Doc Holliday lies in bed in a sanitarium in Leadville, Colorado, expecting never to leave his room again. So I may be breaking new ice here, opening a hitherto undiscovered seaway to reading pleasure.Welcome to a Steampunk wild west starring Doc Holliday, with zombies, dinosaurs, robots, and cowboys. He also seems to like combining folklore and satire with mash-ups of other genres, such as hardboiled fiction, adventure and mystery. ![]() His “hard” science fiction is especially celebrated for its approach to culture, particularly his Kirinyaga series, from which I am picking up a “read this if you like Ursula K. I am also amazed to learn that Mike Resnick, of whom I had never heard before this, is the most nominated author in the history of the Hugo Awards, and a five-time winner in the category of short fiction. The other books in the series, in order, are The Buntline Special, The Doctor and the Kid, and The Doctor and the Dinosaurs and if I see them, I will definitely read them. Wild and woolly as this tale is, it was evidently founded on some serious research. I also appreciated the helpful appendices, including digest biographies and a bibliography about the main characters and even some extracts of their own writings. Still, I enjoyed the genre mash-up, the humor and the weirdness appropriate to a series titled The Weird West Tales. Then suddenly one does come, and the problem is cleared up so quickly and neatly that it almost doesn’t seem worth it. They talk about it, think about it, and sometimes go out and take poke at it, and for quite a while no solution comes to them. Second, if you get through the book slowly and in small doses, as I did, you might notice that the entire plot consists of the characters dealing with one essential problem. I sometimes struggled to find an image to put on my mental canvas. ![]() First, author Resnick holds back his powers of description to the point where scenes and characters that really cried out for a few verbal brushstrokes are merely named. All this is almost enough to enable you to overlook two slight deficiencies in the entertainment. The pace moves quickly and the characters pulsate with vitality and conversational charm, convincing you they would have said those exact things if real history had ever brought them together. So is the way four-eyed, dandified Roosevelt wins the undying loyalty of all the tough guys the moment they test their manliness against him. And it has historic characters appearing out of context yet somehow, amazingly, in character.Įvery witty word that drops from Doc Holliday’s bloody-spittle-stained lips is pure gold. It has Edison and Buntline inventing vintage/futuristic weapons to destroy an indestructible magical monster. It has a dusty frontier town kept entertained by a harem of robotic prostitutes (oops – I should have said Adult Content Advisory). It has a gang of unruly gamblers and gunslingers shaping up to be Roosevelt’s Rough Riders. It has medicine men who can change shapes and raise the dead. This is the Wild West you didn’t learn about in your school history texts. The only catch is that all the other medicine men in the west are against it, and they have pooled their power to create a giant creature named War Bonnet whose sole purpose is to stomp Geronimo and Roosevelt into jelly. In return for Roosevelt’s promise not to wipe out the Indians, Geronimo is willing to surrender the barrier. ![]() Geronimo, the great Apache warrior, wants to make a deal with Theodore Roosevelt, an up and coming man of genius and rare leadership qualities. ![]() The friendly rivals are trying to invent a gadget that will tear down the wall of magic that has kept the United States from spreading West of the Mississippi.
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