James Nicoll Reviews

A Dragon Lives Forever

After the Dragons

By Cynthia Zhang

2 Jul, 2021

**Doing the WFC's Homework**

1 comment

Cynthia Zhang’s 2021 After the Dragons is an alternate-history climate-SF novel.

In a history not too far from ours, dragons are real. They aren’t magical dragons (as so many literary dragons are) but utterly mundane animals. Western and Eastern dragons thrived in different niches, which meant that the land-dwelling Western dragons were expunged as inconvenient, whereas the largely aquatic Eastern dragons survive to this day. Thanks to climate change, the Eastern dragons may join their cousins in extinction.

Still, if someone wants to study dragons, China is the place to do so. Dragon research lures mixed-race Eli from America to China. This confers on Eli many interesting experiences, not least of which is being regarded as an inexplicable foreign oddity.

The Days of the Old Schoolyard

Analog’s Children of the Future (Analog Anthologies, volume 3)

Edited by Stanley Schmidt

1 Jul, 2021

**Special Requests**

5 comments

1982’s Analog’s Children of the Future is the third installment in the Analog Anthologies, all of which were edited by Stanley Schmidt. As one might guess from the title, all of the stories are drawn from the pages of Analog(some from the days when it was called Astounding). All of the stories involve children.