Ivory by Mike Resnick

This was up for the Nebula, Arthur C. Clarke, Locus, Science Fiction Chronicle Readers Poll Awards.

Summary:

Elephant tusks get gambled away in an alien game. The last member of the tribe is seeking it. He has employed in order to find it. This novel tracks those movements over the centuries of its displacement.

Commentary:

This is a book I rather love and I have a hard time accounting for it. It's a minor SF masterwork--that illustrious tier when you have read SF classics like Dune and Foundation, etc. and are scratching your head about what to read next. This has nothing to do with awards. This outshines some winners although a few award-losers might might outshine this one. But not many.

Like the movie Red Violin, the story follows the history of an object through time except Resnick's predates the movie by a decade. The risk of such connected stories is that they are merely connected stories. What a book strives to do is become more than the sum of its parts. This achieves that.

This amounts