Dinosaur Fantastic

by Mike Resnick (Editor / Contributor), Martin H. Greenberg (editor), Nick DiChario (Contributor)

Mike Resnick and Martin H. Greenberg have called upon such gifted writers as Robert Sheckley, Pat Cadigan, Frank M. Robinson, Judith Tarr, Mercedes Lackey, Larry Dixon, Bill Fawcett, Katherine Kerr, David Gerrold, and Kristine Kathryn Rusch to create these twenty-five stories of the most terrifying and fascinating creatures to ever inhabit the Earth: the dinosaurs. From their native Jurassic landscape to your own backyard, from their ancient mastery of the planet to modern-day curiosities trapped in an age not their own, from the earth-shaking tyrannosaur to the sky-soaring pterodactyl, here are unforgettable tales-some poignant, some humorous, some offering answers to the greatest puzzle of prehistory. But all are certain to capture the hearts and imaginations of dinosaur lovers of all ages.

Contents:
Introduction (Dinosaur Fantastic) • essay by Mike Resnick
"Just Like Old Times" • Robert J. Sawyer
"Disquisitions on the Dinosaur" • Robert Sheckley
"Dino Trend" • Pat Cadigan
"The Greatest Dying" • Frank M. Robinson
"Revenants" • Judith Tarr
"One Giant Step" • John E. Stith
"Last Rights" • Mercedes Lackey and Larry Dixon
"After the Comet" • Bill Fawcett
"Rex Tremandae and Majestatis" • Kathe Koja and Barry N. Malzberg
"The Skull's Tale" • Katharine Kerr
"Cutting Down Fred" • Dean Wesley Smith
"Shadow of a Change" • Michelle West [as Michelle M. Sagara]
"Wise One's Tale" • Josepha Sherman
"Curren's Song" • Laura Resnick
"Whilst Slept the Sauropod" • Nicholas A. DiChario
"Rex" • David Gerrold
"The Pangaean Principle" • Jack Nimersheim
"On Tiptoe" • Beth Meacham
"Betrayal" • Susan Casper
"'Saur Spot" • Kevin O'Donnell, Jr.
"Pteri" • Lea Hernandez
"Chameleon" • Kristine Kathryn Rusch
"Fellow Passengers" • Barbara Delaplace
"Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Dinosaur" • Gregory Feeley
"Evolving Conspiracy" • Roger MacBride Allen

Genres: Science Fiction, Anthologies, Short Stories, Fantasy, Dinosaurs, Fiction, Short Story Collection

331 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1993

About the author

Michael "Mike" Diamond Resnick, better known by his published name Mike Resnick, was a popular and prolific American science fiction author. He is, according to Locus, the all-time leading award winner, living or dead, for short science fiction. He was the winner of five Hugos, a Nebula, and other major awards in the United States, France, Spain, Japan, Croatia and Poland. and has been short-listed for major awards in England, Italy and Australia. He was the author of 68 novels, over 250 stories, and 2 screenplays, and was the editor of 41 anthologies. His work has been translated into 25 languages. He was the Guest of Honor at the 2012 Worldcon and can be found online as @ResnickMike on Twitter or at www.mikeresnick.com.

Reviews

[Craig · Rating 4 out of 5]

The release of this anthology was no doubt timed to take advantage of the premiere of the first Jurassic Park film and the resultant dino-craze. It's a better-than-average group of stories, with an amusing, excellent cover. My favorites are by David Gerrold and Robert Sawyer.

[Translucent · Rating 5 out of 5]

The cover is so funny >_<
the dino's sweatshirt and that he is reading his own book
some of the stories are okay too

[Mjhancock · Rating 3 out of 5]

This speculative fiction collection has 26 stories about dinosaurs. Thus, it does deliver on at least half of its titular promise. Is it fantastic? Well...

