A Dragon Lives Forever
After the Dragons
By Cynthia Zhang
2 Jul, 2021
Doing the WFC's Homework
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.