Peter Jackson's Temeraire

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There really hasn't been an official thread on this yet, so I thought I'd make one!

First up, the main Hollywood Reporter article:

Peter Jackson is eyeing his next fantasy series. The filmmaker has dipped into his discretionary fund to option "Temeraire," a historical fantasy series by first-time novelist Naomi Novik, as he puts the pieces together for his career post-"King Kong."

The "Temeraire" saga reimagines the world of the Napoleonic Wars with the addition of an air force of dragons and valiant aviators. It centers on British naval Capt. Will Laurence, who captures a French ship, where he discovers an unhatched dragon egg in the hold -- a gift from the Emperor of China intended for Napoleon. When the egg hatches, he is forced to give up his naval career to become captain of the dragon he names Temeraire.

" 'Temeraire' is a terrific meld of two genres that I particularly love -- fantasy and historical epic," Jackson said. "I can't wait to see Napoleonic battles fought with a squadron of dragons. That's what I go to the movies for."

Jackson also is looking to take the books into the realm of interactive entertainment.

Novik was a computer programmer who did design work on a video game titled "Neverwinter Nights: Shadows of Undrentide." She wrote the first "Temeraire" book in 2004. When Del Rey saw it, the publisher asked for two more books. The series was launched in the spring.

Jackson got involved when producer Lucas Foster read galleys in January and sent them to Jackson's manger, Ken Kamins at Key Creatives. When Jackson read it, he was hooked.

"As I was reading these books, I could see them coming to life in my mind's eye," Jackson said. "These are beautifully written novels, not only fresh, original and fast-paced, but full of wonderful characters with real heart."

Foster and Kamins will serve as executive producers of the movie.

Novik learned that Jackson was one of the parties interested in her fledgling series in February but was skeptical anything would happen.

"I was warned that whatever happens in Hollywood, you should assume it's 10 degrees below reality," Novik said. "So if they say Peter Jackson has it, it really means Peter Jackson's assistant's personal trainer has it. I never took it seriously until (IPG's Justin Manask) called myself and (literary agent Cynthia Manson) and said, 'Peter wants the book.' There was lot of screaming in my household when I first got the call."

To Novik, who first read J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings" at age 6, having her creation in the hands of the man who brought those books to the screen is immensely reassuring.

"Those movies meant so much to me," Novik said. Jackson has not yet decided whether he will make one movie or three or if the books can be introduced by other media first. He is using his own funds to option material before approaching any studios with his plans.

In that vein, Jackson has optioned Alice Sebold's "The Lovely Bones" and is writing the adaptation with partners Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens on spec with the intent of speaking to distributors after the script is done. He plans to direct the movie in second-half 2007.

Novik, writing the fourth installment of the series, is repped by Cynthia Manson Literary Agency, IPG and Gang, Tyre, Ramer and Brown.

Jackson is additionally repped by Nelson, Felker.

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The dragon of the title is one of the series' central characters, as is his "aviator", Will Laurence, a former officer of the the British navy who had taken part in the capture of Temeraire's egg from a French ship while it was in transit to France. Temeraire is later revealed to be of a rare Chinese breed, and his possession by the English is considered a great coup.

Through the course of the book, Captain Laurence settles into the role of an aviator rather than a naval captain. Through him we learn how dragons are bred, raised, trained, and harnessed in combat. We are also introduced to the society of the aviators, a branch of the military trained to fight while mounted on dragons.

The training of Temeraire and Laurence is rushed so that their unit can assist the navy in preventing a French invasion while the veteran dragon units are sent to assist in the Battle of Trafalgar. Accordingly, the British win that engagement, although Horatio Nelson survives, one of the deviations from our history the series takes. Rather than a tactical blunder, Trafalgar turns out to be a ploy of Napoleon to leave Britain vulnerable to the world's first aerial assault.

And here is a link to a semi-sequel to His Majesty's Dragon that takes place in between the first novel and the second (Throne of Jade).

http://www.temeraire.org/stories/Feast_or_Famine.shtml
 
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A historical fantasy with bite, this deliciously addictive debut novel from Naomi Novik captures the Napoleonic period perfectly and skillfully layers history with imagination by adding a Dragon Air Force to the battle for England. Temeraire is a Celestial dragon, the most highly-prized of all draconic breeds; famed for their intelligence, agility and most of all for the Divine Wind - their terrible roar capable of shattering the heavy timbers of war ships and devastating woodland. Captured by the British, Temeraire was meant to be the companion of the Emperor Napoleon and not captained by a mere officer in the British Air Corps. The Chinese have demanded his return and the British government cannot afford to provoke the Asian super-power into allying with the French - even if it costs them the most powerful weapon in their arsenal, and forces Laurence and Temeraire apart.
 
please dont let him crap all over these great books too!

no magic. no dragons... noooooo STOOOOOORY!!!