Any short story collection is generally going to have some hits and misses, and this collection certainly is impressive in terms of volume--26 is a lot of stories. But unfortunately, it's more miss than hit for me. A major part of the issue is that a high number of stories are aiming for comedy more than action, horror, or speculative elements, and when it comes to comedy and speculative fiction, I'm spoiled by having read Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams at an impressionable age. If you can't reach that high bar--and I'll admit, it's arguably an unreasonably high bar--I'm not terribly interested. And then there's the general issue that when it comes to speculative fiction short stories and dinosaurs, Ray Bradbury's "Sound of Thunder" set a bar too a long time ago. And a high number of stories in the collection stumble on at least one of these bars.

Sheckley's "Disquisitions on the Dinosaur" is too scattered; Pat Cadigan's "Dino Trend" works a little better as a satire, where people use biotech to become dinosaurs in a sort of fast fashion way. Judith Tarr's "Revenants" use dinosaurs and paleo-reserves to satirize divorce; Kathe Kojra and Barry N. Malzberg's "Rex Tramandae Majestatis" covers similar ground, but from a body horror perspective (which kind of works, honestly). John E. Stith's "One Giant Step" is basically all the windup for a punchline that didn't work for me; Dean Wesley Smith's "Cutting Down Fred" is admittedly one of the odder takes I've seen on public masturbation. David Gerrold's "Rex" is a real 90s throwback to the "I hate my wife" kind of joke, with a murderous pet T-Rex thrown in; Mercedes Lackey and larry Dixon's "Last Rights" isn't quite as distastefully bleak, but it does take a lot of shots at animal rights activists who want to free dinosaurs. "On Tiptoe"by Beth Meacham is one of the comedy ones that worked for me, based around the idea that maybe dinosaurs are really good at hiding; there's a human element to it that grounds it a bit. And the final story, Roger MacBride Allen's "Evolving Conspiracy" is technically involving dinosaurs, but it's more about wild conspiracy theories being strung together, which is admittedly kind of fun. So about 1/3 of the stories are comedies, and range from "fine" to "left me kind of cold."

Of the rest of the stories, I'll pick some highlights. Robert J. Sawyer's "Just Like Old Times" is an incredibly dark satire on the Canadian healthcare and justice system, based around the idea of placing people in the bodies of those from the past as a form of retirement; it's probably the text from the collection I'd be most likely to teach in class. As you'd imagine, there are multiple stories about dinosaur extinction, and plenty of them involve ironic human extinction as well; I can't say any of them struck me as particularly strong. There was one type of story that came up a few times--the prehistoric times from the dinosaur perspective, which basically become sword and sorcery stories where you replace the sword and sorcery with dinosaurs. I don't know if I could handle a whole novel set like that, but I was fond of all of the short stories in this vein: Bill Fawcett's "After the Comet," Katherine Kerr's "The Skull's Tale," "Wise One's Tale" by Joseph Sherman. There's also a lot of stories about people transforming into dinosaurs, which are fine, but kind of just Kafka variants when you get down to it. I liked Laura Resnick's "Curren's Song," which recasts Nessie as a dinosaur to tell a pretty cool, mournful story about lost creatures and lost cultures. Nicholas A. DiChario's "Whilst Slept the Sauropod" could stand to take another crack at that title, but also does a good job with the fantasy dinosaur vibe. And last, I'll tip my hat to Gregory Feeley's "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Dinosaur," which is a series of aborted dinosaur stories, and general meta ruminations on what a speculative dinosaur story can be. It's about half deconstruction, and half giving the sense that the author was tapped to write a story, and couldn't decide on one he wanted to stick with.

As you can see by that very long description, there's good here, but there's a lot of misses--so many that I'm left feeling pretty mixed on the collection as a whole.

