Naomi Novik

I feel that I've been thinking a lot about the climate crisis.

And in a way, some of the writings in the climate movement, the climate mobilization and some of the manifestos there and kind of some of the thinking there, I think, has been influencing me as well.

You know, so Temeraire, of course, has two very, you know, Temeraire's family tree is very clear, whether it's Patrick O'Brien on one side and Anne McCaffrey's Pern books on the other side.

Then the extended family is Jane Austen and Georgette Heyer and Horatio Hornblower, and then slightly more obscure versions of these things.

Those are the roots of Temeraire.

Temeraire, obviously, you know, Temeraire was something that I started writing.

I started working on Temeraire in 2004.

And I finished the last volume, I think, in 2016.

This is one of those embarrassing things where as an author, as soon as I finish writing the books, they're gone.

They're done for me.

And I don't remember anything about the dates exactly.

But I think that's about what it was.

It was more than a dozen years.

And so the person who finished the series was in many ways not the same person who began it.

And so...

With Temeraire, what was interesting was that I was having to work quite hard to be in conversation with my past self and try and find the way to bring the story to a satisfying close at the end.

And obviously there's a military history and Atlas of the Napoleonic Wars was an absolutely critical book for me throughout the whole series, which is this wonderful, wonderful book

that essentially goes through every single campaign of the Napoleonic Wars, often on a day by day, and sometimes on an hour by hour basis, showing you the troop movements across the countryside, describing things like, you know, I mean, and it's just wonderful because you realize how 95% of the Napoleonic Wars

Through at least 95 percent of the battles, nobody had any idea what was going on.

You know, like the and in fact, that Napoleon's fundamental genius really was in basically better being able to manage and respond to to that uncertainty.