I never expected to DNF the Temeraire series. When I first picked up His Majesty’s Dragon in December I fell in love with a historical fantasy centred around the bond between man and dragon. However, as I’ve continued on in this series I’ve just become less and less invested in the story Naomi Novik was telling.

Empire of Ivory takes place immediately after the end of Black Powder War. We learn that all of the dragons in Britain have fallen deeply ill and are on the brink of death. Laurence and Temeraire go on a journey to find the cure for this horrible disease and save their friends.

What ultimately compelled me to put this book and series down completely is the way Naomi Novik addressed race. This book and every book in the Temeraire book since Throne of Jade has had an incredibly uncomfortable relationship with race and colonialism. As a black southern African it was unbelievably frustrating to experience a narrative that demands you confront slavery and colonialism from the perspective of white people. I stopped reading this book when our crew was in Cape Town because of how central the Afrikaner and British colonists were in the narrative. This section brought into stark relief how sidelined people of colour were in this story. Novik provides a handful of token POCs like the missionary Erasmus and unnamed ‘natives’ yet they were secondary to the white colonizers in the story.

The way Novik framed Laurence and his abolitionist cohorts frustrating because of the lack of time and attention given to black people in the narrative. We spend a lot of time focused on the struggles of being an abolitionist with little acknowledgement of the struggles of being a slave. This framing of Laurence as some sort of anti-racist white saviour, while the only back characters in the novel got barely any time to exist outside of the white perspective, was insulting.

In the end, I DNF’d this book a little less than halfway through the story so don’t know if Novik did the work to humanize the Xhosa and Khoi communities to become more than just ‘natives’ in the background or give the handful of back characters a significant role in the story. I understand that a depiction of the relationship between white colonizers and black people isn’t supporting it. However, in the year of our lord 2020, there is no place in my life for stories about slavery and colonialism written by and about white people.

I will say that outside of the questionable racial politics of this series I genuinely have become uninvested in these books. The plots of these novels have only become less and less interesting to me and I’ve come to realize I don’t care about the Napoleonic Wars as much as I would need to continue on in this series. What I loved about His Majesty’s Dragon was the deep bond between Laurence and Temeraire and its just not enough to justify reading five more books in this series.

So I’m not going to continue on with the Temeraire series and this whole experience has only bolstered my desire to read from authors from marginalized communities telling the histories of their people. If anyone has any historical fantasy from the perspective of black people I would love to hear them.