Dry Bones by Craig Johnson (2015)

Cover blurb

When Jen, the largest, most complete Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton ever found surfaces in Sheriff Walt Longmire’s jurisdiction, it appears to be a windfall for the High Plains Dinosaur Museum — until Danny Lone Elk, the Cheyenne rancher on whose property the remains were discovered, turns up dead, floating face down in a turtle pond. With millions of dollars at stake, a number of groups step forward to claim her, including Danny’s family, the tribe, and the federal government.

As Wyoming’s Acting Deputy Attorney and a cadre of FBI officers descend on the town, Walt is determined to find out who would benefit from Danny’s death, enlisting old friends Lucian Connolly and Omar Rhoades, along with Dog and best friend Henry Standing Bear, to trawl the vast Lone Elk ranch looking for answers to a sixty-five-million-year-old cold case that’s heating up fast.

My thoughts

Today the fossilized remains of Sue the T. rex are the centerpiece of the Field Museum in Chicago, but in the early 1990s those “dry bones” were at the center of the largest legal battle in paleontology. I won’t go into the details about the case other than to warn you against watching Dinosaur 13, the terrible, one-sided “documentary” made about the whole sordid affair. (Two good takedowns of the film can be found here and here.) The most you need to know for this review is the fossil ultimately sold at auction for more than $8 million, and the legal wrangling around Sue was the inspiration for Dry Bones, a murder mystery starring the popular Wyoming sheriff Walt Longmire.

I have never read a Longmire novel before Dry Bones and while I was dimly aware of the TV show based on the book series, I haven't watched any episodes. That said, each book is largely a standalone novel. Prior knowledge of what has come before isn’t required, but it certainly helps when it comes to understanding the relationships between characters. Longmire himself is part Wyatt Earp and part Sherlock Holmes: A college-educated cowboy who is as comfortable speaking Latin as he is riding in the saddle. He is the sheriff of Absaroka County,  a fictional Wyoming county bigger than Rhode Island in terms of land area but with only 30,000 residents. Dry Bones begins with Longmire and his Deputy Sheriff/lover Vic Moretti investigating the death of Danny Lone Elk, a Native American rancher who seemingly drowned while fishing. The problem is Lone Elk was the only person able to verify the ownership of Jen, a huge T. rex skeleton claimed by both the local museum and the rancher’s family. Longmire comes to suspect that Lone Elk’s death wasn’t the accident it seemed, and he is pretty sure the killer’s motive has something to do with the multi-million dollar fossil everyone is fighting over.

Dry Bones is a well-written crime novel but not a very satisfying one for readers new to the series. The first half of the book focuses on a subplot that I’m sure will have a major emotional wallop for longtime fans, but for the rest of us it seems an unnecessary diversion from the central mystery. That said, the subplot is dropped midway – as is a major character – and the story kicks into high gear when minor characters start disappearing and Longmire begins to unravel why Lone Elk was murdered. The identity of the killer isn’t hard to puzzle out, but the author throws in enough twists to keep you guessing how events will unfold.

As far as criticisms, I was annoyed that the case against selling scientifically valuable fossils was made through the mouth of a character who embodied every bad stereotype about government employees. The author obviously wasn’t interested in a nuanced portrayal of the issue. Also, magic is real in Longmire’s world. The main character experiences visions portending to future events and his best friend is a clichéd Native American shaman who dispenses sagely advice. Not sure why the inclusion of magic bothered me so much – it just seemed at odds with the otherwise down-to-earth tone of the novel.

Overall I enjoyed Dry Bones but suggest you read some of the earlier books in the series before picking this one up. There is a major development in the novel that I’m sure will have huge implications for the characters moving forward, but without some grounding in their backstories, it doesn’t have the narrative heft that it should. Dry Bones is the 16th novel in the Longmire series, so you have some catching up to do.

Trivia

• As started earlier, the Longmire novels are the basis for a long-running American cable television series currently on Netflix.

• The author’s website is www.craigallenjohnson.com

• The title is taken from the religious tune of the same name, which itself was inspired by the Bible verse about a “valley of dry bones.”

Reviews

• Denver Post

• Wyoming News

• Deseret News

Edge of Extinction: The Ark Plan by Laura Martin (2016)

Cover blurb

I always thought that I wouldn’t put you in danger for the world, but it turns out that for the world, I will.
-Dad

ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY YEARS AGO: The first dinosaurs were cloned. With their return came a prehistoric pandemic that nearly wiped out the human race. The only way to survive was to move underground, allowing the dinosaurs to take over…

FIVE YEARS AGO: Sky Mundy’s father mysteriously fled their home in North Compound, one of four facilities where the last remnants of humanity have been trying to rebuild, leaving her all alone.

YESTERDAY: Sky discovered a cryptic message from him telling her the fate of the world depends on Sky delivering a memory card to someone above ground. No one survives above ground.

NOW: Sky is going anyway. Breaking out of North Compound with her best friend, Shawn, in tow, Sky has to try to fulfill her father’s impossible request. As Sky ventures topside into this lost world reclaimed by nature and ruled by dinosaurs, she will discover it is just as dangerous as she had always feared… but it’s also nothing like she had ever expected.

My thoughts

Don’t clone dinosaurs, kids. Nothing good will come of it.

That seems to be the life lesson imparted by Edge of Extinction: The Ark Plan, a young adult novel by first-time author Laura Martin. Set 150 years after cloned dinosaurs unleashed a plague that killed off most of humanity, the story follows 12-year-old Sky Mundy on her quest to possibly find her missing father. The publisher touts the book as “Jurassic World meets Dawn of the Planet of the Apes,” but really its spiritual predecessor is the comic Xenozoic Tales (a.k.a. Cadillacs and Dinosaurs), also set on a future Earth where dinosaurs have returned and taken over the planet. There is no evidence Martin knew about the comic when she wrote Edge of Extinction, which is a fun if somewhat by-the-numbers thriller.

Edge of Extinction is told from the first-person point of view of Sky, a social outcast in one of the few underground shelters where humans sought refuge from a plague that nearly wiped them out. Thanks to a brief history lesson near the beginning of the book, readers learn that in the past scientists learned how to clone dinosaurs, but in the process inadvertently brought back the diseases the prehistoric reptiles carried. The sudden disappearance of most people allowed dinosaurs to overrun Earth’s ecosystems. Humans are no longer at the top of the food chain, so Sky’s people rarely leave their underground shelters as travel on the surface is usually a death sentence. Sky decides to risk it after she receives a message from her missing father telling her to deliver a memory card carrying secret information to a drop-off point located in the middle of Lake Michigan. Soon afterward, our hero escapes the shelter with her best friend Shawn, pursued by both hungry dinosaurs and an evil government willing to kill to get its hands on the memory card.

If there was a checklist for clichés in modern young adult fiction, then you could mark off most of the boxes for Edge of Extinction. A headstrong central protagonist? Check. Parents either dead or missing? Check. A larger, shadowy conspiracy driving events? Check. Two male friends who could turn into rival love interests for the female hero? Check. Edge of Extinction certainly doesn’t reinvent the wheel when it comes to children’s literature, but stories have never needed to be groundbreaking to be entertaining. Martin’s first novel strikes a nice balance between worldbuilding, character moments, and chase scenes. There is quite a lot of action crammed into the book’s 250 pages, but it is interspersed with long stretches of Sky exploring her future Earth and developing her relationships with the two other main characters. Whenever the pace threatens to sag, Martin adds another wrinkle to the book’s central mystery or throws in a dinosaur to menace our heroes.

That said, few first novels are without flaws. Besides the numerous cliches already mentioned, I found the dialogue somewhat stilted. The 12-year-old protagonists at times talk more like child characters out of a 1950s movie than any preteens I’ve met. Edge of Extinction also is the first book in a planned series, so don’t go into it expecting many answers to the mysteries it raises or tidy resolutions to any of its conflicts. (The novel concludes with a sample chapter from the sequel, titled Edge of Extinction: Code Name Flood, which will be published in 2017.)

If any of the above criticisms are starting to dissuade you from picking up Edge of Extinction, then let me reassure you that the book’s positives outweigh its negatives. You will enjoy it, and hopefully so will any kids you can pry away from their video game consoles long enough to do a little reading. (Seriously, get them away from video games, because I'm getting tired of 10-year-olds kicking my butt in Star Wars: Battlefront.)

