Jurassic Park once again available as an audiobook

It's hard to believe the novel Jurassic Park is now 25 years old. Unfortunately, we're not getting an annotated or illustrated edition of the book to celebrate its anniversary. What we are getting is a new audiobook released to cash in on the premier of next month's Jurassic World.

The unabridged recording of Jurassic Park, read by Scott Brick, is now available through Brilliance Audio and other online audiobook retailers, like Audible. This is a big deal as there hasn't been an unabridged recording of the novel available since its initial release in 1990, making it hard to find. In fact, it has been much easier to find recordings of the book's inferior sequel, The Lost World. Now you can listen to Jurassic Park for only $16, which is pretty cheap compared to the cost of most audiobooks.

I highly recommend reading/listening to Jurassic Park if you haven't already. Don't worry if you've seen the movie a million times: The novel is very different from the film (and also much better).

What other dinosaur-themed works of fiction are available as audiobooks? Well, as already mentioned, the sequel The Lost World has been around for a while. Here are some other novels I found through Audible:

• Raptor Red by Robert T. Bakker: The famous paleontologist's fun novel about a female Utahratpor surviving in the early Cretaceous.

• Tyrannosaur Canyon by Douglas Preston: A modern-day thriller about a mysterious T. rex fossil and the secrets it contains about why the dinosaurs went extinct. It suffers from the problem of giving too much information away at the beginning of the story.

• Doctor Who and the Dinosaur Invasion: The novelization of one of the TV series' more infamous episodes.

• The Dinosaur Hunter by Homer Hickam: A murder mystery involving paleontology in modern-day Montana.

• Dinosaur Summer by Greg Bear: An unofficial sequel to the original The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. I rather enjoy this book, although other people have called it one of Bear's weaker efforts.

• Dinosaur Park by Hayford Piece: I haven't read this one, but it concerns aliens, time travel, and dinosaurs.

• Deathbeast by David Gerrold: The well-known science fiction writer turned his attention to dinosaurs in this time travel story that I didn't like, but maybe you will.

• The Land That Time Forgot by Edgar Rice Burroughs: The first of three novels set on a lost continent of dinosaurs from the creator of Tarzan.

• The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: There are at least four unabridged readings of this classic dinosaur novel on Audible. There also are two full-cast audio productions.

New book roundup: Dinosaur invasions and alien dinosaurs

Sadly it appears the premier of Jurassic World in June isn’t going to result in the same deluge of dinosaur-themed media that surrounded the release of Jurassic Park in 1993. I only know of two new works of fiction about dinosaurs coming from mainstream publishers, and there isn't a single anthology in sight. Fortunately there are several self-published titles available for readers wanting some prehistoric action.

As always, a disclaimer: I haven’t read any of these books so I can’t vouch for their quality. I’m simply providing this list as a service to readers. Also, this list relies heavily on titles published through Amazon.com. If you know of any other publishing formats that include titles I’m missing, please let me know in the comments.

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Doctor Who and the Dinosaur Invasion by Malcolm Hulke

This isn’t a self-published title but a novelization of one of the classic show’s most notorious episodes. (Turns out puppets do not make convincing dinosaurs.) However, the novelization is unusual in that it was penned by the writer of the episode. Here’s the cover blurb:

Three hundred and fifty million years ago, dinosaurs crawled the Earth, devouring everything in sight. But then they disappeared. Certainly, no one ever expected them to return ... When Doctor Who lands in London and finds the entire city deserted - except for dinosaurs - he figures something really weird is going on. It is. A clever group of misguided idealists is at the centre of a bizarre plot to reverse Time to a golden era - an era before technology, before pollution, before the hydrogen bomb. The group is going to give the human race a second chance. But, to implement Operation Golden Age, the past must be eliminated. The present will not exist - and only the chosen will survive. Doctor Who must turn the clock forward to stop Operation Golden Age, but will he be able to do it before Earth's Time runs out?

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Planets that Time Forgot: Classic Tales of Otherworldly Dinosaurs, edited by Benjamin Chandler

In my essay about the different plot devices authors used to bring dinosaurs back to life, one of the more unusual ones mentioned was transporting dinosaurs to alien planets. Benjamin Chandler has collected and illustrated six classic stories using this device. Cover blurb:

The dinosaurs are long gone on this world, but what if they existed elsewhere? Would they evolve to build modern civilizations? Overrun planets in primordial violence? Come to be worshiped as gods? What if they were to re-evolve in Earth's distant future?

Here are six newly illustrated classic sci-fi stories that try to answer these questions, exploring worlds where dinosaurs still reign, from pulpy adventures on the far side of the moon to giant alien monster satire. Featuring the works of Henry Kuttner, Arthur K. Barnes, Milton Lesser, and others.

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Dino Hunt by Max Davine

Here’s a title from a small publisher that is available as both a physical book and digital download:

Jimmy Reeves is a down on his luck wildlife wrangler, his career once saw him traveling the globe, working on relocation programs and starring in documentary films. Now, he and his business partner Paul Franciscus are lucky if they can get a gig wrangling bulls in Arizona. Until one day, when they receive a massive advance payment from a mysterious company based in Florida. In return, they are to do what once brought them glory the world over; trap and relocated endangered animals. Little do they know they're not going to the Everglades to trap alligators, they're going through time and space to rescue great, big dinosaurs!

