Birthright

They will tell the story a hundred ways, and every teller lies a little. That is how you know a thing is true out here: the legend and the fact walk into the same cantina and refuse to shake hands. This is the future history of Man — one species' seventeen-thousand-year climb out of the mud of Earth, across a galaxy that never asked us to come, and the long slow guttering-out at the far end of it. Mike Resnick built the whole span single-handed, and its keystone is Birthright: The Book of Man — twenty-six self-contained tales, each a profession, a world, a turning point, with humans and aliens giving flatly contradictory accounts of what happened. Around that spine turns a shelf of sub-cycles, sorted along the ages the race passes through as it rises and falls — Republic, Democracy, Oligarchy, Monarchy, Anarchy. The bounty-hunter myth of the Widowmaker; Wilson Cole's mutinous Starship run against a rotting Navy; the cold ascent of a girl who reads the future in the Oracle books; the outlaw-saint of Santiago; the gaudy orbital vice of the Velvet Comet; a weary detective working the Monarchy's back alleys. Kings, con men, killers, and clairvoyants — one voice threading all of it. The register is frontier ballad crossed with the fall of Rome: wry, elegiac, forever weighing the man against the myth that outlives him. Nothing here demands reading in sequence. Start with Santiago for the legend at full gallop, the Widowmaker for a lean revenge tale, or Birthright itself to take the whole arc of the fall in a single sitting.