Dinosaur Fantastic, edited by Mike Resnick and Martin H. Greenberg
331 pages
Published 1993
Read from November 11 to November 13
Rating: 1.5 out of 5
In the introduction, editor Resnick claims this is the first anthology devoted to all-new dinosaur fiction, which I suppose could be
technically correct —
The Ultimate Dinosaur came out the year before, but featured a single reprinted story (and was 50% essays, besides).
Four of these stories would be reprinted three years later in Greenberg’s
Dinosaurs anthology. None of the four was especially good, or so I thought when I read that book, so I’ve been iffy about the chances of the rest. But I’m on a dino roll, so let’s try it out!
“Just Like Old Times” by Robert J. Sawyer. Not only did this piece reappear in Greenberg’s
Dinosaurs, it also got recycled into the
Apex: World of Dinosaurs anthology. For a story that is nothing more than 1990s psycho-killer pap, it’s gotten a lot of mileage for Sawyer. I’ve read and reviewed it too many times already. I’ll say this about it: meh.
C-
“Disquisitions on the Dinosaur” by Robert Sheckley. This is a “humorous” yarn about Emperor Nero being forced to host an anachronistic infestation of dinosaurs. It tries really hard to channel Mel Brooks and instead just falls flat on its face somewhere in the vicinity of S. P. Somtow’s godawful Aquiliad stories. Worth no one’s time. F
This anthology is already starting to feel like a slog.
“Dino Trend” by Pat Cadigan. Another one that would get reprinted in Greenberg’s Dinosaurs. As you’d expect from Cadigan, it’s a bauble about urban hipsters in a nanotech future, who play out the ending scenes of their relationship while cosmetic creams that turn you into a dinosaur hit the market. It’s fine. C
“The Greatest Dying” by Frank M. Robinson. A forgettable post-
Jurassic Park pandemic piece. What if amber, instead of preserving dino DNA, preserved a virus that had killed off the dinosaurs? Spends too much of its runtime sketching a summary of the asteroid extinction theory instead of, you know, establishing its characters or telling its own story. Maybe
D+
“Revenants” by Judith Tarr. A mother brings her four-year-old to the extinct animal petting zoo. This is her one day this month with her daughter, who lives with her father in an Atavist preserve, cosplaying the Ice Age. A few clever details are sprinkled here and there in the story: “She was wearing pants I’d bought for her, and a shirt with a hologram on it, one of the Lascaux cave paintings.” It would be a more enjoyable story if it weren’t, at its heart, a snide satire against family services “overreach.” (As an abused kid ignored by the system in the ’90s, I can only roll my eyes.) I’d much rather read an inverted version of this story, with a single mother hunting bear in an Ice Age preserve, having to host her city-girl daughter for a weekend. C+
“One Giant Step” by John E. Stith. This rote little tale of saurian time travelers arriving 65 million years before modern civilization, only for one of them to trigger a mass extinction in order to give a worthier lineage the opportunity to evolve (and to not poison the Earth in the future), feels very 1960s to me. It has a sort of white people nihilism at its foundation, a conceit that any intelligent species is going to be ecologically destructive and bigoted (even though only white people have made those activities the centerpieces of our culture). D
“Last Rights” by Mercedes Lackey and Larry Dixon. This is, somehow, my first exposure to Lackey. Unfortunately, it’s a lazy satire about bleeding heart liberals turned animal liberationists, who take it upon themselves to liberate dinosaurs from a genetic engineering facility. Watch the silly little liberals get picked off one by one! I’ll pass. F
“After the Comet” by Bill Fawcett. A herd of psychic Triceratops tries to survive in the aftermath of the Chicxulub impact. This is an overlong retread of a standard theme; its only innovation — psychic dinosaur herd — is just goofy. D-
“Rex Tremandae Majestatis” by Kathe Koja and Barry N. Malzberg. Out of everything on the table of contents, I was most curious about this one. Malzberg, of course, wrote “Major League Triceratops” in
The Ultimate Dinosaur, a story which utilized elliptical literary prose to disguise the fact that it had nothing to say. My only prior exposure to Koja was “La Reine d’Enfer,” one of the more stylish and interesting stories in
Queen Victoria’s Book of Spells. Apparently the two authors were frequent collaborators. This piece, sadly, hews closer to Malzberg’s “Major League” than to Koja’s “Reine.” We begin with a heterosexual encounter so tawdry and unsatisfying that Leona, our POV, imagines the guy as a stegosaur. Leona’s ex-husband writes out in LA for a cartoon called
Dino Dudes. Dinosaurs and extinction run through the piece as metaphors for divorce, entropy, a death-wish, the ennui and malaise of modern suburbia. Like, it’s fine enough. But also kind of an elaborate literary shrug. Of the two tales so far that use dinosaurs as symbols of divorce and single motherhood, I preferred “Revenants” by a hair.