But others have come to pillage the Cretaceous world for its natural resources, and to enslave and exploit the prehistoric inhabitants. They are ruthless, they are well equipped, and they will stop at nothing. It's up to unwitting Reeves to make a stand not just for the dinosaurs, but to save his own life, teaming up with an alluring paleontologist and a helicopter pilot nicknamed “Crash” to save the land of the forgotten from human annihilation.

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Other titles

Crockatiel - An O.C.L.T. Novel by David Niall Wilson: The latest in a series of novels about an international agency that investigates paranormal mysteries, this time about a mysterious creature living in the swamps of South Carolina.

The Island in the Mist by G.G. Mosely: The fountain of youth is discovered on a lost island in the middle of the Bermuda Triangle.

The Valley by Rick Jones: The Hunger Games meets Jurassic Park as convicted criminals are forced to cross a valley filled with resurrected dinosaurs while being filmed for the amusement of the masses.

Return to Skull Island by Ron Miller and Darrell Funk: An unofficial sequel to the original King Kong. Miller is an illustrator and writer who has received the Hugo Award.

Apex Theropod Deck-Building Game by Die-Hard Games (2015)

Summary

Apex is a deck-building game, played solo or with up to 5 friends. You play as one of seven prehistoric apex predators competing for territory and resources against other predators. Each playable species has a unique deck to master.  Each deck has different strengths, weaknesses, and strategies—creating a varied and constantly evolving experience.

Your species must overcome a very brutal environment including harsh climate changes, disease, attacks from predators, grievous wounds, infections, and deadly prey. The game incorporates many dinosaurs that behave in their own distinct way. The goal of the game is to endure the environment, build up the population and evolve your species, and become the Apex predator.

* Summary from publisher’s website. Images from BoardGameGeek.

My thoughts

Apex is a game I waited a long time to get my hands on. Then I got it, and it took me nearly as long to learn how to play.

I’m exaggerating, but my unfamiliarity with deck-building card games combined with a poorly written rulebook certainly tested my patience during my first few games. The game designer has since published a second, much easier to understand rulebook and posted gameplay videos, all of which helped. I’ve now nailed down the core mechanics of the game, although I’m still a long way from mastering it.

Was all the time I sunk into Apex worth it? Definitely. Apex is the best dinosaur board/card game currently on the market. But it is not a game that will appeal to everyone, with mechanics that will likely confuse people whose experience with board games doesn’t go much beyond Monopoly.

Apex is a game for one to six players—or eight if you have the Kickstarter edition—in which you take on the role of a carnivorous dinosaur in the Mesozoic. You hunt prey, fend off other predators, and even “hatch eggs” that can become cards to add to your deck. Most of the game’s 600 cards represent an impressive range of dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals that lived during the Mesozoic. (Except the giant snake Titanoboa, which was included for its coolness factor.)

At the start of the game, each player chooses a deck of cards that represents a specific predator. You then “hunt” prey cards using cards from your deck. Every kill earns you points that can be used to purchase new apex predator cards for your deck or "evolve" cards that give you special abilities. Trouble comes in the form of non-player predators that periodically pop up in the game to either kill prey or attack you. If that weren’t enough, you must contend with a super-predator “boss” that can not only deal out a lot of damage, but will take multiple hits to bring down. And did I mention this boss has minions to make your life even more miserable?

One thing Apex does beautifully is merge theme with game mechanics. A lot of the rules simply make sense in context of simulating a predator in the wild. For example, there are disease cards that require you to add a wound card to your deck every time you draw them. That’s logical: Just as a disease whittles away an animal’s health, disease cards make your deck progressively weaker. One rule I really like is ambush. You can set aside up to three cards to ambush prey in a later turn, but you must add an “alert” card to your deck to do this. If you draw the alert card later on, not only do you lose the element of surprise and return your ambush cards to the deck, but you activate any alert rules on prey in play, making them harder to hunt.

Another plus for Apex is it’s simply beautiful to look at. Apex was the creation of one man—Herschel Hoffmeyer —who not only came up with the game mechanics but also did all the art himself. That’s an impressive achievement, and I’m a bit flabbergasted at the amount of work that went into the game. The art is not just good game art—it’s good paleoart, with a degree of anatomical accuracy you usually don’t see in entertainment products. I’ve often found myself not playing the game but simply looking at it, enjoying the depictions of the dinosaurs spread out on the table before me.

Are there downsides? As I’ve already mentioned, the rulebook that came with my copy of the game was hard to follow. Another drawback is Apex isn’t a game you can just jump into on a whim. It has a significant setup time, with players needing to shuffle and sort the several card decks used in the game before they start playing. (This is probably less of a problem with more players given each person could shuffle a different deck.) Also, while I have only played Apex solo, I’m left with the impression there isn’t much player interaction during the course of the game. There are few cards you can play against other people but otherwise players are playing against the mechanics of the game itself, not other players. Whether or not this bothers you depends on what type of gamer you are.

