Posted by Os Davis in 2012 Olympics, Olympics, Review, short stories, Sports, track and field | 0 Comments
For the glory of Empire: Reviewing Mike Resnick’s “The Olympians”
With the XXX Olympiad currently in full swing, BuckBokai today pimps a favorite science-fiction sport story, Mike Resnick’s “The Olympians.”
Celebrating its 30th anniversary in 2012, “The Olympians” serves as the seventh chapter in Resnick’s Birthright: The Book of Man
As essentially all the stories in Birthright, “The Olympians” works as a standalone story – proven by its inclusion in the Isaac Asimov’s Wonderful Worlds of Science Fiction volume Science Fictional Olympics
“The Olympians” has mighty Earthmen already established as the ruling species, despised by most – and with many good reasons, the games among them. The Olympic Games in Resnick’s work don’t resemble our own so much as a series of individual sporting events. Each matchup features a Terran and a home-planet representative. For decades, Earth has gone undefeated in everything from swimming to wrestling in a show that has nothing to do with Olympic ideals and is rather all about “demonstrating” the “superiority” of the human race – indeed, as part of the arrangements, once the Earth side loses any one event, the games will end.
In “The Olympians,” the sporting event at center is a long-distance running race and, wow, has a track meet ever been more excitingly portrayed in any fiction? Against an Emren sporting thighs “knotted with muscle,” Resnick’s protagonist “Big” John Tinsmith feels the weight of the empire on his back and the (approximately) 1 trillion eyes of 500 billion viewers as he spends the entire race playing catchup to the quick underdog – as does the reader. By the heart-pumping conclusion, the engrossed follower suddenly becomes torn between cheering for the drug-supplemented, aloof-to-the-point-of-arrogance hometown boy and hoping for the humiliation to end.
The conclusion is fitting and surprising, leading the science-fiction sports fan into the next . On one hand, an entire volume dedicated to the Olympians might be possible. On the other, Resnick or another scribe looking to do so would be faced with the inevitable Earth victory – kinda takes the suspense out things, eh?
Interesting to note: Asimov’s collection was released in the 1980s against a backdrop of Cold War politics consistently checkering Olympic Games with mass boycotts and such. An Amazon review notes that “Olympic contests between the Soviet bloc and America were often exploited for propaganda purposes, the outcome of an athletic event supposedly saying something significant about the victor’s country. This 1984 anthology, from the height of the Cold War, has several stories built around that notion.”
The same review opines that “‘The Olympians’ … is not, despite the title, a future Olympics tale,” but BuckBokai would beg to differ. Sport is often used as a tool of denigration by those of empire mentality and the loss of dominance in a game that a given culture has introduced to the world can be socially enervating (i.e. England’s drop in international cricket through the last half of the 20th century, America’s current standing in international baseball, etc).
Meanwhile, the USA would appear to remain healthily atop the international tables in basketball, the world game this culture introduced to the planet. But just because the 12 guys going for gold are not somber faceless monsters with an explicit goal to destroy doesn’t mind the “Dream Team” and its descendants aren’t propaganda tools. Pushing product (in this case, the NBA) isn’t *that* much different than pushing the Soviet ideal in the greater scheme of things, is it? And is it any coincidence that “The Olympians” is set within the “Democracy” time period of Birthright?
Maybe Resnick’s Olympians could’ve used a little PR…