Also available at Fictionwise
Fierce Embrace arose because, in 1993 I asked Mike Resnick what it would take to get into one of his anthologies. He told me to send some samples, among which was IRIDIUM DREAMS. He called in September 1996 and asked if I could write another dinosaur story for him and, oh, by the way, could I have it back in six weeks? I did it in three and this is the result.
This story is designed to work on several levels. I deliberately did not make the sections of the interwoven stories directly parallel, but did make them analogous to each other in a deeper sense. The scenes and locations were based on an article in the July 1996 issue of NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC, which included a nice map of the Gobi.
This was the first story that I wrote to spec and deadline and was surprised to find how nice it was to work under pressure. The story got a favorable review in Tangent as the only hard science story in the entire collection.