*BARF*
 
As long as PJ has the approval of the author, he has my approval!

Oh, and here's the third book. No word on the fourth, just that it's being written.

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History takes flight in the third book of Naomi Novik's deliciously addictive Temeraire series which captures the Napoleonic period and skillfully layers historical events with imagination by adding a Dragon Air Force to the battle for England. After their adventure in China, Capt. Will Laurence of His Majesty's Aerial Corps and his extraordinary dragon, Temeraire, gratefully anticipate their voyage home. But before they set sail, they are waylaid by urgent new orders. The British Government, having purchased three valuable dragon eggs from the Ottoman Empire, now require Laurence and Temeraire to make a more perilous over-land journey instead, stopping off in Istanbul to collect and escort the precious cargo back to England - and time is of the essence if the eggs are to arrive before they hatch. A cross-continental expedition is a daunting prospect, fraught with countless dangers. The small party must be prepared to navigate frigid mountain passes and cross sterile deserts to evade feral dragons and Napoleon's aggressive infantry. And they will also have to endure an unexpected menace, for a Machiavellian herald precedes them, spreading political poison in her wake. Lien, the white celestial dragon, absconded from the Chinese Imperial Court shortly after the humiliating death of her beloved princely companion. Fervently believing Temeraire to be the architect of her anguish, she has vowed to ally herself with his greatest enemy in order to exact a full and painful revenge upon everything and everyone the black dragon holds dear.
 
Has anybody actually read these books? I picked up the first one today and look to starting it this weekend.
 
WOW... just wow.

I couldn't wait till this weekend to start reading it so I just said **** it! I'm on chapter 3 and the book is a blast so far. If you haven't picked it up, you should do so right away!

You want a fair assessment on what to base your foreknowledge of the content?

Picture a mixture of Dragon Heart and Pirates of the Carribean. The dragon, Temeraire, has an enduring personality and you really care for the human characters as well. Peter Jackson definitely found a rare gem.

$7.50 at your local Barnes & Noble. PICK IT UP!
 
Narynan said:
please dont let him crap all over these great books too!

no magic. no dragons... noooooo STOOOOOORY!!!

*BARF*

Yeah, don't let him crap all over this like he did with LOTR...by maintaining the heart of the books while knowing when to deviate in a way that enhances the films greatly from their source material.
 
Stormyprecious said:
Yeah, don't let him crap all over this like he did with LOTR...by maintaining the heart of the books while knowing when to deviate in a way that enhances the films greatly from their source material.

Dont forget about winning several Academy Awards along the way.
 
Interview with PJ at aintitcool.com!

PETER JACKSON: I'm happy to talk about whatever you want to talk about this morning. And we've got this other thing that we can talk about...

QUINT: Do you want to start with that?

PETER JACKSON: Yeah, sure. It's something we've been doing quietly over the last few months, but it's all wrapped up now. Fran (Walsh) and Philippa (Boyens) and I have acquired the option for the TEMERAIRE books by Naomi Novik.

QUINT: I love those books! I wrote a review of the first one on the site, actually.

PETER JACKSON: Yeah, I saw your review. We got the galleys sent to us, which has never happened before. I keep reading that filmmakers see the galleys of books, but we've never been sent a thing...

QUINT: Strangely enough, they handed out a little preview book at Comic-Con that I saw had a quote from my review on it... and I said something like, "This'd make a great movie!"

PETER JACKSON: (laughs) Yeah... We just... you know, we wanted something... We're doing these small movies, which is great and we're enjoying that, but we just wanted something that exciting and fantastical that we could start to think about and start to work on and develop. We read these books and thought they were really great. I'm a complete sucker for that world of history combined with the fantastical.

QUINT: It's very unique. Are you planning on adding this into your producer queue or...

PETER JACKSON: No, no... I'm not sure. I mean, I love the books and it may well be that I'm going to shoot them. I don't know. I'm just going to see... LOVELY BONES has been occupying our minds for the last few months, we haven't really dared to delve too much into (TEMERAIRE). We've only recently completed the work to secure the rights to these, anyway, so we haven't allowed ourselves to get too excited yet until it was all done.

The one thing I am going to do is I'll start the guys at WETA designing some things. We've just acquired the rights ourselves. We haven't gone in conjunction with a studio or anything else. We just bought it ourselves.

The thing we'll do is we'll develop the screenplays on spec and then we'll design it. Which is really the first thing I want to do, is have Weta do a design pass of the characters and the world. Get Gus (Hanson) and those guys to have a go at it, which we'll do at some point when the HALO stuff is mainly done. So, we'll start with that and once THE LOVELY BONES gets all tied up and in good shape we'll start to think about this series.

