SF Signal: REVIEW: New Dreams for Old by Mike Resnick

REVIEW: New Dreams for Old by Mike Resnick

REVIEW SUMMARY: Makes me want to read more of his work.

MY RATING:

BRIEF SYNOPSIS: A collection of 20 short fiction works by Mike Resnick; many of them award winners and nominees.

MY REVIEW:
PROS: 17 stories good or better, 7 of them excellent.
CONS: 3 stories hovering around the mediocre range.
BOTTOM LINE: An above-average collection of stories featuring many award winners and nominees.

Over the past couple of years, I have read a small handful of Mike's Resnick's short fiction and every single one of them received relatively high marks. When I realized this, I was eager to dive into some more. (Let alone, for the moment, the longer fiction of his that I'd like to read like Kirinyaga and the Starship series.)

New Dreams for Old is a 2006 collection of Resnick's short fiction. Together, the twenty stories have won 2 Hugo Awards and 11 Hugo or Nebula Award nominations. (Factoid: According to The Locus Index to Science Fiction Awards, Mike Resnick has earned the fourth-highest number of award nominations - behind Ursula K. Le Guin, Harlan Ellison and Connie Willis - when considering all awards that the Index tracks.) That award tally is impressive and after reading the stories I can see why.

Simply put, Resnick writes "people" stories that carry quite an emotional impact. Instead of far-flung, hard science fiction that deals with impersonal concepts, these stories are endearingly personal. Resnick writes from the heart and with heart thus making an instant connection with the reader.

There are an amazingly high number of top-quality stories in New Dreams for Old. Standouts included "Robots Don't Cry", "Travels with My Cats", "A Princess of Earth", "Guardian Angel", "For I Have Touched the Sky", "Mwalimu in the Squared Circle" and "Keepsakes". Even the story I least enjoyed - and that only because I did not see the movie Casablanca on which it was based - was not bad.

Reviewlettes of the stories follow, with links to online versions where available...

STORIES IN THIS COLLECTION:

"Robots Don't Cry" [2003 short story] [Although I read this in May 2004, I re-read this again in January 2007. I still think it's superb, but offer the following embellishments to that review.]
- Synopsis: A space scavenger and his alien partner find a 500-year-old and robot named Sammy who feels emotion but is unable to express it.
- Review: Excellent story with a touch of humor and a lot of heart. A fun, quick read that's reminiscent of Isaac Asimov's story "Robbie" because of the beautifully portrayed relationship between Sammy and Miss Emily. Well done.
- Note: Nominated for the 2004 Hugo award.

"The Elephants on Neptune" [2000 short story]
- Synopsis: A human exploration team lands on Neptune (previously thought to be gaseous) and meets a group of surviving elephants.
- Review: After a promising setup explaining how the Elephants lead an idyllic life with the sole burden of total memory, this story seems to have something to say about the cruelty of humans against animals. This way of life is made "real" when the humans and the Elephants switch places through metamorphosis, hardly explained away as forces that "seem very little removed from magic."
- Note: Nominated for the 2001 Hugo award and the 2002 Nebula award.

"Travels with My Cats" [2004 short story]
- Synopsis: A lonely man falls in love with the author of a rare travelogue book who visits him nightly even though she died more than seventy years before.
- Review: Resnick writes a story that connects on an emotional level. The narrator, Evan Owens, has never loved anything his entire life. Just when he accepts that he is destined to die a lonely man, along comes Miss Proscilla Wallace, who shows him what it means to be alive. Although he realizes that she must be a hallucination, their talks serve a therapeutic purpose and open Evan's eyes to his own loneliness. An unfortunate incident turns into a bittersweet ending with emotions that linger. Well done.
- Note: Winner of the 2005 Hugo award.
- Note: Nominated for the 2005 Nebula award.

"A Princess of Earth" [2004 short story]
- Synopsis: A widower meets a stranger claiming to be John Carter of Mars.
- Review: After a brief amount of time wondering whether the stranger was really John Carter or just a loon, I realized that was missing the point. The story is really about the widower's pain of loss. The parallels between the widower and Carter - each has lost his respective Princess - is used to great effect to highlight the feelings of love, loneliness and hope.
- Note: Nominated for the 2005 Hugo award.

"Down Memory Lane" [2005 short story] [I read this in June 2006. Here's what I said then]
- Synopsis: An elderly man deals with the onset of his wife's increasing dementia.
- Review: This is a touching story that show's both the husband's love and his pain. The exact nature of the wife's affliction is unknown but is Alzheimer's-like, making this story reminiscent of Maureen F. McHugh's "Presence" ( itself a 2003 Hugo nominee). The sf content here is minor, relegated to a last-minute scientific experiment undertaken to make the couple more compatible.
- Note: Nominated for the 2006 Hugo Award for best short story.

