Six Blind Men and an Alien

by Mike Resnick

They tell the story about the four blind men and the elephant. One felt the elephant's trunk and declared he was touching a snake. Another felt his leg and concluded that it was a tree trunk. A third felt his tusk and said it was a spear, and the fourth felt its tail and proclaimed that it was a rope...

Genres: Science Fiction

108 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 2010

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

[Ryan · Rating 2 out of 5]

The title is a riff of the blind men and the elephant story where various blind men touch an elephant and all imagine wildly different things based on to them an unknowable thing. This book takes place in the future when global temperatures have warmed, the Himalayan Mountains are much warmer and as a result the ice has mentioned except for the peak. They are not as majestic as they are now. On a big anniversary of Hemingway's famous expedition where he ca,e across the remains of a animal and wrote his famous poem a crew from a magazine retrace his journey and see if they can find the remains. They find remains of something but it's something of unknown origin. Each member tells a story imagining how it got there, what it was, and how it lived and died. Just nothing spectacular but not really not totally bad. Just a ok novel. Does a good job of asking "What if Hemingway didn't really find the big cat animal remains?" But everything else is mediocre at best.