I don't really know yet how we'll structure it, because obviously it's more than one film, for sure, so it'll be interesting to just have a think about that. And it's the future books, too... I think Naomi is already doing her 4th book and I think she's planning a 5th and 6th book as well. We've optioned all TEMERAIRE books, including future ones.

QUINT: Strangely enough I had the galleys for the 2nd and 3rd books, too. I didn't know how I was going to react to the books since I don't read fantasy too often, but you're right. I really grabbed on to that kind of MASTER AND COMMANDER type story set in a more fantastic world. I've always loved the What If? stories... and this is very much like that. What if Napoleon and the English had air combat during the Napoleonic wars?

PETER JACKSON: I love that, too. I love it where the history is authentic 80% of the time, but we've got 20% of Fantasy in there, which is fantastic. It's not really used that much in film, either. I find it to be exciting because it mends particular genres, which in themselves have not been well-realized on film, certainly not commercially. You know, the Napoleonic Epic, Napoleonic Sea Battles plus dragons... It's a problematic area, but I think linking the two and using the great characters and the intrigue and the politics, which is what I enjoy...

You know, it's not just about the dragons and the battles, it's the other stuff in the detailed world she created. I love even just the concept of how the flying corp are looked down upon by the traditional navy. It's all about the English Class system, that's what makes it really interesting. And there are parallels to Tolkien in the sense that it is complex. It's going to be a lot of fun, actually.

QUINT: I was racking my brains trying to figure out what this big announcement was going to be...

PETER JACKSON: It's the first time it's ever happened! I actually got the jump on you, which is great! I'm also interested in exploring a sort of interactive... not video games as we know them today, but something that sort of melds a serialized interactive entertainment somehow. I just got interested in that area and I've been looking for something that'd be suitable for that. It's early days yet.

What I love about what George Lucas has done with STAR WARS, which I think is really cool, is that you have the movies and the movies, obviously, are the flagships of the saga, of the storytelling, but you have the comic books and the novels and everything that fills out what happens inbetween the films and what happens in other places while the films are occurring. I love that expansion of the world. This is, to me, has also got the same possibilities. The movies can be the epics and there can be other forms of entertainment that can be running alongside the movies, expanding the world of the books and the story.

QUINT: One thing I like about the TEMERAIRE project is that the series is really new and while it's out there, it's not a phenomenon yet. It can really be a surprise to the audience.

PETER JACKSON: Yeah. I like it because it's a story we've never seen before, it's a world that we've actually never seen. Apart from films like MASTER AND COMMANDER and (HORATIO) HORNBLOWER and a couple of things... even without the fantasy it's a world that's very rarely ever been told on the screen. It doesn't have to be dry and boring and historical and PBS. It doesn't have to be any of that stuff. It's vibrant and exciting and dynamic and thrilling. It should have a sort of RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK quality to it as well.
 
http://www.aintitcool.com/display.cgi?id=22157

Quint takes a ride with TEMERAIRE (aka His Majesty's Dragon), a novel by Naomi Novik!

Ahoy, squirts! Quint here. You don't often see me pop up with a book review on the site. Matter of fact, the only book reviews I have written were for the last two entries into my favorite modern series, Stephen King's DARK TOWER books. I love reading, but I'm not the same with books as I am with movies. If I'm not digging on a book right away, I tend to quit reading it. I'm not as patient, I guess.

So, I was sent an Advance Reading Copy for a fantasy novel, the first of three books in the story. I'm not really big into Fantasy fiction on the whole. I love the pulpy granddaddy's to the genre, like Burroughs' work and Bradbury's work and, of course, Tolkien's stuff, but I have found most modern Fantasy to be treading the same water. That just didn't interest me, even though I've heard some really good things about some current Fantasy, like Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series. I don't know... I just look at those covers and there's something in my brain that just puts up a large, red flag of disinterest.

All that is to say that I don't keep up with much current Fantasy and those that I do find myself reading tend to be smart genre blenders. That's what I love about King's Dark Tower books. They're just as much horror as they are fantasy, just as much western as science fiction, just as much action as drama. It's a new taste.

The description of Naomi Novik's TEMERAIRE is what prompted me to give it a chance. The story is set during the Napoleonic wars and follows British Naval Captain Will Laurence as he captures an enemy vessel bound for France. Below decks his crew finds a large egg and the journey begins.

The book supposes that during this historical conflict the UK and France not only had ground troops and Naval warships, but also had an Air Force composed of dragons and their masters.