Trivia

• The recommended age range for Edge of Extinction is 8 to 12. However, most adults should be able enjoy it as well, just as they did the Harry Potter novels.

• One of my favorite parts of the novel: Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park is required reading in school… for history class.

• Martin acknowledges in an afterword that she knew little about dinosaurs when she began researching Edge of Extinction. Her biggest shock was learning that scientists now believe many dinosaurs had feathers. Dinosaur lovers will happy to know she includes this knowledge in her descriptions of the animals. That said, Sky at one point remarks that the dinosaurs of the setting are much bigger than the ones found in the fossil record, although this size difference is never mentioned again.

• The author’s website is lauramartinbooks.com.

Reviews

• Kirkus Reviews

• Project Muse

Dinosaur Hunter by Steve White (2015)

Cover blurb

CONGRATULATIONS

Your application for a Mesozoic hunting license has been successful!

Before you travel back in time and charge headlong into a pack of prehistoric big game, we strongly advise that you read the following guidebook. It will provide you with information crucial to success — and survival! Learn the basic facts of the geography, climate and environmental conditions of the five Mesozoic hunting reservations on the offer. Discover the huge variety of dinosaurs that stalk these times, with tips on identification, tracking, and the best weapons to bring them down! Finally, this guide contains first-hand accounts of some of the hunters who have braved these conditions and lived to tell the tale.

LET THE HUNT BEGIN!

My thoughts

Dinosaur Hunter: The Ultimate Guide to the Biggest Game is itself something of a dinosaur. Stories about people hunting dinosaurs were never common in science fiction, but for many years readers could expect a steady trickle of them. The subgenre petered out after the release of the first Jurassic Park film in 1993, with the last major work being Rivers of Time by L. Sprague de Camp, published that same year. (Although, more recently, David Drake’s Time Safari stories were collected in Dinosaurs and a Dirigible in 2014.) Dinosaur Hunter is exactly what the title promises: A guidebook for time travelers who want to bag T. rexes and other large prehistoric game. And it is a very good book, although it will probably appeal more to dinosaur lovers than science fiction fans.

Dinosaur Hunter is published by Osprey, a U.K. company best known for publishing detailed military histories. However, the company also produces a line of fantastic “nonfiction” history under the title Osprey Adventures. There is military history of the Martian invasion in H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds; a secret history of Nazi occult practices; a treasure-hunting guide for any would-be Indiana Jones; a how-to manual for fighting zombies; and so on. Dinosaur Hunter is part of that line. The premise is that the reader has purchased a ticket to go on a dinosaur safari in the Mesozoic. You have been given the book to learn about the equipment you will need as well as the wildlife and environmental conditions you will encounter. Detailed summaries are provided for five time periods in which hunting reserves have been set up, with readers asked at the book’s end to choose which period they want to hunt.

The text can be divided into two parts. Each section of the book begins with a lengthy description of the environment you will encounter as well as the ecology and behavior of dinosaurs that inhabit it. Much of this is speculation, but it is speculation informed by science, and White does an impressive job creating realistic ecologies for each species. If anything, predators get more love than herbivores, but that makes sense given most hunters would likely target meat-eaters for the bragging rights.

Each section then concludes with excerpts from memoirs written by previous hunters. Every story ends in death or dismemberment and is supposed to serve as a warning to the reader about how dangerous Mesozoic hunting can be. These stories easily were my favorite parts of the book as White does a bang-up job bringing the prehistoric world to life through well-written descriptions and imaginative animal behavior. There isn’t much in the way of character development or plot but that wasn’t the author’s intent. The stories are meant to paint a picture of the Mesozoic world in the mind’s eye and at that they succeed wonderfully.

In addition to being an author, White also is an illustrator, so he provides several excellent black-and-white reconstructions of some of the animals in question. Readers who love their dinosaurs up-to-date will be happy that many dinosaurs sport feathers and quills.

I was surprised by how much I enjoyed Dinosaur Hunter. I thought it would be a cheap attempt to cash in on the popularity of dinosaurs given Jurassic World came out the same year, but White put a lot of thought and effort into the book. That said, I’m biased. I like dinosaurs and I like fiction about dinosaurs. Readers who have only a passing interest in the animals probably will be bored with the info-dumps about behavior and ecology. They may enjoy the memoirs more, but there isn’t enough plot in the book to grab the attention of anyone just looking for a good story. Dinosaur Hunter is only a book for the most hardcore of dinosaur fans, but if you’re one of them, you’re in for a treat.

Trivia

• White is a comic book artist and book editor who edited the 2012 coffee-table book Dinosaur Art: The World’s Greatest Paleoart.

• Dinosaur Hunter has an Easter egg for readers of paleofiction: One of the characters has the call sign Raptor Red.

• The five hunting reserves in Dinosaur Hunter correspond to famous fossil formations. They are the Chinle Formation of the Late Triassic, the Morrison Formation in the Late Jurassic, and the Bahariya, Dinosaur Park, and Hell Creek formations, all in the Late Cretaceous.

Reviews

• Geeks of Doom

• Examiner

• Sci-Fi and Scary

The Dinosaur Lords by Victor Milán (2015)

Cover blurb

A world made by the Eight Creators on which to play out their games of passion and power, Paradise is a sprawling, diverse, often brutal place. Men and women live on Paradise as do dogs, cats, ferrets, goats, and horses. But dinosaurs predominate: wildlife, monsters, beasts of burden–and of war. Colossal plant-eaters like Brachiosaurus; terrifying meat-eaters like Allosaurus, and the most feared of all, Tyrannosaurus rex. Giant lizards swim warm seas. Birds (some with teeth) share the sky with flying reptiles that range in size from bat-sized insectivores to majestic and deadly Dragons.

Thus we are plunged into Victor Milán's splendidly weird world of The Dinosaur Lords, a place that for all purposes mirrors 14th century Europe with its dynastic rivalries, religious wars, and byzantine politics…except the weapons of choice are dinosaurs. Where vast armies of dinosaur-mounted knights engage in battle. During the course of one of these epic battles, the enigmatic mercenary Dinosaur Lord Karyl Bogomirsky is defeated through betrayal and left for dead. He wakes, naked, wounded, partially amnesiac–and hunted. And embarks upon a journey that will shake his world.

My thoughts

“It's like a cross between Jurassic Park and Game of Thrones.”  That's not me talking. That's Game of Thrones* author George R.R. Martin himself, providing the cover quote for The Dinosaur Lords. And he is not wrong, as this book shares a lot in common with the famous fantasy series. It is a medieval epic focusing largely on the Byzantine politics of its fantasy world. There is court intrigue, a large cast of not-always-likable characters, and plenty of sex and violence. Unfortunately it also shares Game of Thrones' greatest flaw: A lot of build-up with very little payoff. But it's got dinosaurs, so there's that.

The Dinosaur Lords is set on a world called Paradise, in which we are told at the beginning “isn't Earth” and “is no alternate Earth.” This is one of several hints scattered throughout the book that The Dinosaur Lords is science fiction despite its sword-and-sorcery trappings. As for the plot: Dinosaur Lord Karyl Bogomirsky is leading a revolt against the emperor of Paradise's largest kingdom when he is defeated in battle and apparently killed. Karyl's death doesn't last long as he is resurrected by one of the setting's mysterious gods and tasked with defending a new pacifist movement against a crusade that will soon be launched against it. At the same time, a few hundred miles away, the emperor’s daughter Melodía watches as her father slips further into paranoia after a failed assassination plot is uncovered. Then there is her lover, Jaume, who is put in charge of leading the crusade despite his doubts about its morality.

The above description leaves out a lot because The Dinosaur Lords is stuffed with characters and subplots. The problem is not much actually happens in the book's 400-plus pages. The Dinosaur Lords is supposed to be the opening chapter of a trilogy, and as such it is mostly about setting up the chess pieces for later novels. It is a slog to wade through as a result. The book opens with a large battle, but the remainder is dedicated to combat training scenes and a predictable storyline about court politics. It also ends with not one, not two, but three cliffhangers. Like Game of Thrones, there is plenty of violence in The Dinosaur Lords — including a rape scene — but it lacks the character development that keeps readers going back to its more famous inspiration despite the fact that winter, it seems, is forever coming.