Negatives aside, I love this game. I had never been much of a card game person before, usually preferring games with dice. Apex opened my eyes to a whole genre of games I had missed out on until now. Unfortunately Apex is not a game you can purchase and begin playing the same day, which will limit its appeal to casual gamers. The game has a bit of a learning curve. But if you are willing to invest the time to learn how to play it, you will be rewarded with the best dinosaur game since Dinosaurs of the Lost World.

Trivia

• The nine playable predators in the game are Acrocanthosaurus, Carnotaurus, Giganotosaurus, Spinosaurus, Tyrannosaurus rex, Utahratpor, Velociraptor, Quetzalcoatlus, and Sarocosuchus. The last two are only available in the exotic predators edition of the game.

Reviews

• Gameosity

Brontosaurus: A faded star rises again

So much for being the snob who corrected my friends whenever someone mentioned “Brontosaurus.”

As you’ve probably heard by now, a group of scientists has proposed restoring the name after concluding the original fossils differed enough from Apatosaurus to constitute a separate genus. I’ll leave it to better writers to explain how this resurrection came about. All I know is I’ve lost the pleasure of tut-tutting writers when they included Brontosaurus in their stories.

Make no mistake: Brontosaurus has appeared in a lot of dinosaur books and movies. It is possibly the most famous dinosaur, running neck to neck with T. rex in terms of a dinosaur name everyone knows. Pull someone off the street and ask that person to draw you a dinosaur, I’m willing to bet most drawings will resemble a Brontosaurus: thin at one end, much much thicker in the middle, and then thin again at the far end.

Brontosaurus may in fact be the first dinosaur ever to appear in a work of fiction. The 1901 pulp adventure novel Beyond the Great South Wall by Frank Savile is about an expedition to Antarctica that discovers a lost civilization that worships a god named “Cay.” The author includes this footnote after the narrator stumbles upon Cay’s lair:

Lord Heatberslie makes a mistake here. Professor Lessatition's subsequent researches proved "the god Cay" to be without doubt Brontosaurus excelsus, remains of which have been found in the Jurassic formation of Colorado. It was purely a land animal.

Beyond the Great South Wall was probably the first example of dinosaur fiction. Yes, Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth was published four decades before Savile’s novel, but Verne’s tale didn’t include any living dinosaurs. Rather, the famous science fiction author populated his book with mastodons and marine reptiles. (Update: I forgot the 1888 novel A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder may actually be the first science fiction novel with dinosaurs, but a quick search through it didn't turn up any specific species, so my point stands for now.)

Brontosaurus also was absent in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1912 novel The Lost World, possibly because many of the dinosaurs depicted in the novel were known from fossils discovered in Doyle’s home country of Great Britain, whereas Brontosaurus is an American beast. It is ironic then that Brontosaurus would play a major role in the first film adaptation of the book. The 1925 movie features not only a Brontosaurus fighting an Allosaurus, but the animal is transported to London to go on a rampage through the city—a scenario that was copied by countless other B-movies.

The animal appears again in the 1933 film King Kong during a frightening sequence in which a group of sailors are trying to cross a lake in pursuit of the giant ape. For sake of plot, Brontosaurus is turned into a flesh-eating monster that flips the sailors' rafts then picks them off one by one as they swim to shore. One sailor manages to climb a tree only to be eaten by the Brontosaurus, which can grab him because of its long neck.

After that, Brontosaurus faded into the background of most imaginative works about dinosaurs. It usually got a shout out but was never the star, lacking both the fierce weaponry of Triceratops and the predatory habits of T. rex. One exception was the 1953 novel Danger: Dinosaurs! by Richard Marsten, in which a herd of brontosaurs plays a small but important role in the plot. More often than not, any references to the dinosaur were more like this throwaway paragraph in David Gerrold’s 1978 novel Deathbeast:

At first, he thought it was a grounded blimp – then his eyes adjusted to the scale of the thing and he realized it was only a brontosaur. Not dangerous at all – well, not deliberately dangerous. There was the case of that hunter who was eaten inadvertently because the brontosaur’s eyesight is so poor it hadn’t see him in the tree – but that one really didn’t count.

The 1980s saw Brontosaurus rumble into the spotlight once again. The dinosaur played a starring role in the 1985 movie Baby: Secret of the Lost Legend, a film so bad it nearly condemned dinosaur films to extinction. Luckily, the animal’s reputation was salvaged in 1988 with the release of The Land Before Time, an animated film about the adventures of a baby Brontosaurus named Littlefoot.

Brontosaurus didn’t make it into 1993’s Jurassic Park. However, the animal did appear in the 2005 remake of King Kong. The film took place on an island where dinosaurs continued to evolve and thrive after the rest of their kind died off 65 million years ago. According to the tie-in book, the island’s brontosaurs had evolved from earlier sauropod ancestors.

Will Brontosaurus rise again now its status has been restored? Hard to say. Still, it is notable that the upcoming Jurassic World features Apatosaurus as one of the dinosaurs populating the park. Given the park’s staff have been known to get dinosaur names wrong before, who is to say the dinosaurs are not brontosaurs?