RAVEN DREAM

by Robert Reed

A small group of Lakota live secretly in the Sandhills of Nebraska. This was where Raven Dream was born. A boy who knows no life but hiding by day and hunting at night, Raven is taught to fear the world beyond, full of demons and evil machines. But he finds himself drawn to this other realm too. Story by story, the collection follows the young shaman, and the world he discovers proves stranger and far more dangerous than ours. "Raven had never seen a wolf. There were plenty of coyotes, both in the world and in the spirit realm. Red forest foxes lurked by the river, and tiny swift foxes hunted voles in the grass. But in his long little life, this man had only imagined what was resting just a few paces from him. Larger than three coyotes, the creature had a powerful long mouth and teeth as big as fingers and vast, vivid eyes filled with smoky light, exposing a soul at least as large as Raven’s soul. He was a male wolf with massive forequarters and paws as big as a man’s hands, and in the absolute silence, the wolf breathed. A slow release of lung-wetted air made a knot of steam that hung between them. Then some of that steam was inhaled again, the sound easy and relaxed. The wolf was studying him. He shifted his haunches, making the snow creak, and the eyes blinked quickly, just once, and then the wolf breathed again. But more deeply this time, his head rearing, the black nose sucking in the cold air, searching for scents, maybe, or maybe just taking pleasure from the dark winter night." Robert Reed is the author of numerous stories and novels. "Raven Dream" and his descendants have never before been gathered in one volume.

150 pages, Kindle Edition

Published February 26, 2018

About the author

He has also been published as Robert Touzalin.

Reviews

[Toby · Rating 3 out of 5]

In M. Night Shyamalan's 2004 film The Village, the gimmick is that the titular village, sequestered and beset by monsters, actually exists in the modern world but isolated not just physically but culturally. Literally, even.

Robert Reed's Raven Dream is not quite that but it does posit a group of Lakota (a North American native people) that lives in their own little World somewhere in Nebraska, hemmed in by barbed wire fences. Beyond the fence is the Spirit Realm, populated by "demons" who are not the People and don't speak the People's tongue, and who work at doing nothing.

This anthology is a collection of five or six Raven Dream stories published over the course of 20-odd years in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. The stories don't cover the same amount of time; rather, Raven Dream never really ages beyond his 9 or 10 years (old enough to be a "man" in the People's World). He doesn't grow phsyically, but we do see him evolve from a naive-but-capable kid to a shaman-in-training and finally an expatriate of his People, learning about and becoming part of the world of demons beyond the World he's known, that his People have known for a more than a century.

The stories are good. At first Reed spends a lot of time on synonyms and metaphors, trying to convey the familiar (to us) through the eyes of Raven Dream (who doesn't know what, like, a bunch of kids on a river float trip would look like, or what a transistor radio would look like or do). But there's also a sci-fi flair to it since Raven's spirit realm isn't quite like ours, either -- sure there are billionaire narcissists, environmental catastrophes, and truck drivers, but there are also cloned animals, AI robot assistant-bodyguards, and VPNs that hide not just your IP address but your entire identity.

In an afterword, Reed notes that the new editorial leadership at F&SF declined to publish new Raven Dream stories, so new work and beyond will probably only be found in his Kindle editions like this one.

[Meiers 🦕 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good. It is 4 or 5 out of a 7-part series of short stories, sorta of smushed together. So it feels a little unfinished at the end, but still I enjoyed it.