As for the dinosaurs, they're fine. They are the most fantastical element found in the fantasy world Milán has created, and he stuffs the novel with a cornucopia of species. The existence of dinosaurs is supposed to be one of the series' central mysteries, but the author provides enough clues that most readers of science fiction will guess the answer by the end of book one. That said, dinosaurs are not really central to the story despite the title. They could have been replaced with dragons or other mythological creatures more common to fantasy settings and you would still have the same book.

I admit I'm not a fan of multivolume science fiction and fantasy epics. I think most authors overestimate their ability to tell grand, sweeping stories and create worlds interesting enough to keep readers coming back. The Dinosaur Lords has done little to change my mind in that regard. Still, I'm not ready to give up on the series yet. The next title - The Dinosaur Knights – is scheduled to hit bookshelves in July 2016. I just hope that now all the pieces are in place, Milán picks up the pace.

* Before you leave any comments, yes, I know the proper title for the book series is A Song of Ice and Fire. But most people are familiar with Game of Thrones so that is the title I used.

Trivia

• The Dinosaur Lords is the opening novel of a fantasy series titled The Ballad of Karyl's Last Ride. The name doesn't exactly roll off the tongue. Anyway, the author has said the series is supposed to be a trilogy, but Wikipedia claims there will be six books, although there is no citation.

• I know dinosaurs and knights have been paired in a few pen-and-paper roleplaying games, but this is the first time they have been brought together in a novel, as far as I can tell. I'm surprised it took this long, although dinosaurs have tangled with samurais.

• I'm not sure how Karyl is pronounced, but I admittedly kept picturing Rick Grimes yelling “Carl!" every time I read it.

• The author's website is victormilan.com

Reviews

• Smart Bitches, Trashy Books

• The Book Plank

• Che Adventure (video)

• Kitty G (video)

The Virgin and the Dinosaur by R. Garcia y Robertson (1996)

Cover blurb

IT WAS SUPPOSED TO BE A SIMPLE TRIP TO THE MESOZOIC…

In a far-future Megapolis free of disease, pollution, and money, Jake Bento is master of the wormhole – until an unforeseen catastrophe nearly strands the professional time traveler and his beautiful young paleontologist companion Peg in a world of huge extinct beasts. Luckily, Jake's deft manipulation of wormhole technology can bring them home – after several stopovers in more manageable eras – with enough 3V recordings to make them both legends in their own, and other, times.

There are those, however, who resent such newfound celebrity – specifically Jake's dangerous erstwhile employers at FASTER-THAN-LIGHT. And now Peg and Jake must watch their backs, from the Pleistocene to the present. For there are no treacheries their enemies won't stoop to – and no time in which to hide.

My thoughts

Who says you can’t judge a book by its cover? The Virgin and the Dinosaur is a 1996 novel by R. Garcia y Robertson that promises two things: 1) A virgin and 2) a dinosaur. I can report that it delivers on both. In fact, when it comes to the latter the book delivers in spades, as there are quite a few prehistoric creatures tucked between its covers. The only problem is readers must wade through a lot of filler to get to the dinosaur action.

The Virgin and the Dinosaur opens in Late Cretaceous Montana with the aforementioned virgin — a French paleontologist named Peg — stepping nude into a forest clearing. Running around in your birthday suit doesn’t seem a particularly wise idea as we are told that mosquitoes “as big as hummingbirds” are flying around, but Peg is the free-spirited type. Enjoying the view is fellow time traveler Jake Bento, who is supposed to be guarding Peg but instead spends most of his time trying to get into her pants. (That is, if she wore pants.) Peg and Jake have a series of adventures before traveling forward in time to pre-Civil War America and then to the far future, where their journeys have turned them into celebrities. However, their newfound fame has made an enemy of Jake’s employer, who realizes the duo now have the power to start their own time travel business and become competitors. The only way to stop Jake and Peg is to ruin their reputations by any means necessary.

Perhaps the most off-putting thing about The Virgin and the Dinosaur is its lack of any real plot. The novel actually is a collection of adventures linked together by a thin narrative arc. This isn't surprising as the first half of the book was originally published as two separate novellas, but it comes off as disjointed as a result. The story loses its footing in the slower-paced second half, although the pace picks up again near the end. That said, the good parts are really good. Robertson has a knack for writing action scenes, and he throws in just enough twists to keep things interesting. The Mesozoic scenes in particular stand out, although they make up only a third of the novel. Unfortunately the characters are not quite as well written. Peg exists solely as an object to be lusted over. Jake spends a good chunk of the novel more interested in sex than anything else, and his infatuation with Peg is more than a little creepy. I guess The Virgin and the Dinosaur was trying to be sexy, but the book is so clumsy at it that its efforts come across as awkward instead.

The Virgin and the Dinosaur isn't a bad book, but it has too many problems to be memorable. Robertson should have devoted more of the novel to his characters' Mesozoic adventures. It also would have helped had he dialed back on Jake's raging hormones. I guess what I'm saying is I wanted less virgin and more dinosaurs.

Trivia

• The first half of the novel was published as two separate novellas in Asimov's Science Fiction magazine. The stories - “The Virgin and the Dinosaur” and “Down the River” - both graced the covers of their respective issues. (Click on the titles for links to the cover art.)

• The novella “The Virgin and the Dinosaur” was republished in the anthology Dinosaurs II.

• The novel The Virgin and the Dinosaur was followed by a sequel, Atlantis Found. (Not to be confused with the Clive Cussler novel of the same name.) As far as I can tell, it doesn't involve dinosaurs.

Reviews

• James Walton

Dinosaur Planet by Anne McCaffrey (1978)

Cover blurb

Stranded on a strange world

THE MISSION

The Exploratory and Evaluation Corps of the Federated Sentient Planets had sent ARCT-10, with its mixed crew of shipbred and planet-bound technicians, to Ireta to catalogue fauna and flora and search for new energy sources. It was a simple mission. A standard crew.

THE PROBLEM

Kai and his beautiful co-leader Varian, the best xenob-vet in the business, followed all the standard procedures – but the results of their investigations were totally unexpected. Not only were the planet's creatures larger than anyone had anticipated and the geological finds smaller, but the rescue ship had inexplicably disappeared.

THE NIGHTMARE

Then suddenly on a world of giant swamp creatures and deadly predators, a curious change had come over many of the members of the ARCT-10 crew… a change that would lead all of them, in one way or another, into the primitive darkness of a future world.

My thoughts

Anne McCaffrey is best known for writing about dragons, being the author of the very popular Dragonriders of Pern series. However, in 1978 she took a break from fire-breathing reptiles to focus on their real-life prehistoric counterparts with Dinosaur Planet. It wasn't much of a stretch as the novel is set in the same science fiction universe as Dragonriders of Pern, although no dragons or Thread show up in its pages. That's a shame, as Dinosaur Planet badly needs an injection of excitement.

The story begins not long after the crew of the spaceship ARCT-10 has landed and set up camp on Ireta, a jungle world whose poles are hotter than its equator because of the planet's super-hot core. Their mission is to survey the planet for energy-producing minerals as well as catalog the wildlife they encounter. The crew's leader, Kai, spends a good deal of the novel trying to squash rumors that the crew have been “planted” - that is, abandoned on the planet by mission control in a not-so-subtle attempt to start a new colony. Varian, the co-leader, isn't particularly concerned about the rumors. Most of her time is instead occupied researching a native species of flying creature that shows tool-making capabilities. Trouble comes in the form of the “heavy-worlders,” a group of crew members much stronger than average because they were raised on planets with high gravity. After a series of discoveries, Kai and Varian begin to suspect the heavy-worlders have violated the greatest taboo of their future vegetarian society: They have eaten meat.

It wasn't easy for me to write the above summary because Dinosaur Planet is a book without much plot. It is a rather dull and rambling piece of fiction that feels much longer than its 200 pages would suggest. Large parts of the narrative are just long stretches of stiff, unnatural-sounding dialogue, the sort of which one would find in bad 1950s B-movies. Worse still is McCaffrey's lazy descriptive text. We only get the broadest brush strokes of Ireta's sights, sounds, and smells because the author never paints them in any fine detail. A character may spot a “herbivore” and that's all we're told. What did the herbivore look like? Did it have a crest? A long neck? What color was it? Did it smell? What sounds did it make? McCaffrey can't be bothered to provide such descriptive elements, and as a result Ireta comes across as a rather drab and generic place.