"The Chinese Sandman" [John Justin Mallory] [2002 novelette] [Read 01/27/07]
- Synopsis: Down-and-out private detective John Justin Mallory must steal an object from the Grundy, his demon-like enemy in an alternate Manhattan populated with fantastical creatures, to satisfy the Chinese Sandman that stole his partner's dream.
- Review: This is a good story that echoes some of the themes in Resnick's story "Keepsakes", which was a story that was written later but that I read before this one. The story is written with enough of a humorous tone to overcome my reservations of fantasy, so things like Mallory's pet cat woman and the bridge trolls on Grundy city castle are met with smiles instead of eye rolls. The idea of elves, trolls, unicorns and the like inhabiting Manhattan is a nice one and Mallory's tough-guy detective is perhaps a little too confident. Either that or the creatures are not as threatening as we are led to believe.
- Note: A line in this story provides the title for Resnick's collection of stories when it is noted that the Sandman trades "new dreams for old".
- Note: Set in the universe of Resnick's only fantasy novel, Stealing the Unicorn.

"Guardian Angel" [2005 novella] [I read this in May 2006. Here's what I said then.]
- Synopsis: Private detective Jake Masters is hired by a socialite to find her missing son, whose father happens to be a notorious crime lord.
- Review: Terse but descriptive prose, a fast-paced story and appealing flavor make this space mystery a winner. The son, Andy, is not so much missing as run away - the mystery is why he has done so. Still, it's fun to watch Jake trounce around the galaxy, chasing leads trying to find his prey. There's a nice helping of aliens in the story, many of which are to be found at a roving carnival where Jake closes in on Andy. Although a little too much story time was spent there, the payoff - learning the reason for Andy's disappearing act - is worth it as it makes the story even more compelling. Resnick does a nice job at capturing the hard-boiled flavor of the detective novel, enough to elicit admiration from this reader and bring the story high marks.

"Old McDonald Had a Farm" [2001 short story]
- Synopsis: The solution to the world's impending hunger problem is the Butterball, a genetically engineered super-animal with an unfortunate design flaw.
- Review: This is another tale in which Resnick tries to shows how humanity can sometimes be cruel. While it succeeds at that, the story overall lacks the impact that make his other stories stand out.
- Note: Nominated for the 2002 Hugo award.

"The Amorous Broom" [John Justin Mallory] [2004 short story]
- Synopsis: Detective John Justin Mallory becomes the target of the affections of a magical broom' that belongs to his ememy, the Grundy.
- Review: Sometimes funny, but more often silly, this story is not as satisfying as the other John Joseph Mallory story I read in this collection, "The Chinese Sandman".
- Note: Set in the universe of Resnick's only fantasy novel, Stealing the Unicorn.

"Hothouse Flowers" [1999 short story]
- Synopsis: A caretaker for the elderly meets a unique patient who causes the caretaker to rethink his values.
- Review: A serious piece about treatment of the elderly gains new focus under the magnifying glass of science fiction. What happens when life expectancy is measured in centuries? What happens to quality of life? The narrator learns that the values he holds may be on morally shaky ground when he meets a patient who can still speak - a rarity for a man of 153 years of age. There is also an interesting parallel with the narrator's botanist wife which helps the narrator make a serious decision.
- Note: Nominated for the 2000 Hugo award.

"The Award-Winning Science Fiction Story" [1988 short story]
- Synopsis: An absurdist story where the characters in the story converse with the author writing it, who also is included as a character in the story.
- Review: Funny at times in a meta-sf way, but ultimately a minor work. Resnick admits as much in the intro but says the story was included because it was recently optioned for film. There are much better stories of his that are more deserving.

"For I Have Touched the Sky" [Kirinyaga] [1989 novelette]
- Synopsis: On the Utopian space station of Kirinyaga, the elder leader (a mundumugu or "witch doctor") encounters a young girl who shuns the archaic ways meant to maintain social stability.
- Review: Yet another awesome Kirinyaga story. (I read "When the Old Gods Die" a while back and made a note to myself to read the fixup novel Kirinyaga. While I haven't done that yet - and this story makes me want to even more - I have pulled it out of the paper box "archives" and moved it within easy reach.) The story itself reads like one of the fables that the mundumugu tells the tribe. It's a rather simple story of a girl wanting to learn when reading is forbidden for women, but the emotional impact of the story is strong and lingers. Another job well done.
- Note: Nominated for both the 1990 Hugo and 1990 Nebula awards.

