Literature / The Book of Dragons

The Book of Dragons is a 2020 anthology book edited and complied by Jonathan Strahan. Its uniting theme is that each of its stories focuses on dragons in some manner, whether as antagonistic forces, mysterious forces of nature, allies or protagonists. Intersperse with these stories are a number of poems sharing the same basic themes.

Stories and Poems

• "What Heroism Tells Us", by Jane Yolen
• "Matriculation", by Elle Katharine White
• "Hikayat Sri Bujang Or The Tale Of The Naga Sage", by Zen Cho
• "Yuli", by Daniel Abraham
• "A Whisper Of Blue", by Ken Liu
• "Nidhog", by Jo Walton
• "Where The River Turns To Concrete", by Brooke Bolander
• "Habitat", by K. J. Parker
• "Pox", by Ellen Klages
• "The Nine Curves River", by RF Kuang
• "Luckys Dragon", by Kelly Barnhill
• "I Make Myself A Dragon", by Beth Cato
• "The Exile", by JY Yang
• "Except On Saturdays", by Peter S. Beagle
• "La Vitesse", by Kelly Robson
• "A Final Knight To Her Love And Foe", by Amal El Mothar
• "The Long Walk 2020", by Kate Elliot
• "Cut Me Another Quill Mister Fitz", by Garth Nix
• "Hoard", by Seanan McGuire
• "The Wyrm Of Lirr", by CSE Cooney
• "The Last Hunt 2020", by Aliette De Bodard
• "We Continue", by Ann Leckie and Rachel Swirsky
• "Small Birds Plea", by Todd Mc Caffrey
• "The Dragons", by Theodora Goss
• "Dragon Slayer", by Michael Swanwick
• "Camouflage 2020", by Patricia A. McKillip
• "We Dont Talk About The Dragon", by Sarah Gailey
• "Maybe Just Go Up There And Talk To It", by Scott Lynch
• "A Nice Cuppa", by Jane Yolen

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This work contains examples of:

• Breath Weapon:
  • In several stories, the dragons breathe fire in the classic manner.
  • In "The Long Walk", demons can exhale clouds of mist hot enough to boil anything caught in it to death.
• Chameleon Camouflage: The chamo-dragons in "Camouflage" can alter their coloration to perfectly match their surroundings, becoming effectively invisible except for suggestions of movement or their open eyes.
• City of Canals: In "The Nine Curves River", the city of Arlong is built on a system of elevated wooden platforms above a small archipelago. Water lies beneath most streets and bridges, and in some areas travel is by boat.
• Cybernetic Mythical Beast: In "Matriculation", the main character flies on the back of a clockwork dragon that she inherited from her father.
• Draconic Humanoid: In "The Long Walk", after entering the land of the dragons, the main character encounters women with small horns and skin covered in soft scales. They're later revealed to be what dragons look like when they take on human form.
• Dragon Hoard: This motif shows up in several stories.
  • In "Yuli", the titular character's stash of stolen gold, kept hidden away to no gain to him but attracting danger in the form of thieves and old enemies, is compared to a parallel narrative about an ancient dragon brooding over his treasure while adventurers infiltrate his lair.
  • In "Cut Me Another Quill, Mister Fitz", dragons amass hoards of gold, which they carefully hide away, and grow in size and power based on the amount of treasure they collect. Seizing such a hoard is the Archon's primary motivation in sponsoring the hunt of a dragon hiding in her city, although the main characters are more interested in dispatching the dragon itself.
  • In "Hoard", the narrator mentions that all dragons instinctively hoard something. Gold and jewels were popular, but largely became too dangerous to keep after humans developed a concept of money. Most dragons consequently hoard more abstract things. In the narrator's case, her consists of the foster children in her care — or, more specifically, broken innocence in need of somewhere to recover.
• Dragons Are Divine: In "The Exile", dragons are elemental gods who can take on and discard physical shapes at need, and a single dragon is capable of turning an uninhabitable world into a lush paradise with a few years of solitary effort.
• The Dragonslayer: In "Habitat", the main character earns a reputation as a dragonslayer after killing one in his youth by braining it with a large rock. During his stint as a mercenary, the free company he signed up with took to calling him ormsbana and wurmtoten and made a dragon banner for him in order to capitalize on his reputation during battle.
• Elemental Embodiment: In "Where the River Turns to Concrete", the dragon is a water spirit and the living embodiment of the river where it dwells.
• Exposition of Immortality: Done accidentally in "Cut Me Another Quill, Mister Fitz". When Mister Fitz, an immortal, magically animated puppet, is arguing with the human Sir Hereward about a historical figure from the distant past, he accidentally refers to the figure in question not listening to his advice before catching himself and switching to vaguer phrasing.
  "Narbonius was a fool," grumbled Mister Fitz. "He was well-advised, but chose to disregard what I... that is to say, I have read that he turned against his advisors."
• Fantasy Counterpart Culture: "Habitat" straddles the line between this and a fantasized version of the real Middle Ages. The protagonist's home country is based on medieval England, while Outremer is split between a nation very like the Byzantine Empire and its distinctly Arabic foes.
• Guilt-Free Extermination War: In "The Long Walk", the dragons' ultimate goal is the total extermination of the demons. This is because demons are relentlessly murderous creatures who always react to encountering other beings by trying to destroy them, and killing them off is the only way to keep them from exterminating everything else.
• Hive Caste System: In "We Endure", the alien dragons live in an eusocial caste system consisting of a Queen, who is the only member to reproduce; Gatherers, who forage for food and raw resources to bring back to the hive; Warriors, who defend the hive from intrusions and attack rival hives; Nest Tenders, who care for eggs and larvae; and Cleaners, who maintain hygiene in the hive itself and dispose of the bodies of dead dragons.
• Hugh Mann: In "Lucky's Dragon", the alien scientists try to blend in on Earth by loudly announcing that they are, in fact, regular Earth humans whenever it seems appropriate to do so. One also labels their car, which has eight wheels on telescoping legs, as a "PERFECTLY ORDINARY EARTH CAR" on its license plate.
  "This is Lucinda. She lives next door to me on Earth, er — I mean." She cleared her throat. "That is to say. We live on a block in a city that happens to be on the planet Earth, which is a normal thing to report in genial conversation, as it is the planet where we all live."
• Human Sacrifice:
  • Played with in "The Nine Curves River". Nobody actually knows for sure what happens to the people who go into the grotto — speculation includes them being eaten by a dragon, becoming a dragon, or living forever in an Earthly paradise. It's not even completely certain if there is a dragon in there. All that's known for certain is that people who go in never come back out again, and if nobody's sent in once a year then the rain doesn't come.
  • In "The Long Walk", women who no longer have anyone to support them — usually elderly widows, sometimes beggars — are sent into the titular long walk towards the mountains where the dragons live, to be devoured by the beasts in exchange for the dragons' protection against the demons. In the end, it's revealed that the women aren't actually devoured — most simply live the rest of their lives out in peaceful villages, while a few choose to transform into dragons themselves. The true nature of the deal, unbeknownst to humanity, is also to provide the dragons with a means to reproduce after the demons overran their old breeding grounds.
• Interspecies Romance: In "Where the River Turns to Concrete", the main character, who's a river dragon spirit bound in human form, forms a relationship with a human woman.