Dinosaur Planet also is lacking much in the way of action and mystery, and while neither are necessary for a good novel, the lack of other redeeming qualities makes the absence of the two that much more noticeable. McCaffrey would revisit the planet Ireta again in a sequel, Dinosaur Planet Survivors, which I have sitting on my bookshelf. I can't see myself cracking it open anytime soon.

Trivia

• Ireta also is a setting in McCaffrey's Planet Pirates trilogy. I haven't read the books, so I can't say whether they feature pirate dinosaurs.

• Dinosaur Planet and Dinosaur Planet Survivors were collected in a single volume titled The Mystery of Ireta in 2003.

Reviews

• The Many Works of Anne McCaffrey (contains spoilers)

Dinosaur Thunder by James F. David (2012)

Cover blurb

Eighteen years ago, the prehistoric past collided with the present as time itself underwent a tremendous disruption, transporting huge swaths of the Cretaceous period into the twentieth century. Neighborhoods, towns, and cities were replaced by dense primeval jungles and modern humanity suddenly found itself sharing the world with fierce dinosaurs. In the end, desperate measures were taken to halt the disruptions and the crisis appeared to be over.

Until now.

New dinosaurs begin to appear, rampaging through cities. A secret mission to the Moon discovers a living Tyrannosaurus Rex trapped in an alternate timeline. As time begins to unravel once more, Nick Paulson, director of the Office of Security Science, finds a time passage to the Cretaceous period where humans, ripped from the comforts of the twenty-first century, are barely surviving in the past. Led by a cultlike religious leader, these survivors are at war with another sentient species descended from dinosaurs.

As the asteroid that ends the reign of dinosaurs rushes toward Earth, Nick and his allies must survive a war between species and save the future as we know it.

James F. David's Dinosaur Thunder is a terrifying, futuristic thriller in the tradition of Michael Crichton and Douglas Preston.

*Blurb from publishers website.

My thoughts

The first thing you should know about Dinosaur Thunder is it isn't a standalone story. It is the second sequel to the 1995 novel Footprints of Thunder, which was followed in 2005 by Thunder of Time. Anyone who hasn't read those two earlier novels may find themselves bewildered by Dinosaur Thunder as its plot relies heavily on knowledge of what has come before. A prologue brings readers up to speed but it is no substitute for having read the two earlier novels.

As for myself, I cracked open this book with trepidation. I enjoyed Footprints of Thunder but hated Thunder of Time, both for its poorly researched depictions of dinosaurs and its heavy-handed political stereotyping. In Dinosaur Thunder, David has put a little more effort into fleshing out his star animals and dialed way back on the political ranting. The novel is a better book than its predecessor as a result, but it still has several flaws that prevent me from recommending it.

Dinosaur Thunder is a novel with nearly a dozen main characters and nearly as many plot threads. To summarize as briefly as possible, the discovery of a living T. rex on the moon hints there may another disaster coming like the one that caused large swaths of modern-day Earth to be replaced by their Cretaceous period equivalents. Stranger still, dinosaurs from the past seem to be leaking into our world through doorways in time that may have something to with the comet/asteroid strike that killed them off. When the presidential science adviser goes off to investigate one of these doorways, he finds himself stranded in the ancient past. He is not alone. Also stranded are a group of people led by the Reverend, a Jim Jones-type cult leader who believes the Earth is only 10,000 years old despite the presence of dinosaurs all around him. Then there are the intelligent, spear-wielding dinosauroids who the human survivors are at war with.

Had the author focused solely on the plot elements I outlined then I would have enjoyed Dinosaur Thunder more. The problem is there are other, less interesting plot threads that break up the action, like that of a woman raising a pack of young Velociraptors. The novel has a lot of filler, and while it is less than 400 pages, the book feels too long for the story it is trying to tell. Not helping are the bland characters. The female characters in particular are treated poorly, with their most distinguishing characteristic being their looks. We're reminded repeatedly about just how gorgeous the heroic female leads are, while the most annoying character in the book is a fat woman (and the fact she is fat is turned into a running gag).

That said, Dinosaur Thunder isn't a bad book. Stylistically, it is better written than some other books I have read for this site. It also has some decent action in its latter half. The problem is it just isn't memorable. Much of the mystery of the first book is gone as we now have nice, tidy (and silly) explanations for time travel. The dinosaurs come out a little better this time around, but they are still only bit players in a story more about time travel than paleontology. And for reasons I already pointed out, the plot drags when it shouldn't. I can only recommend Dinosaur Thunder if you have read the first two books in the series and are a completist.

Trivia

• David is dean of the School of Behavioral and Health Science at George Fox University, a private Christian college in Newberg, Oregon.

Reviews

• Publishers Weekly

• Nerds of a Feather, Flock Together

• Before its News

Isaac Asimov's Robots in Time: Predator by William F. Wu (1993)

Cover blurb

FROM THE MOST BELOVED NAME IN SCIENCE FICTION – A SPECTACULAR NEW ROBOT SERIES!

Governors are the ultimate in robot evolution. Composed of six separate robots, each can single-handedly run an entire human city. Now they have begun to fail mysteriously. The last unit, MC Governor, realizes its own destruction is approaching. The Third Law of Robotics comes into effect: a robot must protect its own existence.

To save itself, MC Governor breaks itself down into six component robots and launches its parts into the remote past. But there's something MC Governor doesn't know – time travel causes a change in its molecular structure. If its pieces are not returned to their own time, they will explode in a nuclear inferno, destroying the fragile web of human history.

Only an experimental robot named Hunter and a hastily assembled team of human experts have a chance to find the MC Governor robots before they change the past – and the future. Their first target is in hiding somewhere in the age of the dinosaurs. A robot determined to survive. A robot willing to be branded – PREDATOR.

Toward the end of his career, the late science fiction genius Issac Asimov explored the concept of robotics and time travel in his only robot time travel story. That tale, included here, inspired this new series – an adventure across time authorized by Asimov himself.

My thoughts

Perhaps the greatest claim to fame for an author is having your name appear on books you didn't write. Issac Asimov had been dead for a year when the first of the six-book series Robots in Time came out in 1993. He had nothing to do with the series other than it was inspired by a short story he wrote about time-traveling robots. Still, his rock star status in the science fiction world has the power to sell books, which is why his name is displayed more prominently than that of the actual author, William F. Wu, who was hired by the publisher to write the series.

Unfortunately, Robots in Time doesn't get off to a good start in Predator. The story centers around the disappearance of MC Governor, a Voltron-like robot that splits into six different robots that flee into the past out of fear they will be decommissioned by the humans who control them. A new robot called Hunter is built to seek out the six robots and return them to their proper time period. (Actually, Hunter resembles a human, so the correct term would be “android” if you wanted to be semantic about it.) Hunter deduces the first robot fled into the Cretaceous Period, so he assembles a team of three humans – a roboticist, a paleontologist, and an outdoor survival expert - to help him track down the rogue 'bot. What the team doesn't know is MC Governor's creator has also traveled into the past to round up the six robots so he can salvage his reputation, no matter the cost.

Predator is a book with many flaws, but its greatest sin is it is simply boring. The stakes are not high and there is never any sense of danger despite the mingling of humans with dinosaurs. Here's the thing: Good adventure stories need mystery and suspense. Mystery comes from withholding crucial information until a time when its revelation has the greatest dramatic impact. Suspense comes from creating tension, both through character conflict and through putting characters in seemingly unwinnable situations. Predator blunders on mystery by spending the first 50 of its 220 pages explaining the villain motivations instead of letting readers watch as the main characters unravel the clues. It blunders on suspense with human characters who are more bland than the robots that accompany them, so readers couldn't care less about the petty fights they have. As for action, no character ever faces real danger. Hunter has super strength, so he easily fights off any dinosaurs that appear. Even the rogue robot doesn't post any threat thanks to Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics, which prevents robots from harming people.

The writing is bland and workmanlike, with most of the text just long stretches of bad dialogue. Wu puts no effort into describing either future Earth or Cretaceous North America. Several dinosaurs make appearances but they are mostly window dressing, disappearing after a couple pages never to be seen again. One exception is a Struthiomimus the protagonists catch and train to use as a mount in less than a day. That should give some idea of the quality of science in this science fiction novel.

There are five other novels in the Robots of Time series, but only Predator has dinosaurs.

