Poor dragons, they never get their due. Always the villain. The enemy. The monster to be overcome. Fantasy authors of old spent centuries waging a smear campaign against dragonkind, accusing them of kidnapping maidens, hoarding gold, and being generally unpleasant. These ten fantasy authors however are attempting to repair dragons’ broken public image with a PR stunt: by making them out to be the heroes. These are 10 fantasy books where the dragon is the main character, serving fire and protagonist energy in equal measure.
Seraphina
In the world of Rachel Hartman’s Seraphina, dragons are more than just a backdrop fantasy presence – they’re a sizable chunk of the kingdom’s population. Ever since humans and dragons put aside their differences, dragons have been serving humanity as academic liaisons – lending their considerably large intellects to help solve modern problems of science. But in the halls of nobility, a new conundrum has arisen that can’t be solved with math and measurements, a conundrum called “murder.” After a royal turns up dead from a suspiciously dragon-esque cause, fragile human/dragon relations come under threat of breaking down. It’s up to one court musician to piece together the mystery and stop history from repeating itself – we can’t go back to the bad old days of killing dragons now, can we?
Tooth And Claw
Dragons aren’t just the main characters of Jo Walton’s Tooth and Claw series, they’re the only characters. Set in a Victorian romance novel-esque world where everyone and their mother is a dragon, the plot follows an aristocratic dragon family who are left reeling after the death of their patriarch. The most pressing question they need to solve is a matter of inheritance, i.e. who is going to eat daddy’s scaly corpse and gain his power? Yes, in this world, quaint notions of primogeniture have been replaced by draconic cannibalism, where strong dragons devour weak ones in order to accrue wealth and resources. It’s a raucous comedy of manners featuring fire breathing reptiles who pass the time like any landed gentry – by hunting, dancing, and stabbing one another in the back.
His Majesty’s Dragon
The first of the Temeraire series by Namoi Novik, His Majesty’s Dragon is a historical fantasy novel where the Napoleonic Wars were fought on dragonback. Napoleon’s armies are crushing their foes with the help of flying reptile air support, but tides turn after a British naval captain captures a French frigate and the dragon egg within. When the egg hatches, Captain William Laurence and the dragon Temeraire formm an inseparable bond – accompanying each other as comrades in arms (wings?) and leaning on each other as trusted confidants. You know the situation is dire when a lizard with a reputation for destruction becomes your moral compass in wartime. But when it comes to the big existential questions about the justification of violence, you gotta take the answers where they come.
Promised In Fire
Do you smell that? It’s not the freshly dragon-fire cooked flesh of a virgin in the air. No, it’s romance! Jasmine Walt’s Promised In Fire is a fantasy enemies to lovers tale about a rambunctious water nymph and a grumpy dragon thrown together by a spell gone wrong. While the two separate species are initially suspicious, they begin to form a bond in order to solve a magical plague that is infecting the land and threatening all magical beings equally. The pair also must contend with the threat of falling head over heels (claws?) for one another – a challenge they utterly and unsurprisingly fail to overcome. You want sexy magical romance between two elemental opposites? You and this book will pair up together like the nature of its two main characters – like fire and water.
The Memoirs of Lady Trent
Technically dragons aren’t the protagonists of The Memoirs of Lady Trent series by Marie Brennan, but they’re literally the only thing that the titular naturalist talks about in her writings. A Victorian Era fantasy about one woman’s lifelong relationship to fire breathing reptiles, Lady Trent gives the reader a detailed account of how she became the Jane Goodall of dragons. As her memoirs wax between the academic and the introspective, we get a glimpse into one of the most brilliant minds ever to study these creatures – along with the personal and professional cost of her pursuits. Lady Trent is a woman who risked life, limb, and social standing in order to study dragonkind. Dragons might not be the protagonists of this series, but they certainly are the main characters of the story Lady Trent spent her life writing.
The Dragon Keeper
The first of Robin Hobb’s Rain Wild Chronicles, Dragon Keeper takes place in a fantasy world slowly turning toxic. No, not like your ex. I mean literally toxic, full of polluted water that causes birth defects in humans and dragons alike. After a clutch of malformed dragons hatch from eggs in a polluted river, the younglings hope to survive by traveling upriver to the land of Kelsingra – the ancestral home of their kind. The dragon babies are watched over by human and dragon characters alike, fantasy conservationists that hope to reintroduce a thriving dragon population to the world. If you’re a fan of the whimsical yet quietly devastating environmental themes of Studio Ghibli movies, The Dragon Keeper will soon be your dream fantasy job title.
Song In The Silence
Elizabeth Kerner’s Song In The Silence is a work of draconic romance, a love story between an ancient dragon and an adventurous young woman. Sick and tired of living a horse breeder’s life, Lanen Kaelar leaves home to travel to the mythical Dragon Isle – and potentially breed with the population. Her dreams come true when she meets Akhor, king of the dragons, and the pair begin to slowly fall in love. Things get almost uncomfortably intimate when the pair begin to communicate with each other via telepathy, bonding over their shared desire to deeply know another species outside of their own. While light on corporeal sexy stuff, this book is heavy on the intellectual smut – a human/dragon mindf**k in the most literal possible sense of the term. If you’ve got a thing for dragons that goes beyond academic or literary curiosity, this the book that you’ll be keeping under your pillow at night.
The Dragonriders of Pern
Part fantasy, part sci-fi, Anne McCaffrey’s The Dragonriders of Pern is all dragon. In a series that takes place over millennia, McCaffrey tells the story of a distant planet whose population has learned to live alongside dragons as mounts, coworkers, and friends. Dragons arrived on Pern due to advances in genetic engineering, which humans of old used to create the beasts in order to help fight a space fungus. Yes, really. The planet of Pern is threatened by Thread, a spore from the stars that consumes all organic matter. Its weakness? Dragon fire. McCaffrey’s dozens-long series is a detailed history of Pern’s noblest – the dragon riders and their mounts that have sworn to protect the planet at all costs, from space shrooms or otherwise.
Age of Fire
While it fails to reach the standard set by Sum 41’s debut album All Killer, No Filler, E.E. Knight’s Age of Fire series mostly features killer dragons, with a couple of filler humans here and there. The first novel of the series, Dragon Champion, centers around a young dragon named Auron. Auron’s had it rough from day one, considering he had to fight his male siblings to death moments after hatching. Circumstances go from bad to worse after an attack on his home leaves most of his surviving family dead, leaving him caged and sold amongst human traders. After escaping, he sets out on a quest to seek the wisdom of an ancient black dragon said to know the secrets of dragonkind. All Auron wants is to raise a clutch of kids don’t immediately try to kill one another, or get killed by other species – maybe this other dragon can help? Dream big, Auron. The dragon world needs more idealists like you.
The Iron Dragon’s Daughter
The Iron Dragon’s Daughter is the black sheep (dragon?) of this list, featuring one of the weirdest reimagining of dragons in fantasy literature. The novel begins in a dragon factory. Yes, you read that right, a dragon factory, one that mass produces sentient dragons made of iron. The factory employs Industrial Revolution approved methods to function: child labor. After an indentured servant named Jane begins to hear the voice of an iron dragon in her head, she decides to tender her resignation by busting the beast out. Now on the lam with a dragon that runs on human flesh, Jane throws her moral compass out the window to serve her mechanical companion’s deepest desire: to destroy the universe. It’s a wild work of revisionist fantasy that throws the rules out the same window Jane’s moral compass went. The dragon Melanchthon is to Jane what Mephistopheles is to Dr. Faustus – a main character, but not one whose example should be followed.
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