C+
“The Skull’s Tale” by Katharine Kerr. Rare is the story of sentient dinosaurs that feels as alien as it should. This brief number manages to distinguish itself with its cadence and its sensory emphasis on smell. Though, like all too many stories here, it’s clear that no actual research went into its portrayal of the Mesozoic. C+
“Cutting Down Fred” by Dean Wesley Smith. This one is bizarre, but sadly not in any entertaining way. An acorn marinated in spunk from a used condom grows into a majestic oak named Fred, who can telepathically communicate with those who linger beneath it. When our narrator tries to indulge his girlfriend’s exhibitionist inclinations beneath Fred, Fred beams raunchy limericks into their brains. Girlfriend promptly breaks up with narrator, narrator hopes to prove Fred is to blame, but the city plans to cut Fred down, etc. Then we swerve into Fred telling our narrator that oaks have ancestral memories, and would he like to experience the Cretaceous? The Cretaceous incident, scarcely more than a paragraph, is almost certainly a throwaway addition to get “Fred” on theme and help Smith sell a trunk story, a story that would've been close to unsellable even in the swingin’ ’90s. I cannot over-emphasize how little that interlude has to do with the rest of “Fred.” Well, I guess you can’t spell Fred without F
“Shadow of a Change” by Michelle M. Sagara. Another story that I first read reprinted in Greenberg’s Dinosaurs. Another story that, like the Koja and Malzberg joint, uses dinosaurs as a metaphor for modern discontent, of having no control over what happens to you in the workaday world. It isn’t bad. C+
“Wise One’s Tale” by Josepha Sherman. Wise One, a venerable pterosaur, tells young ones the tale of Quick Trickster, the hero who won pterosaurs their wings from Fire Being. A standard (albeit perfunctory) fable of three challenges overcome through trickery. C
“Curren’s Song” by Laura Resnick. Curren is a special boy, nephew of the king. Curren is also cursed with visions of the future, which his people don't appreciate. When a stranger named Columba arrives to preach Christianity, Curren flees. But naturally a girl his age appreciates him, and she hangs out with him to hear his visions. Even she, however, is disturbed by the "song" he hears from the ancient beings who swim in Loch Ness. As a story, it's a bit flimsy, little more than an extended mood piece. It's fine? C
“Whilst Slept the Sauropod” by Nicholas A. DiChario. The town of Sleepy Mountain flourishes at the foot of a mountain-size sauropod, until the sauropod leaves one day and inadvertently leads the town to discovering the modern world. It's an engaging setup (“The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule,” but make it a brontosaur) for what turns out to be a boilerplate fable about how hustle and bustle corrupt paradise, and how honest hard work is what the hip people are into these days. C+
“Rex” by David Gerrold. We begin with a charming new spin on Jurassic Park — the Filltree family’s basement holds the finest miniature dinosaur zoo in Westchester, or at least it did before they added the two-foot-high T. rex to the terrarium — but the charm is lost because our POV Jonathan is a manly suburbanite who resents his spoiled daughter Jill and nagging wife Joyce. The story revolves around his resentments, which creep into violent fantasies. Caging the miscreant rex on the porch upsets Jill, for example, and Jonathan “wondered if he’d locked up the right animal.” It’s all more or less in that vein. It ends with Jonathan tacitly deciding to murder his family via miniature tyrannosaur. The straights really aren’t okay, huh? Oh well. This story really could have been something. F
“The Pangaean Principle” by Jack Nimersheim. Amateurish character work and implausible dialogue dominate this forgettable piece about a Russian geneticist getting lost in his dino DNA, and alienating his precious daughter in the process. I suppose the fact that this father doesn’t decide to murder his kid is a step up from the previous story, but still, there just wasn’t much to salvage here. F+
“On Tiptoe” by Beth Meacham. A peep at the unappealing mediocrity of heteronormativity from the other direction. Our narrator’s old college roommate, Alice, arrives in New York City for a visit. With her camera, Alice inadvertently discovers dinosaurs with chameleon abilities (or so she believes) hiding all over Manhattan. Instead of having any kind of reaction to this news, our narrator gets jealous when Alice partners up with mildly attractive museum researcher Matt. Our narrator suspects that Matt is just humoring Alice to get into Alice’s pants. And instead of communicating any of this, our narrator gets excited about helping Matt get over Alice. Truly bizarre stuff. F+
“Betrayal” by Susan Casper. As a youth, Eldon encountered a magical liopleurodon mosasaur in a sea cave, and for a while afterward, he seemed to lead a charmed life. But he blames the magical liopleurodon mosasaur when things go wrong, and betrays her by revealing her to the world. When he doesn’t get the fame and notoriety he believes is his due, he breaks into the aquarium the state has built around her, and shoots her. As with “Cutting Down Fred,” I have a hunch that this was a trunk story, almost certainly about a mermaid, which Casper fudged into a mosasaur for this anthology. (Mosasaurs don’t leap to mind on the list of magical mythical beings, after all. Not like liopleurodons.) At least this story has a decent level of prose skill, so I’ll give it a D-
