"Birthright: The Book of Man" – a Dim View of Humanity

Following up on recent posts about Mike Resnick's books Seven Views of Olduvai Gorge and Santiago, I had to jump right in and read his future history collection Birthright: The Book of Man.  In general, I'm a big fan of future history collections: Heinlein's of course, but also H. Beam Piper's, Asimov's, etc.  Resnick's future history however takes a pretty poor view of humanity in general, and it doesn't end well.  He's taken his cues from Europe's 16th thru 19th century colonialism phase, something that we've hopefully moved beyond, and extrapolated that sort of behavior out into the cosmos.  While parts are heroic and inspiring, most of it is an exercise in how not to do things.

To be fair, it was published in 1982, well before the two more recent books mentioned above were written.  Even then Resnick could spin a tale and hold a reader's interest, and that was enough to keep me going through this otherwise grim book.  It does give the background sweep for a lot of his other work (including Olduvai and Santiago), so in some ways that makes reading this almost a prerequisite.  It mercifully comes in bite-sized short stories, spaced millennia apart, so at least it is easy to put down and perhaps even easier pick up again.  Here, here's the non-spoiler Wikipedia entry on it – read and decide for yourself if it's for you.  Myself, I'm glad to have read it, but am also glad to have it in the rear view mirror.

Love it or loathe it, the man can tell a story.  For me now though, it's onward to other works by other authors.