The Last Dragon on Mars
The Dragonships series, Book 1
Scott Reintgen
Aladdin
Fiction, MG Fantasy/Sci-Fi
Themes: Alternate Earths, Bonded Companions, Cross-Genre, Dragons, Religious and Spiritual Themes, Schools and Institutions, Soldier Stories, Space Stories
**+
Description
Throughout the cosmos, every heavenly body, from the brightest sun to the smallest moonlet, manifests
an avatar in the form of a dragon. When Earth's dragon Gaia decided her world needed life, she
sacrificed herself, eventually enabling humans to evolve and take her legacy to the moon and other
worlds - but nowhere else in the entire solar system had a habitable biosphere. Clearly, in order to
terraform a place, the world's dragon avatar must die... but why must it be a self-sacrifice? Would it
really matter how they died? Through war and treachery, humans slaughtered the great dragon Ares of
Mars, to claim a second planet for themselves. Only with his last breath, Ares cursed his world. Now,
there is air, and with it plants and animals, but the soil is barren, the skies lashed with killer
storms, and every living thing that sprung from Ares's death is half-mad with hatred for humans, an
infection that even spreads to imported pets and livestock. Earth's children may live on the planet, but
it will never be theirs.
The night the boy was born on Mars, the great moon dragon Luna flew overhead, giving his mother the
perfect inspiration for his name... the last gift she would ever give him. Years later, the orphaned
Lunar Jones lives with a dozen other children, scraping the storm-torn wastes beyond the city gates for
scrap and relics that will keep them all fed for another day on a world that's slowly dying around them.
Fleeing another crew while fighting over a prize, he ends up in a forbidden military zone - and
discovers an impossible secret: a dragon. And when young Dread chooses Lunar as his dragoon, the captain
mentally bonded to the near-godlike being, the scrapper finds himself plunged into a new world that's
far more dangerous than any storm-wracked wasteland, with stakes higher than he can imagine - for, if
he and Dread fail the challenges that lie ahead, the last vestiges of Mars will fail with them.
Review
I'd heard good things about this book, and the concept sounded very fun. Dragons as living avatars
of heavenly bodies - able to power "dragonships" that turn the transit time from Earth to Mars into
mere hours? A future with tech so advanced that power generators can spontaneously generate complex
machinery and matter from microchip blueprints? How cool is all that? Unfortunately, the answer turned
out to be rather less cool the more I read, until by the end I was left with a bitter, ashen taste in
my mouth that managed to drop the rating below three stars.
Early on, I rather enjoyed the ideas and the world, and was willing to roll with the implausibilities
for the sake of a good story - and it did indeed start out good. Lunar's the sort of scrappy underdog
character that's a genre staple for a reason, fighting not just for his own survival but the found
family back at the "relocation house" (basically an orphanage where Martian children wait for one of
the meager apprenticeships or jobs to open up and pluck them out of poverty). He even extends his
protective instincts to members of the rival crew that left him for dead, when he finds they also
abandoned one of their own to die in the wilderness. When he discovers Dread in a cavern beneath the
base, he also discovers one rogue general's off-the-books mission and a collection of young elite
soldiers, all hand-picked and trained from early childhood in the hopes that the growing young dragon
would choose one of them as his dragoon... but, instead, as implied by the foreshadowing of Luna's
presence over his birth, it's Lunar who gets the honor. This does not instantly transform him into a
flawless hero, though. He stumbles, he fumbles, he tries to become someone he isn't... and Dread is
not some all-powerful and wise god, being young and inexperienced and possibly a touch mentally
unstable, with terrifying bursts of rage out of the blue where he even threatens Lunar's life. The
boy has to earn his place and his title, as well as the respect of the soldiers who become his crew
- and, of course, when the inevitable major crisis hits, he and the rest find themselves subject to
a trial by literal fire as the fate of Mars hangs in the balance. Along the way are memorable
encounters with numerous dragons, all of which are more akin to Greco-Roman deities than humans:
immensely powerful beyond human understanding, but with outsized personalities and flaws, prone to
ever-shifting alliances and rivalries and bickering in which fragile mortal lives can easily be
extinguished as casually as swatting a gnat. Sure, several parts are strongly reminiscent of other
works (dragons bearing full crews in harness reminiscent of Naomi Novik's Temeraire, the
elite military school where an unconventional underdog must prove themselves like in Orson Scott
Card's classic Ender's Game, etc.), but The Last Dragon on Mars should have been a
gripping, wild ride through a fantastic solar system... so what went wrong?
From early on, I had a slight itch in the back of my mind about the idea of Earth's avatar
dragon/essentially-goddess Gaia sacrificing herself for life... and not just for life, but
seemingly for humans. (Did dinosaurs even exist in this alternate solar system, or is this more of
a Creationist take that glosses over any other species than H. sapiens, and by extension the
many rich and wondrous biomes that came before us, as either nonexistent or irrelevant because
"chosen by the Creator"?) Then Luna, devoted to the will and memory of Gaia (as all moons tend to
be devoted to their "masters", their planets), decides to help humans. She chooses to let herself
be seen and make contact with the mortals, explaining concepts of mental bonds and what dragons
could do when paired with human innovation and technology (the "dragonships" and more), encouraging
them to spread through the solar system even knowing that there are no other habitable worlds out
there and there won't be any unless one of her kin is also willing to sacrifice themselves as Gaia
did.
Why would she do this? Why would this not lead to trouble? This is never questioned, because the
right of Gaia's blessed mortals to go wherever they want to, to plant their flag on whatever soil
- no matter how hostile - and call it their own, is undisputed.
When Ares (understandably) refuses to give the children of Earth his planet Mars, the humans and
Luna conspire to slaughter him in cold blood... which makes him the bad guy. I get that Lunar was
born long after the original would-be colonists struck down Ares, but still, the growing sense
that humans are somehow owed the planet - and, by extension, anywhere else they choose to go -
simply by virtue of being humans... does anyone else smell more than a little "manifest destiny"
doctrine, here? Couple that with how Lunar's first-person narration kept throwing in anachronistic
references that seemed out of place for his character and his situation - such as comparing one
woman's ponytail to swinging like a clock pendulum in a far future world where pendulum clocks
would likely be obscure ancient history, or casually dropping a reference about how he and his
companions are expected to save an entire planet while being younger than the driving age on
Earth (which assumes that teenagers on Earth still undergo the rite of passage of learning to
drive a motorized vehicle, that driving ages have not changed in hundreds of years, and that a
Martian boy living a hand-to-mouth hardscrabble life with minimal access to education would know
or care about a bit of trivia like that) - and later developments that enforce the "divine right
of kings" in a rigid social hierarchy of unquestioned masters and obedient servants (with
trouble coming when the servants dislike cruel, harmful treatment from their master and try to
change the status quo), and I found my suspension of disbelief plummeting through the
stratosphere.
By the end, despite some high-adrenaline space battles and world-shifting stakes, I no longer
cared what happened to the people or the dragons... which was just as well, as the last twist
almost had me groaning as it took the very last vestigial flutter of suspension of disbelief
and stomped it flat. After the early promise and wonderful concepts, little was left but ashes
and disappointment... though I will admit the dragons could be quite awesome.