gods monsters and the lucky peach by kelly robson

Fabian, an abrasive “tactical historian” from TERN, the research group that discovered time travel, is their guide to the past. She puts together a small team of three, roping in her colleague Hamid, a biologist who’s obsessed with horses, and reluctantly accepting her eager young administrative assistant Kiki as the third team member. Minh is determined to win the project (the follow-on work could be extremely lucrative). Now Minh, a cynical 83-year-old ecologist with six prosthetic tentacle-like legs, has received a request for proposal (RFP) that combines both time travel and ecological restoration: going back to 2024 BCE Mesopotamia to study the drainage of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers as a guide to future river remediation projects. In the excitement surrounding the discovery of time travel a decade or so ago, nearly all the funding shifted away from ecological restoration to time travel projects. In the 23rd century, humanity is beginning to rebuild on the surface of the Earth after living underground for many years in “hives and hells.” Life on the surface is limited to specific habitats, and the need for expensive ecological restoration projects to make the habitats livable has led to funding consortiums with time-consuming (and headache-inducing) formal proposal requirements. Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach (2018), one of several exceptional novellas nominated for the 2018 Nebula award, combines some intelligent and subtle world-building in the aftermath of worldwide disasters, the future version of project financing and lobbying (with lamentable similarities to our current world), and time travel to ancient Mesopotamia as research for an environmental remediation project.

I have such a soft spot for time travel tales, and this one is so intelligently written! Full review, first posted on Fantasy Literature: Several of my stories have been chosen for 'year's best' anthologies, and in the past two years I've been a finalist for several high-profile awards.Ĥ+ stars. I've published short fiction at Tor.com, Asimov's Science Fiction, Clarkesworld, and a number of anthologies. I've edited science books, and from 2008 to 2012 I had the great good luck to write a monthly wine column for Chatelaine, the largest women's magazine in Canada. To this day, nothing is more important to me than reading, nothing is more delicious than a great novel, and few people are as important as my favorite writers.

This was pre-Internet and since there were no bookstores in my town and the library was pretty bare, good books - the kind that made my heart sing - were precious treasures. I spent most of my teenage years either hanging out at the drugstore waiting for new issues of Asimov's Science Fiction magazine, or when I was in the city, lurking in the SF and Fantasy section of the bookstore.

Gods monsters and the lucky peach by kelly robson