Trivia

• Predator was released the same year as the first Jurassic Park movie. That explains the focus on dinosaurs. It also explains the many references to chaos theory throughout the novel, although the science behind it is never explored in any detail.

• Wu says on his website the novel was written for younger readers, so he toned down the story's language and violence. Still, the book was marketed as adult science fiction. That's not as big a stretch as you would think: I once had a bookstore owner explain to me that she placed the science fiction section next to the young adult section because there was overlap in readership.

• A summary of all six books in the series can be found on Wu's website.

Reviews

• The Science Fiction Review

Mesozoic Murder by Christine Gentry (2003)

Cover blurb

Ansel Phoenix makes her living drawing dinosaurs for magazines, books, and museum displays. One morning, digging with students out in the field, she unearths the body of colleague and ex-lover Nick Capos. Shocked and grieved over the murder, Ansel is also distraught on a professional level. As president of the Pangaea Society, an esteemed paleontology organization to which the murdered botanist also belonged, Ansel must fight to preserve the society’s reputation when unsavory facts about its scientists — dead and alive — are revealed.

Not trusting the Big Toe police who’ve an axe to grind with her father, Ansel decides to investigate what Capos had been doing during the last few months of his life and soon suspects he was working on a secret project worth killing for. Her list of possible suspects grows by the hour as someone starts stalking her across the Montana landscape. This master predator will stop at nothing to keep her from discovering… what? Why is Nick’s fossil collection missing and why had he developed a recent interest in Baltic amber?

Ansel must also deal with the cultural challenges of her own half-Anglo, half-Blackfoot heritage, her ranching family, and the changes threatening their rural community while using her intuitive fossil-sleuthing skills to solve more than one Mesozoic mystery.

My thoughts

Dinosaurs have been dead for 65 million years, but paleoartist Ansel Phoenix finds something that died much more recently when she takes a trio of college students on a fossil-hunting excursion in eastern Montana. The group stumbles upon the body of botanist Nick Capos, a member of the local paleontology society and a man Ansel once had a one-night stand with. The police quickly deduce Capos was poisoned and start an investigation. However, Ansel fears the dead scientist's connection to her society could jeopardize funding for a museum it plans to build, so she begins looking into the matter herself. Her background in paleontology turns up clues the police missed, but the deeper she delves into the mystery, the closer she comes to becoming the killer's next victim.

Mesozoic Murder is an enjoyable “cozy mystery” from Poisoned Pen Press, a small publisher specializing in crime fiction. The novel doesn't do anything new with the genre outside the focus on paleontology, but works of fiction have never needed to be groundbreaking to be entertaining. The novel's greatest strength is its protagonist, Ansel. The character isn't particularly deep but she is quirky enough to be likable, and I think female readers in particular will connect with her. The other characters are somewhat cliché – there is a handsome detective who serves as a potential love interest, an obnoxious police chief, at least two snooty scientists, a Native American shaman with mysterious powers, and so on – but they have just enough personality not to come across as stale.

As I was reading Mesozoic Murder, I couldn't help but compare it to The Dinosaur Hunter, another paleontology-themed mystery novel set in eastern Montana. Having spent five years in the state, I would argue The Dinosaur Hunter does a better job portraying the culture and landscape of that part of the country. The Montana of Mesozoic Murder came across as too urbanized with its big city police force and its characters' ability to quickly travel from one town to next, never mind the vast distances between communities there. (Montana is very big and very empty.) That said, Mesozoic Murder is a better read. For one, the novel doesn't try to force feed you its author's politics, unlike The Dinosaur Hunter. Also, the mystery is center stage in Mesozoic Murder whereas the characters in The Dinosaur Hunter couldn't care less about solving crimes.

Mesozoic Murder isn't without its flaws, but it does enough right that most readers will walk away entertained. Give it a try if you enjoy mysteries.

Trivia

• Mesozoic Murder is one of two paleontology-themed mysteries starring Ansel Phoenix. The other is Carnosaur Crimes.

• The author, a Florida resident, obviously put a lot of research into Montana before writing the novel. However, she makes one glaring error: She describes the city of Billings as the state capital. The correct answer is Helena, in case it ever comes up on trivia night.

• The publisher's website is www.poisonedpenpress.com

Reviews

• Publishers Weekly

• Large Print Reviews

• MyShelf.com

The Great Zoo of China by Matthew Reilly (2014)

Cover blurb

In the blockbuster and bestselling tradition of Jurassic Park comes the breakneck new adventure from the New York Times and #1 internationally bestselling author Matthew Reilly whose imaginative, cinematic thrillers “make you feel like a kid again; [they’re] a blast” (Booklist).

It is a secret the Chinese government has been keeping for forty years. They have proven the existence of dragons—a landmark discovery no one could ever believe is real, and a scientific revelation that will amaze the world. Now the Chinese are ready to unveil their astonishing findings within the greatest zoo ever constructed.

A small group of VIPs and journalists has been brought to the zoo deep within China to see these fabulous creatures for the first time. Among them is Dr. Cassandra Jane “CJ” Cameron, a writer for National Geographic and an expert on reptiles. The visitors are assured by their Chinese hosts that they will be struck with wonder at these beasts, that the dragons are perfectly safe, and that nothing can go wrong.

Of course it can’t…

My thoughts

I debated whether I should review The Great Zoo of China on this blog. Of all the titles here, it comes closest to violating my policy of only focusing on fiction about dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals. The monsters of the novel are dragons, although ones supposedly rooted in science (more on that in a bit). I decided to go ahead and review the book for two reasons. First, it is now out in bookstores, and it is nice for a change to review a current title instead of one that is decades old. Second, after reading it, I felt guilty that I may have directed readers to this literary horror through a recent news item. While not the worst book I've reviewed on Prehistoric Pulp, it comes damn close.

The Great Zoo of China is Jurassic Park, except the setting has shifted to China and the dinosaurs are replaced by dragons. The Chinese are ready to open a secret zoo they have spent years building, so to announce it to the world, they fly in several journalists and some U.S. dignitaries. Among them is CJ Cameron, a herpetologist who walked away from her profession after an alligator attack left one side of her face horribly scarred. She is accompanied by her brother Hamish, a photojournalist/former Marine/party dude. Needless to say, the visitors are shocked to find that instead of pandas and tigers, the enormous zoo houses dragons. There are no cages or fences. The Chinese instead rely on sonic technology to keep the dragons from eating guests. Of course, the dragons find a way around the safeguards, but they turn out much less of a threat than the Chinese government, which doesn't want the story of the zoo's failure leaking to the outside world.

In Q&A at the end of the book, Reilly says Jurassic Park is the novel that inspired him to become a writer. The Great Zoo of China is something of a homage to Michael Crichton's famous work. Crichton was never a good writer, but he was a good storyteller. Reilly is neither. He shows no skill for building suspense or delivering logical, exciting action. Remember the famous scene in Jurassic Park where the T. rex attacks the visitors in the Jeeps?  Part of what made that scene so great in both the book and the movie was the way it built up tension before the attack, putting the audience on edge before the T. rex shows up. There is a similar scene in The Great Zoo of China involving a cable car, except when the attack comes, it comes with no warning or hint that something bad is about to go down. Reilly is in such a rush to get to the action that he glossed over the most crucial part of good storytelling: Setting tone.

Sadly, Reilly is no better at delivering action. Most of the narrative is delivered in short, one-sentence paragraphs with a liberal use of exclamation marks. The writing jumps around so much it is hard to follow, with certain characters disappearing and only re-appearing when they're needed in the plot. And the action is so absurd and over-the-top I began to wonder if The Great Zoo of China was set in an alternate universe with a different set of physics than our own. In one scene, the heroine dispatches two Chinese soldiers with a makeshift flamethrower created using a small can of hairspray and a lighter. The fire causes the grenades the soldiers are carrying to instantly explode, which somehow manages not to hurt the heroine even though she is close enough to set them alight using hairspray (It must have contained napalm as an ingredient, given its effect). The book is filled with such ridiculousness – I lost count of the number of times I rolled my eyes while reading.

