Mike Resnick is one of the few American writers who really knows how to write about Africa. His “Kirinyaga” stories earned Resnick his first Hugo award in 1989, and while it might be a mistake to say that anyone truly understands a place he isn’t native to, he writes about it as if he grasps some of the subtleties of the hugely diverse and multifaceted continent. IVORY, which was first published in 1988, demonstrates this, along with a Resnick’s flair for solid speculation.
IVORY’s centerpiece is a wonderful imagining of the last days of the Kilimanjaro elephant, a beast whose gigantic tusks – weighing a combined 462 pounds – now reside in the bowels of the British Museum of Natural History. Very little is known about the elephant’s demise, and Resnick’s explanation is as good – if not better – than any.
That’s hardly science fiction, though, and to satisfy the requirements of the genre, Resnick wrapped the elephant’s story around a procedural mystery in which a museum researcher 6,000 years in the future is tasked with tracking down the tusks for a man purporting to be the last of the Maasai.
The tusks’ history is traced through a series of vignettes about its various owners – which range from cyborg gamblers to alien dictators – and the quality of these fenceposts varies widely. While they start strong in a hive of scum and villainy worthy of STAR WARS, the vignettes lose steam about halfway into the book, picking up as both the researcher’s and elephant’s stories reach their conclusions.
IVORY isn’t perfect, but it reminds us again that many science-fiction writers have as good an understanding of history they do of the future, and Resnick’s Africa – both past and future – is authentic and alive as ever. It’s also got the best cover it has ever had and a great, solid feel – which many classic reissues deserve but don’t receive – thanks to Pyr. –Ryun Patterson
OTHER BOOKGASM REVIEWS OF THIS AUTHOR:
• ALIEN CRIMES edited by Mike Resnick
• DOWN THESE DARK SPACEWAYS edited by Mike Resnick
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Interesting. I haven’t read anything by Resnick since he was writing, if I recall correctly, urban fantasy while I was in grade school. Or something like that. I might have to check out some of his more recent material.
A great novel about Africa is Donald Westlake’s Kahawa a big action-adventure yarn about some mercenaries who plan to hijack one of Idi Amin’s coffee trains. It’s like nothing else I’ve ever read, and of course, long out of print.