Monday, May 22, 2017

Deal Me In Week #20: "The Dragon of Pripyat"


I'm still working my way through Jay's Deal Me In Challenge . In a nutshell--we line up 52 short stories for the year, we match those stories up to a card in a regular deck of card, and each week we shuffle our deck (of real cards) and draw a card from whatever remains in the deck. Last week I drew the Five of Spades which corresponds to "The Dragon of Pripyat" by Karl Schroeder (from The Year's Best Science Fiction 17th Annual Collection by Gardner Dozois, ed.).

photo credit

"The Dragon of Pripyat" takes place long after the Chernobyl disaster. The site is still "hot" radioactively and there is always a danger that another disaster could be triggered. Gennady Malianov is a freelance nuclear inspector who is hired by the Chernobyl Trust to investigate the site. Someone is extorting money from the Trust by threatening to trigger just such a disaster unless they are paid. Malianov finds more than he bargained for when a old man living in the danger zone tells him of a dragon living near the reactor's remains.

 

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