“’Saur Spot” by Kevin O’Donnell, Jr. Sci-fi writers in the ’80s and ’90s really fantasized that the big bad government was gonna regulate them to death, didn’t they? “Damn the EPA!” one character bewails here. In a dystopian future where boric acid requires a permit, and books are read on an electronic tablet, Gideon Cope is an old man who wants a tiny pet dinosaur to help manage his roach problem. That’s pretty much the whole story. D-
“Pteri” by Lea Hernandez. Out of nowhere, we have a premise that’s actually interesting: Gelesse is a witch whose familiar is a pterosaur named Pret. The setting is interesting too, a contemporary fantasy where one can get a degree in the Craft from a state university. Gelesse tells us the tale of how she Called her familiar after several failed attempts. The story is slight, and could very well have been about any other kind of animal — a crow would have made as much sense as a pterosaur — but I appreciate it after the last few garbage tales. At least a C+
“Chameleon” by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. The last of the stories that I first encountered in Greenberg’s Dinosaurs. This one was the best of that bunch, a tale of a grade schooler bullied for being a crybaby and a witch, who discovers that museum dinosaurs are the repositories of the hopes, wishes, and fears that children project onto them. She gains some measure of self-determination from this, imagining herself as a big green dinosaur. It doesn’t have much at all to do with dinos in the end, but it’s a competent story. B-
“Fellow Passengers” by Barbara Delaplace. An artifact from the 1990s: our narrator is a reporter for a Weekly World News-style tabloid. The narration is a pastiche of 1940s hardboiled reporter patter, which is mildly amusing given the context. She’s sent on assignment to check out rumors of strange livestock deaths, and discovers that some kind of theropod is on the loose. It’s a featherweight story, but not awful, which counts for a lot in a book like this. When the Deinonychus is captured, and our reporter watches it in the zoo, it just might be the most vivid dinosaur in the entire anthology. But of course we must endure another ’90s artifact: the return of naive animal liberationists. All the same, this story wasn’t bad. C+
“Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Dinosaur” by Gregory Feeley. As if ashamed to commit to writing a story about dinosaurs, Feeley couches several potential stories in an essay of sorts, attempting to wring some idea of why dinosaurs are popular in the public imagination from various dino story tropes. A couple of the ideas could have made for interesting stories — more interesting than most of what we got in this book — but Feeley would rather skip the storytelling to offer facile assertions like “It is preadolescent boys who like dinosaurs, just as preadolescent girls may develop an interest in horses…. Girls want to ride horses, but boys want to be dinosaurs.” And again: “Perhaps the dinosaur’s popularity derives from its power as a symbol of boisterous male energies in a post-chauvinist society.” I suppose we could test that assertion if we ever attained a post-chauvinist society, maybe? Presumably a post-chauvinist society could begin once we admit that social expectations pressure children to like what is “appropriate” for their assigned gender, instead of assuming “boys like this, girls like that” is somehow meaningful. Much like this anthology in miniature, “Thirteen Ways” is a gallery of wasted potential. D
“Evolving Conspiracy” by Roger MacBride Allen. One last 1990s classic for the road: conspiracy theories! A conspiracy by the devil to make people believe in evolution, no less. It’s supposed to be funny. I didn’t really care. Thirty years later, we have enough problems with broken-brained Q cultists imagining the devil is leading child sacrifices in pizza parlor basements. The paranoid style of American politics rises triumphant. It just isn’t that funny anymore. F
And that’s it! Damn, that was a slog.
It’s funny that all these authors took such pains to avoid the “A Gun for Dinosaur” / Jurassic Park cliché — modern human beings encountering realistic dinosaurs in a survival narrative — that the effort to avoid it feels like a new cliché itself. We had five or six stories of people turning into dinos; six more stories of sentient dinos; three stories of miniature dino pets; two stories that use dinosaurs as a direct metaphor for the pressure and disconnect of modern urban civilization. Some of these stories were even adequately entertaining. But when 90% of what you want from a dino story is human characters encountering, surviving, running from, dying from, or befriending well-researched dinosaurs, this book is a tremendous (though unsurprising) disappointment.
