Turtledove
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"Running of the Bulls"  
RunningoftheBulls
Author Harry Turtledove
First Appearance Tor.com
Publisher Tor.com
Reprinted No
Collected No
Illustrator Greg Ruth
Genre(s) Alternate history, Science fiction
Publication date March 2013

"Running of the Bulls" is a short story by Harry Turtledove. It was published on-line at Tor.com on March 27, 2013. It is written as a pastiche of Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. Turtledove uses a favored trope of altering the names of Hemingway's characters, usually in the forms of anagrams or quasi-anagrams; for example, Hemingway's Jake Barnes becomes "Baek Jarns". Like Barnes, Jarns received a wound in a recently concluded war that has rendered him impotent. However, it quickly becomes clear that there is more to this story than just a simple pastiche, as Turtledove also uses anagrams for the names of his countries, creating a fantasy atmosphere. Things take an even more fantastic turn when Jarns and his friends go to "Amblona" to see the running of the bulls, which are in fact creatures like nothing currently found on Earth.



They are in fact Triceratops. Moreover, through a series of clues scattered throughout the story, Turtledove also reveals that the people of this story aren't humans, but are a species of evolved and sentient dinosaurs.

Inspiration[]

Turtledove explained the story's genesis: "Pieces of this one have been in my mind since the mid-1990s, when I got a mental image of the running of the bulls in Pamplona with Triceratops standing in for the bulls. If you do Pamplona, it’s hard to avoid Hemingway. And, if the bulls are dinosaurs, what are the people going to be?"

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