Dinosaur Fantastic — Mike Resnick

In this compelling and entertaining anthology of original pieces, veteran anthologists Resnick and Greenberg offer nearly every short-story angle imaginable on dinosaurs, from prehistorical to post-modern. A few pieces are from the dinosaur point of view, while others are reflective vignettes about the place that our oldest, extinct predecessors hold in the modern imagination. The best stories have themes of dinosaurs physically or symbolically coming back from extinction through replication technology. In Pat Cadigan's contribution, dressing up as your favorite dinosaur in dino clubs has become the latest fashion in a technologically crazy future headed for its own extinction. David Gerrold posits mini-dinos as pets in the suburbia of the future. Once again, they are a fashion trend, an outdated one this time, and Gerrold uses a pet mini-Tyrannosaurus rex as a metaphor for a family breaking apart. Kevin O'Donnell Jr.'s similar story, in which mini-saurs become pest-controlling pets in a dystopian, cockroach-infested future, is a poignant comment on a present in which the idea of a past has been all but forgotten. By avoiding the most obvious and cliched ways of telling these stories, the selections in this volume show consistent quality. (July)