Think Like a Dinosaur: And Other Stories

Think Like a Dinosaur: And Other Stories by Kelly, James Patrick. hardcover edition. ISBN: 9780965590198.

This first major retrospective collects Kellys finest short fiction from a twenty-year career and includes a dazzling array of work from hard science fiction to Twilight Zone-ish fantasies to stark futuristic horror. Thus the grim fable "Pogrom" presents a near-futuristic scenario in which internecine warfare has broken out between the aging boomer generation and a youthful dispossessed proletariat who must support them. The landmark novella "Mr. Boy" - already considered a contemporary classic in the genre - is the wildly inventive tale of a genetically stunted twelve-year-old who literally lives inside his mother, who has turned herself into a three-quarter-scale model of the Statue of Liberty. "The First Law of Thermodynamics" is a remarkable evocation of the psychedelic sixties - the time of Vietnam and Kent State and acid rock - in which, like that era itself, nothing is what it appears to be. And "Breakaway, Backdown" portrays the shocking price one must pay for those mustering the "right stuff" to venture into outer space.