"Unsafe at Any Speed" [2003 essay]
- Synopsis: An essay that briefly examines the real-life physics behind Superman's super speed.
- Review: Written in the same vein as Larry Niven's "Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex", this tale is equally humorous. "Pardon my bluntness, but the mere act of breaking wind could send him thousands of miles off course, while severely affecting the Earth's rotation." Indeed.

"The Pale Thin God" [1993 vignette]
- Synopsis: A short-short story in which seven gods judge Jesus.
- Review: For a short-short story, Resnick makes quick-but-effective work out of spinning miniature tales of peace, life, mercy, compassion, love and hope.

"Mwalimu in the Squared Circle" [1993 short story]
- Synopsis: In 1978, Uganda President and former boxer Idi Amin proposed to settle the war with Tanzania by challenging Julius Nyerere, President of Tanzania and former teacher ("Mwalimu"), to a boxing match refereed by Mohammed Ali. In this alternate history story, that boxing match takes place.
- Review: This story was written for the Resnick-edited anthology Alternate Warriors, which challenged authors to write stories in which famous non-violent figures were forced to either advocate violence or partake of it themselves. The theme is similar to Turtledove's "The Last Article" (see SF Signal review) and is just as effective. Nyerere, the POV character, spins a story that is simultaneously about peace vs. violence, intelligence vs. physical strength and fighting for the greater cause.
- Note: Nominated for the 1994 Hugo award.

"Here's Looking at You, Kid" [2003 short story]
- Synopsis: The narrator, Humphrey Bogart's character in Casablanca, tries to avoid saying the lines doing the things for which he is famous.
- Review: Although it was cute to watch the meta-awareness of the character being in a movie, this story was written specifically for fans of Casablanca and offers little for those who have not even seen it- like me.

"The Burning Spear at Twilight" [2005 short story]
- Synopsis: An alternate history story in which Kenyan leader Jomo Kenyatta actually was the leader of the Mau Mau Rebellion he was purported to be during the British occupation of Kenya.
- Review: Points to this story for giving a brief lesson in history and telling a story of how propaganda can be mightier than the most powerful armies.

"The Kemosabee" [1994 short story]
- Synopsis: A humorous story that supposes that Native American Indians are a lost tribe from Israel and, as such, what might have occurred between the Lone Ranger and Tonto.
- Review: Worth a laugh or three.

"The 43 Antarean Dynasties" [1997 short story]
- Synopsis: A humorous story that supposes that Native American Indians are a lost tribe from Israel and, as such, what might have occurred between the Lone Ranger and Tonto.
- Review: Misleadingly slight at its beginning, this story's impact becomes more and more pronounced as the Antarean tour guide shows the tourists marvel after marvel of Antarean culture, architecture and history. Sadly, the uninterested family (particularly the father and the game-playing kid) fails to see the wonder of it all; they see Antares as a backwater planet populated by a weak race of creepy aliens that have been conquered too many times for them be worth any ounce of concern or awe. The parallel with American attitudes towards third world countries is evident and wonderfully delivered.
- Note: Winner of the for the 1998 Hugo award.

"Keepsakes" [2004 novella] [I read this in June 2006. Here's what I said then.]
- Synopsis: Two government agents - one a seasoned veteran, the other a young, idealistic and hopeful - are tasked with stopping Star Gypsies from tricking their unwary victims out of their precious, sentimental keepsakes that they trade for cheap labor.
- Review: As premises go, this one is pretty standard: the detectives try to apprehend "the bad guys" who always seem to be one step ahead. Yet this seemingly innocuous premise is a sturdy platform on which to perform some great storytelling. One can not help but be drawn in by the mystery of the Star Gypsies. Who are they and why do they want to trick people out of their most precious sentimental tchotchkes? How do they manage to avoid description? Are they shape-changers or something else? Add to this the pessimistic old-timer who has been chasing them for so long that he's all but given up hope on catching them. Stir in a young, bright-eyed hopeful who believes he can make a difference and focuses on their motive. Together they make an interesting team. They get a break when they are able to guess the Gypsies next move and the story gets even better as the details unfold. I was amazed at how much suspense could be built up with even the shortest of scenes. There was an uneasy peace about the air as we finally meet the Gypsies, learn their secrets, and glide into the final, somewhat predictable - but still very engrossing - final confrontation. Well done.
- Note: This story might have easily fit into Resnick's anthology, Down These Dark Spaceways, for which he also contributed another excellent story ("Guardian Angel"). Both are equally near perfect.