Mashing up genres

 I've finished the first draft of my fantasy novella, and I've put it aside to settle for a while.  My next challenge is to write three new short stories for three different anthology calls before the end of December.

I have the story outlines written down, and two will be mainstream science fiction.  But it's the third theme with interested me the most.  It had to feature dragons in unusual settings.  

One of the ideas suggested by the editor was dragons in space, and I immediately came up with an idea for a story of a dragon  running away from home and joining a multi-species starfleet.  Putting a dragon into space like that is a real mash-up of genres, and it challenged me to really think about the setting.

The start of my story has the dragon walking across a large space station next to her human escort.  I figured that, if dragons regularly used the station, they'd need to be able to fly there.  So I mention the extra-high ceilings of the hallways, which allow dragons to fly over the heads of the walking species.

The story has to be from the dragon's point of view, so it challenged me to think about how a dragon would react to that setting.  I thought she'd have a much better sense of smell than the humans who built the station, so I have her twitching her nose at all the unfamiliar smells as she walks along.

She's grumpy because she has to walk, and is feeling heavy and ungraceful.  Then I wondered how a four-legged beast like that would deal with a Travelator.  Given that they can be a challenge for species who are designed to walk, I thought they'd be a real challenge to get onto and off for a species which finds walking cumbersome and only does it as a last resort.  Then I wondered if she'd catch a claw in the flooring, and decided she'd ripped a claw out on a moving stairway early in her training.

I had fun with the scent again when she was trying to disguise her appearance. She's dyed her scales and mane, and for humans that would be enough.  But if dragons have a keen sense of smell, she'd have to disguise her scent too.

She's a starship navigator, so I had to think about the design of her console on the ship too.  I cheated a bit there by saying that the ship had always had dragon navigators so the console had been designed for them.  But I reckoned it needed to be adjustable in height, to accommodate different sizes of dragon.

I designated one of the ship's holds as a dragon flying area, giving it padded walls, and some of the corridors on the ship are extra-wide to accommodate them.

I've had real fun mashing up my genres, and working out what needed to change to accommodate my dragon character in that science fictional setting.