• Layered Metropolis: In "Cut Me Another Quill, Mister Fizz", the city of Nikandros is built atop an arrowhead-shaped promontory and arranged into layers by altitude. The Archon's citadel sits at the top, surrounded by the Upper Third (actually less than a quarter of the city's overall size) where the city's upper class lives. A wall separates the Upper Third from the Middle Third where the rest of the general population lives, which is itself terraced into five tiers. Below that and past a large crevasse, the Lower Third sprawls around the promontory's base and consists of great complexes of forges, foundries and metalworking shops that form the backbone of the city's industry.
• Metal Muncher: In "We Don't Talk About the Dragon", the dragon is kept fed by dropping a bucket of scrap iron in its lair once a week, which at most only ever slightly abates its hunger. In the end, it turns out that it was being fed the wrong metal, as it needed to eat gold instead.
• Obfuscating Stupidity: In "Cut Me Another Quill, Mister Fizz", Sir Hereward makes a point of presenting himself as a careless, oafish, clueless drunkard in order to spy on his targets while getting them to let their guard down and think that they are the ones manipulating him.
• Our Demons Are Different: In "The Long Walk", demons are monstrous beings with two mouths, six limbs, crystalline eyes that light up when they spot prey, and the ability to exhale clouds of deadly scalding steam from their jaws and tendrils on their heads. They're relentlessly vicious killers who attempt to destroy everything and anything they encounter, and both humanity and dragons are engaged in a desperate battle of survival against them.
• Our Dragons Are Different: The stories all focus on dragons, and have a wide variety of different interpretations and visions of the creatures. These come in both Western and Eastern variants, and include clockwork creatures, ravening monsters that reproduce by turning other creatures into dragons, river spirits, nature gods, the living embodiments of humans' ability to feel emotions, invaders from another dimension, eusocial alien animals, metaphors for familial abuse, and dimensional invaders brought to Earth by rainless storms.
• Our Ghouls Are Different: In "The Long Walk", ghouls are six-limbed, four-eyed creatures that grow from untended corpses, which they fashion into macabre, tree-like shapes. The humans use them as beasts of burden, feeding them on dead bodies.
• Our Vampires Are Different: In "Matriculation", vampires are of the pallid and corpse-like variety, with elongated nails and fangs. They studiously avoid sunlight, keeping their homes gloomy and unlit and only stepping outside during twilight hours and with heavy clothing. Many make their living as pawnbrokers and only take payment in blood, which they carefully and professionally extract through medical equipment.
• Planet Looters: Lianlei and Ongjie, and the rest of the masters in "The Last Hunt" thoroughly despoil the worlds they take over. The world's native inhabitants are all enslaved to serve as experimental subjects, slaves or pets, while ruthless resource extraction and the masters' constant meddling and experiments devastate the environment. Eventually, when nothing is left but a burnt-out, useless husk, the masters pack up their entire civilization, alongside whatever projects and slaves they find interesting enough to bring along, and move on to another world to begin the cycle again. The only consolation given to the few survivors left in the barely-habitable ruins of their world is that the masters will have been so through in sucking out anything of use to them that they'll never come back again.
• Raised by Wolves: In "We Continue", Jacq was found by one of his world's dragon-like aliens after being left orphaned during his colony's collapse, and was afterwards largely raised in the dragon colony by his finder, which he termed "Auntie". This was complicated by the fact that the dragons, while very intelligent, are ultimately little more than animals.
• Shoulder-Sized Dragon:
  • In "A Whisper of Blue", the dragons that visit the town are tiny — ranging from the size of a lapdog to the size of a songbird — versions of almost every variety of dragon under the sun.
  • In "Lucky's Dragon", the dragons start out not much larger than a fingernail and grow and shrink erratically as the story goes on. Lucky's eventually settles at the size of a small poodle.
  • At the end of "Cut Me Another Quill, Mister Fizz", the dragon expends so much energy to survive the battle that she's reduced to the size of a human finger.
• Suspiciously Specific Denial: In "Maybe Just Go Up There and Talk to It", as dragons begin to appear in numbers across the planet, a Soviet minister makes an international radio announcement to state that the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics has no dragon problems, which the protagonist takes as good indication that the Soviets are up to their eyeballs in scaly menaces.
• Time Travel: In "Camouflage", the main character's final exam at the magical academy he attends involves projecting him to the time of the Punic Wars.
• Viral Transformation: In "Habitat", it's revealed that dragons reproduce by infecting other beings with a kind of disease, which can be transmitted through even a small nick from their fangs, claws or scales, incubates for anywhere from a few days to several years, and eventually transforms the victim into a new dragon. Even the victim's death won't halt this process.
• Walking Wasteland: In "Habitat", something about the nature of dragons causes plants to die off in areas where they settle, which in turn promotes wildfires. Over a long period of time, they turn their chosen territories into sterile deserts — Outremer is stated to have been originally a lush and fertile land, and became covered by its vast deserts due to the immense numbers of dragons living there.
• Weird Currency: In "Matriculation", the vampire pawnbrokers deal primarily in blood — dealing with them involves considerable haggling over exactly how many ccs something is or isn't worth. They will also, more rarely, pay for services or valuable goods using thalers, stamped iron disks that unlike their real-life namesakes aren't used as coins per se — rather, they serve as tokens of credit for the vampire themself, backed by their own long unlife's worth of reputation; rather than being exchanged at fixed value, they serve as guarantees that their original issuer will honor whatever payment they were used to cover.
• Weird Weather: In "Maybe Just Go Up There and Talk to It", as the dragons become increasingly entrenched on Earth, they begin to gradually alter the weather. The climate gradually begins to warm, extending the growing season, even as cold winds blow erratically and unseasonably, while sunlight grows unnaturally honey-colored and the air becomes charged with electricity.

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