Sunday, June 18, 2017

Deal Me In #24: "Scherzo with Tyrannosaur"


I'm still working my way through Jay's Deal Me In Challenge . In a nutshell--we line up 52 short stories for the year, we match those stories up to a card in a regular deck of card, and each week we shuffle our deck (of real cards) and draw a card from whatever remains in the deck. Last week I drew the Queen of Spades which gave me
"Scherzo with Tyrannosaur" by Michael Swanwick from The Year's Best Science Fiction 17th Annual Collection by Gardner Dozois, ed.

photo credit

 Swanwick's story reminds me a bit of The Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams. But--instead of treating time-travelers to a view of the end of everything--this place allows folks to go back in time to the era of dinosaurs and see a T-rex up close and personal (through a window that's rated at twenty tons per square inch). Our narrator is the palenontological director and host of Hilltop center, a research center in the late Cretaceous period. The Time Safety Officers are always on guard to make sure no one uses their knowledge of the past for profit--or changes anything that will affect the timeline. But what if the director discovers something personal that he just has to fix? Will the Officers let him get away with it? Will his future self?

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