Marie Brennan: Tropic of Serpents

In Tropic of Serpents: A Memoir by Lady Trent, Marie Brennan returns to the alternate world she created in The Natural History of Dragons, a world that is in many ways like our own in the mid-victorian era, but in which there are dragons, in great abundance and variety, found mostly in the less accessible parts of the world. Here she continues the story of Isabella, a young woman with a passionate scholarly interest in dragons, and the determination and courage to travel wherever she must in order to collect information on them - even if it means breaking all the conventions that surround a young woman in her society.

These novels bring to mind the lives and writings of European women adventurers of the 18th and 19th centuries in our world, women like Mary Kingsley, Gertrude Bell, Alexandra David-Neel and Hester Stanhope. Brennan does not shy from giving her protagonist some of the classist, racist and imperialist perspectives of such times, although a healthy dose of scientific rigour and a willingness to learn about the ways of dragons from the people living close to them help to temper these perspectives as she gains more experience in her travels.

This second volume in Isabella's story takes her to a continent not unlike our own Africa, where her native country of Scirland has involved itself in a local war in order to gain massive trade advantages. Isabella, of course, is there to see the dragons of the savannahs and the mysterious swamp-wyrms that dwell in the delta jungles of the Moulish Swamp. Unfortunately, her desire to explore these dragon's natural habitats involves her in the political schemes of others when all she really wants is to do natural science and learn the secrets of dragons.