying liberal and degree-carrying anthropologist, I haven't tired of the fantasy of various cultures meeting each other as diplomatic equals rather than exterminating each other with pathogens and prejudice, but Basilisk is weaker than the previous two volumes on a structural level.

The new characters (with the exception of Suhail) are scarcely sketched in even by pulp adventure standards; the de facto antagonists, stand-ins for the Ming Dynasty, aren't given any kind of human face, remaining anonymous guards and bureaucrats. Instead, much of the book is a loosely connected travel narrative, in which Lady Trent faces problems of logistics, dengue fever, shipwreck, native customs, and a rather abrupt decision to reenact the sandworm-riding scenes of Dune with a sea serpent. This last decision precipitates her onto the forbidden island where she gets another clue in the mystery of the vanished Draconian race (which, honestly, doesn't hold much interest for me, as they're still a generic vanished fantasy race at this point), stumbles upon the Yelang (a.k.a. Ming) soldiers hiding out on the forbidden island, steals their dragonbone airship, and eventually rides a sea serpent into battle. It's all good fun, old fashioned adventure tidily swept clean of unpleasant racism and historical ugliness, but also kind of silly.