Dragon Rider

As ecofiction, the novel focuses on how humans interact not just with each other, but also with the world around them. Dragon Rider’s fantastical setting represents a real-world context that informs the plot and character motivations. The novel does not explicitly comment on Earth’s environmental state as a result of human actions. Instead, the disappearing dragon habitat parallels the ways humans negatively impact their real-world environment. Within the context of the narrative, the silver dragons as well as many other fabulous creatures have disappeared or gone extinct due to humans, who hunt them or destroy their natural habitats.

This is the case of the dragon’s valley, where Firedrake and his community live in peace, as seen in the first two chapters. When humans arrive, they flood it, destroying the environment for their own ends. The context makes clear that the fate of the dragons and their home is representative of the fates of natural habitats in the wild, which have been destroyed or stolen by humans through hunting, deforestation, pollution, and other activities. By making the dragons sympathetic characters, the novel implicitly argues that the human impact on nature is wrong, even evil, and that humans have a moral obligation to rectify such damage and preserve these natural habitats in the future.