100 Things: Dragon's Blood, by Jane Yolen

[goseaward]

So I thought I'd do the 100 Things Blogging Challenge. Basically: pick a topic, blog about 100 things that fit in that topic. I'm going to blog about stories that were/are important to me in some way--whether that's because I just think they're good, because they changed the way I thought about things, the way I wrote about things, whatever. And stories means I can do books, short stories, movies, TV, fic--see how that works out? :D

First up: Dragon's Blood, by Jane Yolen. This was one of my favorite books as a kid, so beloved I can still quote phrases from it. The book takes place on a planet called Austar IV, an inhospitable world originally used as a penal colony and now mostly a gambling planet--the main economic driver is the dragon fighting pits (the native dragons having been bred up, but not really tamed, by the human settlers). The plot follows Jakkin, a teenage worker on a dragon farm, as he independently raises a dragon from hatchling to her first fight.

I really loved this when I was younger because, one, interesting worldbuilding, and two, DRAGONS! Awesome dragons! (And some philosophical things later on in the books.) However, there are some weirdnesses about the book that I notice now. I wasn't really aware enough when I was younger to see the obvious analogue with Australia. Also, the plot and vocabulary aren't very advanced, but a lot of the subject matter is. All of the women we see (iirc) are prostitutes, former prostitutes, or the children of prostitutes, except for Jakkin's memories of his dead mother. Jakkin and his coworkers are...well, they call them bonders; basically it's people who have sold themselves into slavery. They get food, shelter, clothing for as long as they are bonders, and they have opportunities to earn extra money; when they can pay their owners a certain sum they are freed. Of course that money is also the money they have for extras, such as alcohol, admission to the dragon pits, and the aforementioned prostitutes. The bonders are treated well, and it's implied in the book that there are people who buy their freedom only to come back to the bond system later when they can't support themselves. (Some of the inequalities of this system are addressed in later books.) There are also some issues I won't go into on the ethics of how Jakkin gets his dragon.

That said, there are a bunch of things about it that I like. The training of the dragon is interesting and emphasizes the difficulty & hard work of doing something like that (there are a couple of other times in this series you'll hear about my love of books that talk about the daily grind of learning to do something well). The worldbuilding is nice on the detail level, as much as I have a problem with some of the macro aspects: this is definitely a resource-poor backwater and that plays out in a lot of ways. There's high-level technology they hardly use because it's so difficult to get batteries, most of the protein sources you hear about come from the dragons, there are interesting digressions on dragon breeding and how the fighting relates to their natural behavior. The protagonist is a sheltered teenage boy who believably hasn't thought about the way the rest of the world works, and he's helped by Akki, a girl on the dragon farm about his age who's way more savvy than he is.

It's a short book--I think it took me about 3 hours to reread it recently--and the other books in the series are good as well. I don't love this the way I did when I was, like, ten, especially the rather abrupt ending, but it's still a fun little read.