[Zack Hester · Rating 2 out of 5]

Dinosaur Fantastic (1993) — Anthology by Mike Resnick and Martin H. Greenberg
Contents:
• Introduction (Dinosaur Fantastic) - essay by Mike Resnick — (3/5)
• Just Like Old Times - Robert J. Sawyer — (4/5)
• Disquisitions on the Dinosaur - Robert Sheckley — (2/5)
• Dino Trend - Pat Cadigan — (2/5)
• The Greatest Dying - Frank M. Robinson — (3/5)
• Revenants - Judith Tarr — (2/5)
• One Giant Step - John E. Stith — (2/5)
• Last Rights - Mercedes Lackey and Larry Dixon — (2/5)
• After the Comet - Bill Fawcett — (4/5)
• Rex Tremandae and Majestatis - Kathe Koja and Barry N. Malzberg — (3/5)
• The Skull's Tale - Katharine Kerr — (3/5)
• Cutting Down Fred - Dean Wesley Smith — (4/5)
• Shadow of a Change - Michelle West [as Michelle M. Sagara] — (3/5)
• Wise One's Tale - Josepha Sherman — (3/5)
• Curren's Song - Laura Resnick — (1/5)
• Whilst Slept the Sauropod - Nicholas A. DiChario — (1/5)
• Rex - David Gerrold — (3/5)
• The Pangaean Principle - Jack Nimersheim — (5/5)
• On Tiptoe - Beth Meacham — (4/5)
• Betrayal - Susan Casper — (3/5)
• 'Saur Spot - Kevin O'Donnell, Jr. — (3/5)
• Pteri - Lea Hernandez — (1/5)
• Chameleon - Kristine Kathryn Rusch — (2/5)
• Fellow Passengers - Barbara Delaplace — (3/5)
• Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Dinosaur - Gregory Feeley — (3/5)
• Evolving Conspiracy - Roger MacBride Allen — (3/5)

[Joe Santoro · Rating 3 out of 5]

This has been on the to read shelf for a LONG time.. not sure if I actually got it from the sci-fi book club back in the day, or later, but it has the heft of one of those slightly smaller than normal HC books they used to sell. The Cover is awesome, but is probably the best part.

There are a couple good ones (the entry by Mercedes Lackey about some animal activists is morbidly funny, and the one with Fred the tree is great), but there's a few real stinkers -- one of the longer entries was about a divorced mom that hated the dinosaur cartoon her ex worked on, and, I guess, made her go nuts? It was pretty poor.

Written in 1993 (After that famous Dinosaur book), alot of the stories were variations on the JP theme... zoos of dinos, discovering DNA, mini dinos, etc... but a few were not really related at all, just had a dinosaur as a side mention.

The most creative one involved Time travelling Dinos, which was pretty neat. And while the author list is a veritible who's who of late 8os B-grade sci-fi writers, that's not the best time period.

If you really love Dinosaurs, or really just have to have everything written by Roger Macbride Allen or Judith Tarr, then you could do worse.

[Fastidiously Facetious · Rating 3 out of 5]

These 25 short stories about dinosaurs range wildly in theme and quality. Some take their approaches quite literally and imagine dinosaurs as sentient beings whereas other stories merely use dinosaurs as a prop to better explore other themes. Some of these stories are truly exceptional, a few should never have been printed, and the rest fall somewhere between average and above average.

[Janet Popish · Rating 2 out of 5]

My lack of enthusiasm for these stories might be based on my ambivalence for short stories in general. Some of them were interesting and thought provoking, but most were just meh.

[Alexander Theofanidis · Rating 3 out of 5]

Χαριτωμένη συλλογή, κατώτερη όμως του Mike Resnick. Ίσως θα έπρεπε να τον αφήσουν να γράψει όλα τα διηγήματα...

[Leo W. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fun romp

[Bob Pore · Rating 4 out of 5]

DINO-MYTE!

[Greg Heath · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a fantastic (pun intended) assortment of tales for lovers of all things prehistoric. The stories herein run the gamut from sobering, post-apocalyptic scenarios to darkly humorous, occasionally quirky and whimsical tales of dinosaurs and humans living alongside one another in society. There is scarcely a dud to be found in this anthology, and what's good is really, really good.