Now let's talk dragons, which are the main reason most people will pick up this book. Reilly alleges his dragons are grounded in science, but that is about as true a statement as if J.K. Rowling claimed the magic in Harry Potter was grounded in quantum mechanics. The Chinese tell their visitors that dragons are actually dinosaurs that survived the mass extinction 65 million years ago. However, the heroine quickly deduces this is a half-truth to sell the idea of living dragons to a scientifically illiterate public. Dragons are actually a type of archosaur, a group of reptiles that include dinosaurs, although Reilly claims the designation is used to explain away any animals whose origins are uncertain. (Paleontologists may take issue with that.) Dragons lived and evolved alongside the dinosaurs but survived the extinction thanks to eggs that can hibernate for millions of years. Okay...

The scientific problems keep mounting. Reilly never says why his dragons have six limbs - two wings and four legs - when all vertebrae life on Earth is based on a four-limb body plan. (Even the silly 2004 British psuedo-documentary The Last Dragon – A Fantasy Made Real, which explored dragon evolution, provided an explanation for six limbs.) He throws in some hand waiving about hollow bones to explain why dragons can fly, even through the largest reach 200 feet in length and weigh several tons. And, in what is perhaps his worst sin, Reilly populates his zoo with different species of dragons, but the only difference between them is their skin colors. A more imaginative writer would have dreamed up different varieties of dragons to fill different ecological niches. Hell, the color-coded dragons of Dungeons & Dragons show more evolutionary adaptation than the ones in Reilly's book.

This review is among the longest I have written for this site, primarily because I can't recall the last time I've been so disappointed in a book. Jurassic Park remains one of my most-beloved novels, and while I didn't expect The Great Zoo of China to reach the same classic status, I did expect a small measure of literary competence. Here is a mainstream novel containing the worst traits of badly written fan fiction. Just how bad? I'm not a supporter of book burnings, but reading The Great Zoo of China is closest I've come to reconsidering that position.

Trivia

• Matthew Reilly is an Australian author who has penned several thrillers. His website is matthewreilly.com.

Reviews

• Associated Press

• Sydney Morning Herald

• The Armchair Library

• Kirkus Review

Lords of Creation by Tim Sullivan (1992)

Cover blurb

THEY WERE CONCEIVED AT THE DAWN OF TIME…

In the deep Montana shale, paleontologist David Albee makes a remarkable discovery: a metal box containing prehistoric dinosaur eggs — warm, alive… and ready to hatch.

One week later, they are among us – newborn creatures from an age long dead. With uncanny intelligence, they adapt to their new world – driven by some strange, unknown purpose. Curious and hungry, they begin to feed… and grow.

But even as Albee struggles to protect his find from the wrath of government agents and religious fundamentalists, gargantuan invaders from a distant star prepare to make contact – armed with earth-shattering revelations that will destroy humankind’s every notion of nature and science… and God.

My thoughts

The 1990s in Tim Sullivan’s Lords of Creation were far different from what I remember. The United States, swept by a wave of Christian Millennialism, creates a Department of Morality to enforce religious doctrine and nearly outlaws paleontology as a heretical science. (The First Amendment be damned.) The political climate makes amateur paleontologist David Albee something of a pariah, so he is understandably a little nervous when he finds a metal box in a rock layer dating to the time of dinosaurs. Turns out the box holds fresh dinosaur eggs – and they’re about to hatch. The government learns of the discovery and sweeps in to cover up the find and its religious implications. When the dinosaurs finally emerge, they are far more intelligent than anyone ever guessed. Stranger still, the box broadcasts a signal that attracts the attention of aliens, who send a message to humanity that they’re coming for the dinosaurs.

Lords of Creation is a novel with a plot that sounds more interesting than it plays out. One problem is the narrative meanders along with no real build up of tension or mystery. Nothing ever feels of much consequence despite the world-changing events taking place (the discovery of living dinosaurs, first contact with aliens, etc.). We instead spend a large amount of time exploring the relationship between the main character and his ex-girlfriend, but both characters are so thinly drawn that it’s hard to care about their romance.  

A more serious problem is that most characters are just one-dimensional caricatures the author uses to bash political views he doesn’t like. I’ve complained before about conservative authors who fill their novels with straw men to make simplistic political statements (here and here). Sullivan shows liberal writers also can fall into this trap. He wants to make a statement about science vs. religion, but his conservative villains exist solely so the liberal good guys can lecture them on how wrongheaded they are. They’re not allowed to be real human beings or present their arguments in any sort of intelligent manner.

That said, I doubt readers with a conservative bent could get worked up about Lords of Creation because ultimately it is too bland to be memorable. The best thing I can say about the novel is it’s a good example of how not to use science fiction to explore a complex social topic.

Trivia

• Lords of Creation was ahead of its time in that it featured feathered dinosaurs. The film version of Jurassic Park, which came out one year later, depicted scaly velociraptors – a mistake that will continue into this year’s Jurassic World.

• Tim Sullivan has authored six novels and was a co-author of The Dinosaur Trackers. He also is a screenplay writer and actor who has appeared in several films, according to his Wikipedia page.

Reviews

• DWD’s Reviews
  
• Raymond’s Reviews

The Parasaurians by Robert Wells (1969)

Cover blurb

MEGAHUNT CHARTERED. For a select few, it offered a dangerous vacation from the too-safe world of the 22nd century -- a chance to hunt fantastically real robot analogs of the giant dinosaurs who ruled the Earth in mindless grandeur for a million centuries.

Ross Fletcher could afford Megahunt’s price -- and welcomed the challenge and peril of hunting the
“parasaurians.”

But the safari suddenly changed character, with Fletcher and his companions becoming the quarry, pursued by a hunter more deadly than any monster from the past -- man.

My thoughts

If Jurassic Park and Westworld had a baby, then the offspring would be The Parasaurians -- except in this case the child would be older than the parents, as this forgotten work of science fiction came years before those two better-known titles.

The year is 2173 and Ross Fletcher is bored. He is wealthy and alone, his wife having died a few years earlier and his adult daughter not having much time for him. So it doesn’t take much prompting when a salesman from a company called Megahunt Chartered offers him the chance to purchase a vacation package available only to a select few: A spot on a hunting safari on an island inhabited by robotic dinosaurs. These dinosaurs, called “parasaurians,” have been designed to look and behave like the real deal. In the sheltered world of 22nd century, the hunts offer an opportunity to experience real danger.

After touring Megahunt’s facilities, Fletcher sets out on a hunt with a beautiful photographer, an eccentric professor, and a menacing safari guide. Needless to say, things don’t go as planned, and Fletcher begins to suspect that some of the dinosaurs may be more lifelike than Megahunt let on.

Reading The Parasaurains was a strange experience. Here was Jurassic Park, yet written 21 years before Michael Crichton’s novel hit bookstands. Many of the same elements were present: A secret island off the South American coast turned into a private resort. A lengthy setup in which the protagonists tour the park and see many of its inner workings. Attractions that turn on the tourists.

That said, Jurassic Park is the better of the two novels. The main problem with The Parasaurians is not much happens in its slim 190 pages. There is a lot of buildup, but most of the payoff is reserved for the final 20 pages. The rest of the novel is spent following its paper-thin characters on a prosaic journey around the island. Granted, Crichton’s characters could hardly be called fully developed, but he did have a better sense of pacing, and he made the most of the premise by fleshing out his dinosaurs using the latest science. While the dinosaur scenes in The Parasaurians make for the most entertaining moments of the novel, they are too few and far between to make it any fun.

Trivia

• The novel’s plot twist probably won’t come as a surprise to audiences in an age after Jurassic Park. I won’t spoil it here other to say The Parasaurians may be the first example in fiction to use this particular device. If you want to know what I’m talking about, click here. (See No. 5)

• Robert Wells is a U.K. author who has written three novels in addition to The Parasaurians, according to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.

• I’ve seen no evidence Crichton read The Parasaurians before creating Westworld or Jurassic Park. In fact, Crichton initially hesitated writing Jurassic Park because of its similarities to Westworld.

• Not trivia, just an amusing aside: The paperback copy I own of this book disintegrated the very moment I finished it. The cover fell off and the pages spilled loose. I’m surprised I didn’t find a sticker on it saying “This book will self-destruct five seconds after reading.”

Reviews

• Quark Cognition (Also includes reviews of Wells’ other works.)
• Prehistoric Times, Issue 16 (Not available online.)