There are many different breeds of dragons, some that are used for their speed, agility, strength, endurance, etc. Very much like planes in modern warfare, except in this reality the planes have their own instincts, emotions and, occasionally, the ability to spit acid or breathe fire, although fire-breathing dragons are very rare in Novik's universe, which allows her to set this story apart in a significant way from most dragon tales.

There's also a degree of loyalty that really is compelling in the book. A dragon picks his rider and their lives are tied together until death. There's a bond between a dragon and his rider that is greater than anything but the most devoted and selfless friendship you can think of and that's where the strength of Novik's story really lies.

This is Novik's first widely published work and it does show a few signs of a first time writer. Every once in a while her writing gets a tad overcomplicated and there are one or two moments of abrupt story changes that totally feel out of pace with the momentum of the story... You know those, when you have to stop and then turn the page back and make sure you didn't accidently turn two pages instead of one.

However, Novik nails everything important. Our two main characters Capt. Will Laurence and his dragon, Temeraire (named after the famous ship that was captured from the French and used against them by His Majesty's Navy) and their relationship is the heart of the book and is what made it so addictive to me.

It was seriously one of those books that I found myself thinking about during my regular daily routine, one that I put off things in order to just lay back and read. Very addictive.

The dragons can speak right out of the shell and are written with a kind of childlike wonder about the world. Each dragon has its own personality, but so far into the series there isn't one that is portrayed as a monster or even an animal. Novik really writes this as a buddy story. Laurence and Temeraire have a relationship much akin to Frodo and Sam or Capt. Jack Aubrey and Dr. Stephen Maturin from MASTER AND COMMANDER (a series that probably has more of an influence than Tolkien), true friends with no pretense to their friendship.

It's this friendship and, to a lesser extent, the relationships we see between the other aviators and their dragons, that drive the book forward and kept me so involved. Novik got me to care about these two, which was the real challenge for me as an individual reader. After the first couple chapters I didn't find myself reading a Fantasy book. I was just reading a book, following real characters.

The story is broken up into 3 acts.

Act 1 is the discovery of the egg and initial bonding between Temeraire and Laurence. Laurence has to shift from his beloved Navy to being an Aviator, a career that isn't valued very highly by the Navy. The transition isn't a smooth one for the man, but his friendship with Temeraire grows rapidly and eases the giant shift in his life's pursuits.

Act 2 has Temeraire and Laurence training with other dragons and aviators at Loch Laggan. We get introduced to the bulk of the secondary characters, both human and dragon alike, here. Much of the drama of the story resides here as well, as Laurence's Naval training clashes with the Aviators' training.

Novik's character work isn't as in-depth as characters from someone like King, but I'd say they're just real and complex. There are only a few obvious choices made here. For the most part it's solid work, very human (even for the non-human characters).

Act 3 has Laurence and Temeraire's trial by fire as they're thrown headfirst into battle with Napoleon's aviation force in a move that could very well spell disaster for the British.

And because Novik writes this story in a very grounded and real way as an alternate reality to our own, you're not sure that Napoleon is doomed to fail. In a world where there are huge dragons carrying dozens of riflemen and crew attacking ships and other dragons, you can't be sure where else that reality will stray from our own.

Needless to say, Novik's aerial combat at the end is massive, bloody and heart-pounding. The action is enormous, but never overly complicated. It would be exhilarating to see it pulled off on the big screen.

Coming from an admitted Fantasy snob, I give this book a hearty recommendation. It's out in the US in paperback in late March under the title HIS MAJESTY'S DRAGON, a title I'm not a huge fan of. It's apt, but it makes the book sound like one of those dime-a-dozen dragon fantasy books.

The book has just been released in the UK under the title I like the most, TEMERAIRE. Simple. Perfect. The UK edition also comes in hardback with a cover I like better, too. Here's the UK cover:

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I wish Del Ray would put a little money into the series and release them in hardback here in the states. It'd give the series a little more weight, I think.

The second book, THRONE OF JADE, comes out only a month after the first and the final book, BLACK POWDER WAR, a month after that.

Anyway, I wouldn't be surprised if we see this series snapped up by the studios... If handled with a respectable budget and with any degree of seriousness, this would make a ****ing great film series. I can't help but imagine the effects work of something like ROTK or even REIGN OF FIRE mixed with the setting and tone of something like MASTER AND COMMANDER. With these characters and those visuals it could be incredible.

Maybe some of our UK readers who might have picked up the book will throw in their opinions in the talkbacks below. Personally, I'm desperate to read the rest of the story and something tells me I might have a couple more reviews for you shortly, so stay tuned.

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http://www.aintitcool.com/display.cgi?id=22157
 
My review will be up sometime soon, I hope. Nursing school is a b**ch right now. I'm on chapter 8 of 13 (including the epilogue). Stay tuned!
 

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