Dancing in Dreamtime
-
- $7.99
-
- $7.99
Publisher Description
This story collection by the acclaimed author and conservationist “sparks with brilliant imagery” in tales of dystopian worlds and human resilience (Teresa Milbrodt, author of Bearded Women: Stories).
Fans of Scott Russell Sanders, the Lannan Literary Award-winning essayist and author of The Conservationist Manifesto, may be surprised to learn he was one of the brightest science-fiction newcomers of the 1980s. In Dancing in Dreamtime, Sanders returns to his sci-fi roots, exploring both inner and outer space in a speculative collection of short stories.
At a time when humankind faces unprecedented, global-scale challenges from climate change, loss of biodiversity, dwindling vital resources, and widespread wars, this collection of planetary tales will strike a poignant chord with the reader. Sanders has created worlds where death tolls rise due to dream deprivation, where animals only exist in mechanical form, and where people are forced to live in biodomes to escape poisoned air. “Clear-eyed and philosophical” these vividly imagined stories combine “intellectualism with magical realism in an uncommon unity of mind and spirit” (Shelf Awareness).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
For this Breakaway Book Club edition, essayist and novelist Sanders (Divine Animal) assembles revised versions of his contemplative and melancholy stories lamenting the degradation of Earth. Written in the 1980s, the prescient stories explore obesity, habitat loss, and extinction. In "Artist of Hunger," the obese titular character paints food murals for companies that provide slenderizing operations. In the horror tale "Anatomy Lesson," a mutant's skeleton transforms a student. Several stories adapted for Sanders's novel The Engineer of Beasts follow people living in domed cities after the Great Extinction, cut off from wilderness and building mechanical animals for circuses. "Dancing in Dreamtime" brings indigenous shamans into orbit to survey the damage and heal Earth with dance and song. Later stories visit humans on exoplanets discovering supposedly extinct birds and singing trees. Out of place in this collection is the standout fantasy "First Journey of Jason Moss," a gentle story of discovery as Jason travels a present-day Earth. With so many cautionary stories of near-future doom and gloom, a few more hopeful insights would have lifted spirits.