Danger: Dinosaurs! by Evan Hunter (1953)

Cover blurb

Owen Spencer would never have agreed to lead the time-slip expedition back to the Jurassic period - the Age of Reptiles - had he foreseen the terrifying experiences in store for the small group making the expedition. Chartering the expedition was Dirk Masterson, a treacherous big game hunter, whose alleged purpose was to take pictures of the enormous reptiles that roamed Jurassic times. Even when Masterson smashed the jeep into the force field, destroying the only protection that stood between the group and the lumbering beasts, Owen could not be sure it was an accident.

Evan Hunter has written a fast-moving tale of people stranded on earth in its infancy and forced to pit their ingenuity and strength against mammoth reptiles. It might not have been so bad if Masterson, with his mania for big game hunting had not continued to shoot at every reptile he spotted. But his madman tactics repeatedly aroused the fury of the hideous dinosaurs, whose attacks drove the farther and farther away from the relay area that would slip them back to the present when the week was up.

The weird circumstances that made Owen's brother, Chuck, take over the leadership of the expedition and the even stranger adjustment of the time stream that left the party with the inexplicable feeling that somebody was missing makes DANGER: DINOSAURS! an unusual and fascinating treatment of the ever-provocative time theme. The desperate search for the relay area, interrupted by fierce fights with flesh-eating monsters, and an earthquake that creates a chaos of stampeding animals give this story action that is as alien as any distant planet.

DANGER: DINOSAURS! is a juvenile science fiction novel, published first in 1953 as one of the books in the Winston Science Fiction series. The author, Evan Hunter, had a very successful writing career. He was also prolific and used a number of pen names. As Hunter, he wrote THE BLACKBOARD JUNGLE, a novel dealing with juvenile crime and the New York City public school system. It and the 1955 movie based on the book were highly acclaimed. He also had a successful screenwriting career, producing scripts for movies and TV, including the screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock's film THE BIRDS (1963). However, he is probably best known for the crime fiction he wrote using the pen name Ed McBain. His 87th Precinct series is often credited with inventing the "police procedural" genre of crime fiction. The books were turned into a number of movies and TV series.

*Blurb and cover art from the 2014 digital edition.

My thoughts

I’ve dredged up a lot of turkeys in my hunt for obscure paleofiction over the years, so I admittedly didn’t have much hope for Danger: Dinosaurs! when I downloaded the e-book version from Amazon.com. Most science fiction novels that have been forgotten became that way for good reason. But it turned out I was in for a bit of a shock: While not a great novel, Danger: Dinosaurs! is a surprisingly good read with some well-researched dinosaur action.

The novel begins with our protagonist, Chuck Spencer, eagerly awaiting the return of his brother, Owen, a guide who leads tourists on photo safaris to the Mesozoic Era. Chuck is to accompany his brother on his next trip – a jaunt back to the Jurassic Period. The client is one Dirk Masterson, a rich blowhard who thinks his wealth gives him the authority to boss anyone around. Journeys to the Jurassic are usually dangerous affairs, but Owen is bringing with him a force field that will keep the dinosaurs out. However, once the time travelers arrive at their destination, Masterson drives a jeep into the force field, shorting it out. To make matters worse, Masterson then reveals he has smuggled in firearms so he can hunt dinosaurs, which is illegal. Chuck and Owen have no choice but to accompany Masterson, who pushes the party further and further away from the point where they need to be in a week’s time to return to future Earth.

The first thing to strike me about Danger: Dinosaurs! was how much research the author put into the book in order to make sure he got his dinosaur science right. While both earlier and later authors would mix creatures from various time periods in the same setting, Hunter’s dinosaurs are pretty much the ones you would expect to see in the Jurassic. His characters also delve into lectures about the Mesozoic that accurately reflect scientific thinking at the time the book was written. And while the dinosaurs themselves are described as dim-witted, they show reasonably complex behaviors, such as herding. Also, Hunter’s descriptions of the Jurassic environment at times border on poetic, with the author avoiding common mistakes made by other writers, like populating their settings with grass. Too bad the same can’t be said about Hunter’s take on the nature of time, which will leave readers scratching their heads once it becomes a central point in the plot. (To say anything more would spoil one of the novel’s most dramatic scenes.)

The story itself is appropriately action-packed with some scenes of real tension. That said, the characters could be better written. At times they make mistakes so easily avoided that it is obvious the author only had them behave in a certain way so he could advance the story. The villains’ motivations, once revealed, don’t make a lot of sense. Also, Hunter’s physical descriptions of a black man who accompanies the team are far from politically correct by today’s standards, although it should be noted the character in question turns out not only to be a hero, but a vehicle the author uses to critique racial attitudes of the era in which the book was written. Sadly the author’s modern views don’t extend to the novel’s sole female character, who we are told can’t handle the rigors of the prehistoric environment because she is just a “girl.”

Flaws aside, Danger: Dinosaurs! remains a fun little read that might surprise you on how well it has aged. The book is definitely worth your time if you’re a fan of paleofiction.

Trivia

• As stated in the cover blurb, Evan Hunter actually is a famous author better known for his crime stories written under the pen name Ed McBain. He also penned the screenplay for one of the most famous man vs. dinosaur films of all time, The Birds.
• Danger: Dinosaurs! is one of several golden age science fiction novels recently reissued by Thunderchild Publishing.
• Hunter wrote Danger: Dinosaurs! under the pen name of Richard Marsten.

Reviews

• Kirkus (Warning: spoilers)

The Night Shapes by James Blish (1962)

Cover blurb

The continent lay before them, vast areas of it unexplored, its forests, plains, jungle and mountains teeming with forms of life unknown to modern man.

Here the witch-doctors reigned supreme, using their inexplicable and remarkable powers on men and beasts.

The purpose of the safari was mysterious, its members an oddly assorted group of people unlikely to have any sane objective in common . . .

* Blurb from the 2011 digital edition.

My thoughts

Kit Kennedy has no use for the Western world he left behind. The former schoolteacher has been living among the natives of the Congo rainforest for years when The Night Shapes begins. Kennedy simply wants to be left alone, but when a Belgian official threatens to alert the authorities about the expatriate’s expired passport, he agrees to guide an expedition into a previously unexplored portion of the jungle in return for the official’s silence.

The expedition’s leaders claim their goal is to provide medical aid to the local natives, but Kennedy suspects they have an ulterior motive. Why, for example, is the relief mission accompanied by a small band of well-armed marines? And who is the woman accompanying the group? The mystery only deepens as the land grows stranger the deeper they penetrate into the jungle. Then there is the legend, whispered among the natives, of a creature known as mokele-mbembe.

The Night Shapes is a lost world tale that is not quite sure what it wants to be. It’s obvious that Blish sought to tell an adventure story in the mold of H. Rider Haggard, but he also wanted to critique the casual racism that infests the genre. The result is schizophrenic, to say the least. A good chunk of the book is a screed against the Western exploitation of Africa and its peoples, but at the same time the novel is filled with simplistic stereotypes of native peoples and has as a protagonist a white hero who knows what’s better for the Africans than the Africans. The third act of the book also is a mess, with Blish quickly wrapping up his main storyline to go in a completely different direction with the plot.

As far as the novel’s paleofiction elements, prehistoric creatures play a critical role in The Night Shapes, but they are relegated to only a couple brief cameos. Blish is more interested in the African setting than paleontology, and as a result he makes some head-smacking mistakes in his descriptions of the animals.

I appreciate what Blish was trying to do in The Night Shapes, but he would have been more successful if he stuck to a traditional adventure story rather than the strange hybrid that he ultimately produced. This is a case where the simpler path would have been the better choice.

Trivia

• Blish was a well-known science fiction writer who won the Hugo Award in 1959 for his novel A Case of Conscience, which involved dinosaur-shaped aliens.

• Mokele-mbembe is a mythical central African creature that some westerners allege is a living sauropod dinosaur. There is no evidence the animal exists, but that hasn’t stopped Hollywood from making movies about it. The first film based on the myth was Disney’s Baby, Secret of the Lost Legend, released in 1985 to near universal scorn. The second was the equally bad The Dinosaur Project, a “found footage” film that came out in 2012.

Reviews

• Vintage45 (Warning: spoliers)

Speaking of Dinosaurs by Philip E. High (1974)

Cover blurb

Beyond Evolution: A certain gifted engineer accepted the Theory of Evolution until he wandered by chance into a museum. In that museum was the skeleton of a dinosaur, and the skeleton got him thinking and enquiring with terrifying results. Attempts are made on his life and then, in a horrifying time-shift, he finds himself naked and unarmed in the distant past, facing one of the very creatures which had aroused his interest - a dinosaur!

