IN THEIR LAIRS THE DRAGONS WAIT. MAGICAL…MYTHICAL…MYSTERIOUS…MURDEROUS…

Discover how a kiss can break a spell and turn a beautiful biology major into another kind of woman in Evelyn E. Smith’s GERDA.

Go to the magical kingdom of Mo where a king loses his head over a raspberry-blooded dragon in THE KING’S HEAD AND THE PURPLE DRAGON by the creator of THE WIZARD OF OZ, L. Frank Baum

Find an egg in the henhouse and you and the chickens are in for a giant surprise in JOHN ROBERT AND THE DRAGON EGG by Thomas N. Scortia.

Be there when a bioengineer tinkers with DNA and turns a bunch of berry pickers into fire-breathing benemoths in HISS OF DRAGON by Gregory Benford and Marc Laidlaw.

A book full of stories about dragons. Oh, joy.

Me, I don’t like fantasy nearly as much as science fiction, although when it’s well-written it can be fantastic. (My own personal favorite novel of all time is, after all, Lord of the Rings—even above anything Asimov wrote.) And here—well, here we have a bunch of stories I don’t particularly like. The strongest story here is Anne McCaffrey’s “Weyr Search,” which is good if a little overexposed— it has cloyed on me by frequent rereadings. I do like Gordon R. Dickson’s “The Dragon and the George,” however, so the book isn’t a total loss. Just nearly one.