Introduction
When my two daughters were very young, I used to tell them bedtime stories. I’d make the stories up each night but never managed to write them down (much to my youngest daughter’s frustration). They were stories about a girl named Jasmine—who lived not far from their grandmother’s house and who kept her dreams in a snow globe on her bedroom dresser, safe from a witch who sought to steal them—and of her best friend, a small orange dragon named Marmaduke, who was wise and brave and helped Jasmine to understand how she could save herself. Marmaduke even engaged in some glassblowing, not too long after a family vacation during which we watched a glassblower at work. The memories are hazy, but I think the glassblowing had something to do with the unmaking of the world, which seemed a lot for such a tiny dragon, but magic can make heroes of us all.
My own first memory of dragons, if it’s possible to isolate such memories given how pervasive dragons are in our culture, is probably Pete in the not-particularly-excellent Disney film Pete’s Dragon, in which a young boy finds an invisible friend, Elliot, who helps him when he needs it most and brings adventure into his life. If I can’t quite be sure about the first dragon I encountered, it’s hard to forget the many that followed: the greatest wyrm of them all, Tolkien’s Smaug, raining fire down on Lake-town in The Hobbit; followed by Yevaud and the archipelagos of Ursula K. Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea; the white dragon, Ruth, from Anne McCaffrey’s Pern; Naomi Novik’s Temeraire; and George R. R. Martin’s dragons of Westeros: Rhaegal, Viserion, and Drogon.
What do all of these great and mighty dragons have in common? Perhaps that they reflect some aspect of ourselves back to us through story. They can be wise friends and counselors, devious enemies and fiery opponents, and pretty much everything in between. Mayland Long in R. A. MacAvoy’s Tea with the Black Dragon, is a wealthy older man who simply wants to help a mother find her daughter, but it seems he is also a two-thousand-year-old dragon. Lucius Shepard’s great and malign Griaule from The Dragon Griaule, possibly the greatest dragon to enter fantasy literature in the past thirty years, is a slumbering beast the size of a mountain range on which towns and villages are built, and whose human population both depends upon and hates him in equal measure. Dragons, it seems, have always been with us in story, and although I am not a researcher of folktales or an ethnologist, I could be convinced that dragons can be traced back to the first fires around which our distant ancestors gathered, inspired by dark places beyond the light of the fire and the reptiles that lived there—I’m much more skeptical that they are some sort of species memory of dinosaurs, but let’s not rule that out.
Regardless, the way we see dragons depends on where we are in the world. In the West, the image of the fire-breathing, four-legged, winged beast arose in the High Middle Ages. Perhaps a variation on Satan, the Western dragon is often evil, greedy, and clever, and usually hoarding some terrible treasure. There are the dragons of the East, long, snakelike creatures seen as symbols of good fortune and associated with water. Serpentine dragons, like the naga, are found in India and in many Hindu cultures, and are similar to the Indonesian naga or nogo dragons. Japanese dragons, like Ryūjin, the dragon god of the sea, are also water creatures. And so on and so on around the world.
Lizard or serpent-like features are a constant, but the dragon itself may or may not take human form; can be a creature of any of the four elements (air, earth, fire, or water); may crave wealth or not; and may or may not be able to take flight. But it will live at the heart of its story, as the dragons do in the stories in the book you now hold. The Book of Dragons grew out of my desire to spend some time with a new group of dragons and the people who encounter them, and so I turned to some of the best writers of science fiction and fantasy of our time and asked them to tell you the story of their dragon, the one that filled their dreams, and they responded with a bestiary of dragons as rich and varied as you could wish for. In these pages, you will encounter dragons on distant worlds as they follow us out to the stars, in the rain-drenched mountains of the Malay Peninsula, in the barn, and living just next door. They are alternately funny and fearsome, fiery and water-drenched, but they are all remarkable.
The stories and poems in the pages here, from Daniel Abraham, Kelly Barnhill, Peter S. Beagle, Brooke Bolander, Beth Cato, Zen Cho, C. S. E. Cooney, Aliette de Bodard, Kate Elliott, Amal El-Mohtar, Sarah Gailey, Theodora Goss, Ellen Klages, R. F. Kuang, Ann Leckie and Rachel Swirsky, Ken Liu, Scott Lynch, Todd McCaffrey, Seanan McGuire, Patricia A. McKillip, Garth Nix, K. J. Parker, Kelly Robson, Michael Swanwick, Jo Walton, Elle Katharine White, Jane Yolen, and JY Yang, are all I could have wished for, and I hope you will love them just as much as I do!
Jonathan Strahan
Perth, Australia, 2019
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollinsPublishers
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What Heroism Tells Us
Jane Yolen
There is the smell of the heroic in the air:
a pair of hawks circling their nest at feeding time.
Rabbits escaping the talons and claws of destiny.
The flesh of impala laughing in the hyena’s mouth.
Flash of sword repeating in the dragon’s eye.
The princess repelling down the tower on a rope of her own hair.
Even more, I think it’s the sight of you, my friend,
pulling love out of despair,
snatching happiness from the ash of winter,
pushing open the closed door, letting in spring.
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollinsPublishers
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Matriculation
Elle Katharine White
Elle Katharine White (www.ellekatharinewhite.com) was born and raised in Buffalo, New York, where she learned valuable life skills like how to clear a snowy driveway in under twenty minutes (a lot easier than you think) and how to cheer for the perennial underdog (a lot harder than you think). She is the author of the Heartstone series: Heartstone, Dragonshadow, and Flamebringer. When she’s not writing, she spends her time reading, drinking tea, and having strong feelings about fictional characters.
She should have been ticketed.
The cop stationed on the roof stared at her as she flew past, heedless of the portable speed-scryer screaming in her hand, her mouth open in a perfect O. Melee caught the briefest glimpse, only heard the radar’s beep as a smudge of sound whipped past by the wind, but she blessed whoever had assigned a rookie to this route. Clearly the cop had never seen a dragon before. By the time she had recovered, Melee was already out of sight.
Landing in Pawn Row was always tricky, and Melee sensed rather than saw the undead eyes peering at her from under stoops and out of upstairs windows, curious to see whether they would be contacting their insurance companies before day’s end. She shifted her weight, and the dragon banked. The steel and alchromium bones supporting its wings caught the red rays of the evening sun, and the light licked along the dragon’s chassis with the faintest crackle of magic. She felt it like static, raising the hairs on the back of her neck.