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Vinland the Dream and Other Stories
by Kim Stanley Robinson
(Voyager, £6.99, 410 pages, paperback, published 7 May 2002.)
Often collections of short stories are simply as good or bad as the
individual stories.  Too
often this is so even when there is some theme to them, because the
theme's welcome wears out by the time it has been played a dozen times
in the reader's mind, particularly if it involves the same fictional
world or characters. The theme here is the nature of history and of
remembering. It is a rich theme and Kim Stanley Robinson approaches
it from an amazing variety of angles including alternative history,
straight first-person mainstream, space opera meets detective story
and projection into the near future. The real accomplishment of the
collection is that the strands of the theme are still apparent and,
not only do the stories make you think, but the often implicit and tenuous
links between them make you think too. This is serious SF at its best
and it makes one appreciate that history and SF are not so far apart.
If you like scantily clad shoot-n-stab muscular fast paced action, then
read something else.
The high quality of the collection makes picking favourites pretty
arbitrary, but the ones that stick out in my mind include 'A History
of the Twentieth Century with Illustrations' (available
elsewhere on this site) where a jaded and depressed historian who
has been asked to write the coffee table book of the title finds solace
from an ancient sense of place in the Orkneys, which somehow renews
his feeling that people are basically good, despite the atrocities that
form history. 'Venice Drowned' is in just that setting where Venetians
survive on the tops of their old buildings and eke livings from tourism
and such. Again, it is about the human spirit as a reverence for the
past. 'Coming Back to Dixieland' is about a Dixieland jazz band composed
of asteroid miners, who, as many have before them, see their music as
an escape from harsh conditions and as a potential way to improve their
material lot. It captures the joyful desperation of the music really
well, while transposing it to a place entirely other than early 20th
Century New Orleans. 'Black Air' is about a boy pressed on to the Spanish
Armada, who survives its defeat and has experiences that seem as strange
to him as science fiction would.
Review by Richard Hammersley.
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