Read the previous entry in the series here.
Read the next entry in the series here.

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After a letter from Keffria Vestrit to Jani Khuprus in which the former notes apprehensions about her younger children and reports news from Wintrow, “City Dwellers”,” opens with Thymara musing on the relocation into Kelsingra proper from the settlements across the river from it. Details of the relocation are provided, and findings in the city that are put to use are described. Thymara notes changes in Sintara since the latter gained flight, and the two confer about their association and the changes still ongoing in Thymara. Talk turns to Silver, about which Sintara muses longingly, noting its flows and power and raging at Thymara that she cannot recall them.

Thymara recalls conversations with Alise that might be informative, and her thoughts turn to considerations of reestablishing settlement in Kelsingra itself. Tasks assigned and difficulties with other keepers, notably Tats and Rapskal, receive attention, as do factional divisions growing among them. Thymara adds what she is able to recall from the embedded memories in the city to their store of knowledge, which helps with planning for the future, and she muses on the implications of the memories she has gained. She ends up discussing as much with Tats, who insists in bringing Alise into the discussion, and they confer about how to proceed as they watch the work to restore the city go on. But their continued discussion is interrupted by dragons beginning to fight and Carson’s summons to address the same.

Elsewhere, Chassim confronts Selden, the latter of whom regards the former with questions about her hostility. Selden assesses his situation and asks Chassim for more details about it, learning of her parentage and the Duke of Chalced’s intentions towards him. Chassim’s own situation is explicated in some detail, and prospects for the both of them are poor, though they begin to reach an accord together.

The character of Chassim Kent, daughter of the Duke of Chalced, Andronicus Kent, calls for attention, despite how little she appears in the chapter. Her description echoes that of hijabi, and, with that description in place alongside long-standing descriptions of Chalced, I find myself put in mind of markedly unhelpful stereotypes at play in prevailing US cultural discourses antecedent to and contemporary with the publication and presumed composition of the text. I am not an expert on anti-Muslim prejudice, but it does seem to me that the linking of Muslim-coded things to an overtly, almost comically evil nation-state does smack of that kind of bias…and I am disappointed to see it. While there does need to be conflict in such a novel as Blood of Dragons–fantasy literature almost demands that there be some sort of international shenanigans–and much genre fiction benefits from clear antagonists, neither needs to reinforce real-world hatreds that were more than problematic at the time of publication and which have only gotten worse in light of recent execrable events at play. It’s a point against the novel, and a substantial one.

Once again, between the present chapter and some other reading I’ve been doing (you don’t think the novel is the only thing I’m reading, do you?), I come to the anticipated criticisms that “It’s just a novel,” that “It’s just a story,” that “It’s just make-believe,” and that “If you don’t like it, stop reading.” As to the first three, I have often in similar cases noted that the promulgation of material influences prevailing understandings of the world and therefore the actions taken in the world. That is, what gets put out into the world sets people up to think and believe those things and to act on them. The stories we take in help to shape who we are, just as the stories we tell show much of who we are; they matter for those reasons if for no others. (I do think there are others, clearly.) And as to the last of the four–I didn’t say I don’t like the novel as a whole. But liking a thing does not, or should not, mean blindness to its deficiencies.

I have fallen in some ways from my prime, partly because of increasing age, partly because of increasing distance from the kind of life of the mind for which I had trained, the loss of which I yet mourn. But I am not so fallen as to be incapable of seeing blemishes upon what I appreciate and still appreciating it. I did my dissertation on Malory; there is a lot in his work (and more in his life, so far as we know it) with which to find fault. I read Chaucer eagerly; the same is true for him as for Malory. I read Shakespeare, Milton, Asimov, Tolkien (yes, I’m a nerd); the same is true for each of them, as well. I have no doubt I could find similar issues in the other readings I do (again, there are many such). That I do does not mean I endorse all or even any of what they say, and it is perhaps a position of privilege that allows me to do such reading and not be harmed by it…clearly, I have more thinking to do on the matter.

I doubt I am the only one.

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