My thoughts

Speaking of Dinosaurs begins with a tiny alien object entering an abandoned house and, using its “prodigious mental power,” building itself a human body while projecting new memories into the people inhabiting the surrounding community. Its mission is to keep an eye on one David Standing, an inventor who is to play a very important role in the intellectual development of humanity. Standing, of course, is not aware of any of this, and one day he decides to visit a natural history museum on a whim. His examination of the dinosaur fossils there leads him to a startling conclusion: Evolution is bunk. Aliens must have designed life on Earth. It is not long before Standing comes to realize he is being followed by mysterious forces that will go to great lengths to make sure his theory dies with him.

Speaking of Dinosaurs is a strange, slim novel that has very little to do with dinosaurs despite what is promised by the title and cover blurb. The animals make a brief appearance, but mostly the book is a tale of alien conspiracies and humanity’s next great leap in intelligence. The one thing it is not is a good novel, filled with shallow, one-dimensional characters, improbable science, and a meandering plot. I managed to read the book in a single, lazy afternoon, but it felt like a very long afternoon.

Trivia

• High was an English science fiction writer who penned 14 novels and several short stories before his death in 2006. There is a website dedicated to the author: www.philipehigh.com

Reviews

• None

Robert Silverberg’s Time Tours: The Dinosaur Trackers by Thomas Shadwell (1991)

Cover blurb

In the next century, time travel is a tourist business… a very risky tourist business. Couriers can take travelers into any time they wish. But once there, they’d better not change history. The Time Patrol is watching, and those who meddle with the past may find themselves erased from it!

THE DINOSAUR TRACKERS

Time Courier Roy Jones encounters nothing but trouble when he leads a tour back to the Age of Reptiles. First his tourists plan to tame and ride dinosaurs, even though Roy tell them it’s forbidden. Then Roy discovers hunters smuggling dinosaur meat back to the twenty-first century.

If that’s not enough, Mallory Byrne, a nosy reporter, disappears from the group. Roy figures she’s gone alone to observe the most dangerous time of the Age of Reptiles – the moment when a giant asteroid hits the Earth. Roy must get her back before the asteroid crashes… and before the Time Patrol finds out she’s missing!

My thoughts

Roy Jones dreams of being a rodeo champ, but the closest he has come to an actual rodeo is through repeated viewings of mind tapes. (“They were the latest craze, better than video tapes by far,” says our protagonist from the year 2061.) No, he has the much more boring job of tour guide to time travelers. His first assignment? Escort a group die-hard rodeo buffs to the Age of Dinosaurs. Roy doesn’t relish the trip given that as a boy, he saw his father eaten by a T. rex. And his tour group turns out to be a troublesome lot, trying to lasso and ride every dinosaur they come across. Then there is Mallory Byrne, a journalist who wants to see the comet that killed the dinosaurs. When Roy refuses, Mallory disappears, and it is up to the tour guide to get her back.

The Dinosaur Trackers is a young adult novel set in a shared universe created by science fiction author Robert Silverberg. I haven’t read any of the other works in the series, but the gist of it seems to be that time travel is possible but risky given that travelers can change the past. As a result, a special police force called the Time Patrol has been created to prevent history from being altered. Despite the risks, tours of the past are allowed, with the warning that if you interfere with history you will be erased from reality itself. The setting doesn’t make a whole lot of sense: Why permit tours if the past can be changed? And how would you know if history had been altered?

The novel isn’t concerned about these larger questions, instead offering up a light, breezy adventure in a slim 138 pages. The book is okay for what it is. It promises dinosaur action and it largely delivers. Roy, who is the story’s narrator, is a bit annoying, spending much of the book whining about his situation. And the plot relies on too many implausible twists to propel itself forward. But the novel’s short length means it doesn’t linger on its shortcomings, instead moving swiftly from scene to scene. I’m sure my 10-year-old self would have devoured The Dinosaur Trackers, and given that’s its target audience, I guess you can call the book a success.

Trivia

• The Dinosaur Trackers was one of six Time Tours novels, each covering a different period in history.

• Thomas Shadwell apparently is a pen name for three authors: John Gregory Betancourt (the editor), Arthur Bryan Cover and Tim Sullivan.

Reviews

• None

Kong: King of Skull Island by Joe DeVito with Brad Strickland and John Michlig (2004)

Cover blurb

In 1932, American showman Carl Denham returned from a mysterious, hidden island with a priceless treasure – a treasure not of gold or jewels, but the island’s barbaric god, a monstrous anthropoid bearing the name of “Kong.” The savage giant escaped and wrecked havoc through the concrete jungle of Manhattan, but within hours of the beast’s death plummet from the peak of the Empire State Building, his body - and Carl Denham - disappeared. Twenty-five years later, the son of Carl Denham makes a shocking discovery that leads him to the site of his father’s greatest adventure and to answers that will unlock the secrets surrounding nature’s greatest miracle… and history’s greatest mystery.

Authorized by the estate of King Kong’s creator, Merian C. Cooper, Kong: King of Skull Island is a lavishly illustrated novel that acts as both prequel and sequel to the classic novel King Kong. Created by the acclaimed illustrator Joe DeVito and co-written by DeVito and top fantasy and science fiction author Brad Strickland (with John Michlig), Kong: King of Skull Island remains true to the classic Kong legend while illuminating new discoveries that will deepen the original story. Introduction by special-effects master Ray Harryhausen (The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad).

My thoughts

Kong: King of Skull Island is a sequel to the classic 1933 film King Kong that pretends that the official sequel, Son of Kong, never happened. After the events of the movie, Carl Denham, the showman who brought Kong to New York, disappears along with the body of the giant ape. Fast forward to 1957, when his son, paleontologist Vincent Denham, finds his father’s map showing the hidden location of Kong’s home, Skull Island.

Denham recruits an elderly Jack Driscoll – the hero of the first film – to take him to the island. Once there, Denham is injured while making his way to shore and ends up in the care of an elderly native woman known as the Storyteller. She lives up to her name by telling Denham a story about a native princess, the tribe’s first encounter with white people, a cult that worships an evil beast god named Gaw, and young giant gorilla who would one day be known as Kong…

Kong: King of Skull Island is part-novella, part illustrated coffee table book. DeVito provides the background story and illustrations while Strickland and Michlig flesh out the text. The art is a mix of black-and-white drawings and full-color paintings. I preferred former to the latter, as most paintings appeared hazy and washed-out, like looking at a scene through a greasy lens. That’s not an indictment of DeVito’s artistic skill, which is considerable. It’s more a reflection of my own taste in art than any failings of the artist.

As for the text, it’s serviceable. The movie was a non-stop thrill ride, and Kong: King of Skull Island has plenty of action scenes for adventure lovers. But the book also delivers some heavy-handed messages about cultural relations and – strangely – religion while trying to explain away many of the mysteries of the setting: Why did the natives build a giant wall? Where did Kong come from? And why do the islanders make sacrifices to the giant ape? The authors’ skills are not up to telling anything more than a simple action tale, so when they try to get profound, it comes off as awkward and forced. They would have been better off if they had stuck to the film’s pulp adventure tone.

Kong: King of Skull Island is probably not worth tracking down unless you’re a big fan of the original movie. I give the book’s creators credit for trying to expand the film’s universe, but at the same time feel like they missed the point: King Kong was about mystery and adventure, not self-reflection and religious mysticism. The book is a better sequel than Son of Kong, but still lacking when compared to the source material.

Trivia

• The book was released as an iPad app a couple years ago by the company Copyright 1957. Some samples of the app can be viewed on the company’s YouTube feed. (I haven’t seen the app, so I can’t say how it compares to the book.)

• The production company Spirit Pictures announced in 2009 it was making a CGI movie based on the book. There has been little news since then, except for a false rumor last year that horror director Neil Marshall was helming the project.

• Joe DeVito is an illustrator and sculptor. Samples of his work can be seen on his official website, www.jdevito.com.

• Brad Strickland has penned more than 60 novels, mostly science fiction and fantasy, according to his Wikipedia page.

• The book has an official website: www.kongskullisland.com.

Reviews

• Barbara Peterson
• Steven Silver
• Revolution SF