Robert J. Sawyer's brilliant "Just Like Old Times" depicts a future in which any man can relive the death of any living being past. Anyone doing so will die in his own physical body, as well, and once a death has been relived once, it's stricken from the archives, thenceforth unavailable. In this world, convicts sentenced to death are subjected to relive an agonizing demise in their last moments, and it is around this particular aspect of the concept that the story is based. An unrepentant mass murderer is given his last moments in the mind of a Tyrannosaurus Rex bound for death, but soon discovers that he may, in fact, be able to cheat his sentence - and take revenge on a truly epic scale.

Also of particular interest is cult SF author David Gerrold's "Rex," in which a vicious baby T-Rex is kept as a family guard dog and pet. This one is stark black humor, as the pet Rex is let out of its kennel for a late night snack and proves to be more than a handful (and more than simply docile) for the family. There are a number of stories in this vein, full of dark quirks and whimsy. In John E. Stith's "One Giant Step," two dino-men scientists from the future travel back in time to Earth's prehistory and proceed to alter the course of evolution, with a surprising twist. In Pat Cadigan's "Dino Trend," a Utopian society has embraced a gene-splicing fad, fusing the DNA of various flavor-of-the-week dinos with their own as a fashion statement.

All in all, this is a solid collection of short stories with more than a handful of memorable gems. Though the subject focus might seem restricting at first glance, you can be assured that there is plenty of variety to be found, and a number of equally wild and plausible concepts fleshed out maturely. As a writer, this anthology is a real treat for research on a number of SF concepts not widely given attention beyond the pulp era - namely, dinosaurs and their role in both prehistory and modern or future society, time travel, and genetic manipulation. I found many ideas and concepts that could easily be adjusted and adapted into my own story concepts, as well as many examples of how to properly balance elements of humor and scientific plausibility without using funky techspeak or resorting to glossing things over with vagaries. Highly recommended, as both entertainment and food for your muse.

[Gerd · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've got a troubled relationship with this book.
Yes, there are quite some masterful authors collected here like:
Robert J. Sawyer, Robert Sheckley, Kathe Koja..., and it is all original work by them, but no one of them is at the height of his game in this collection.

It is a wothwhile antholgy still for the sheer number of diffrent talents gathered in one place, but in terms of story quality it just can't compare to the Dann/Dozois anthologies Dinosaurs! & Dinosaurs II

[Jerry · Rating 3 out of 5]

It has been more than four decades since I first discovered dinosaurs in the public library waiting after school to go home, but I still find it hard to resist them. The dinosaur on the cover of this collection is wearing a “no cavemen” button, and sure enough these stories are filled with dinosaurs but no cavemen. They all but, I think, two take place in the modern era, though many in fantasy alternates of the modern era.

Some of the stories are genuinely great, all are good reads. I particularly enjoyed the final dinosaur conspiracy, the free-the-dinosaur activists, and Whilst Slept the Sauropod.

[B.L. Gilleon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Being a dinosaur nerd from a young age, this was one of my favorite books growing up! That being said, maybe the line "for all ages" shouldn't be used so candidly here. There are some stories that have a definite adult story line or scenes, so it may not be for all young readers.

The market for dino fiction is a tiny, so there isn't a lot to compare this with, but I really enjoyed the short stories in this collection! Wish I hadn't lost my book now...

[Karolinde (Kari) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another great collection of short stories. Like all collections, not every story is up to the same standard, but most of them are at least fun to read and more than a few are great literature as well.

[Timothy Pitkin · Rating 1 out of 5]

There some interesting ideas but the stories either did not use the ideas well or were not explained all that well. In fact instead of these great ideas it instead focuses on very stereotypical ideas. Just hope someone reads this book and actually makes use of these ideas in a better story.

[Jack · Rating 3 out of 5]

Uneven - some good stories, some not-so-good stories.