Meg by Steve Alten (1997)

Hardback cover blurb

On a top-secret dive into the Pacific Ocean's deepest canyon, Jonas Taylor found himself face-to-face with the largest and most ferocious predator in the history of the animal kingdom. The sole survivor of the mission, Taylor is haunted by what he's sure he saw but still can't prove exists -- Carcharodon megalodon, the massive mother of the great white shark. The average prehistoric Meg weighs in at twenty tons and could tear apart a Tyrannosaurus rex in seconds.

Written off as a crackpot suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, Taylor refuses to forget the depths that nearly cost him his life. With a Ph.D. in paleontology under his belt, Taylor spends years theorizing, lecturing, and writing about the possibility that Meg still feeds at the deepest levels of the sea. But it takes an old friend in need to get him to return to the water, and a hotshot female submarine pilot to dare him back into a high-tech miniature sub.

Diving deeper than he ever has before, Taylor will face terror like he's never imagined, and what he finds could turn the tides bloody red until the end of time.

My thoughts

You're gonna need a bigger boat... like an aircraft carrier.

I'm sure there are more than a few movie-goers who wished that instead of picking a great white shark as the villain in Jaws, author Peter Benchley should have chosen the prehistoric super-shark, Carcharodon megalodon. The novel Meg by Steve Alten wants to fulfill that wish, but it fails horribly. It isn't Jaws as much as it is Jaws 3-D.

The novel opens 70 million years ago with an ocean-bound T. rex becoming dinner for a megalodon -- never mind the shark didn't evolve until millions of years later. (The scene exists solely for the purpose of trying to upstage Jurassic Park.) Fast forward to the modern day. Paleontologist Jonas Taylor (get it?) is dealing with a scientific community who thinks he is a quack for claiming to have seen a living megalodon, plus he has an unfaithful wife. (Think she is going to become shark chow?) Jonas is given a chance to prove he is not a quack by taking an experimental submarine to the bottom of the Marinas Trench, where he finds a living megalodon, but things go wrong and the shark escapes to the surface. The shark is soon eating whales and people, and it's up to Jonas to stop the creature.

Meg is a novel that exists solely for the purpose of being turned into a movie, and not a very good movie at that. It is often unintentionally funny, with bad writing, numerous scientific errors and no sense of subtly or even logic. It may be lazy to point to another person's review in your own review, but the well-known biologist and author Richard Ellis perfectly summed up my feelings about this book when he wrote:

Not only is (Meg) not the slightest bit terrifying, it is unintentionally, hilariously funny, largely because almost every page contains a genuine howler. Whenever the author discusses biology, paleontology, oceanography, or any other recognized scientific subject, he gets it wrong. It is obvious that Alten equipped himself with a book about sharks, a study of submersibles, some weirdly off-base material about whales, and everything that Peter Benchley, Michael Crichton, and Clive Cussler ever wrote, and then mixed them together to produce an almost totally incoherent story, in which the human characters make no sense, the sharks and whales behave like unknown animals from the planet Zarkon, and the technology sounds like a cross between Rube Goldberg and Buck Rogers.

He goes on:

When Doubleday published Jaws in 1975, they paid Peter Benchley an advance in the mid-four figures. Now the same publisher has joined the ranks of those who can twist their own definition of literature (there must be another name for this stuff) to justify paying a million dollars for this outrageously awful book, crammed with egregious errors of fact, and stuffed to the gills with writing so awful that it would insult the intelligence of a sea cucumber...

I am more than a little embarrassed to see than in his author's note, Alten acknowledges me and John McCosker for our book "Great White Shark" as "an excellent source of information on both Megalodons and great whites." If "Meg" is what we spawned, then we ought to be ashamed of ourselves too.

That's OK, Richard -- I forgive you.

Trivia

• Meg is the first of a series of novels by Alten concerning the survival of the megalodon. The others include The Trench and Meg: Primal Waters. He has another novel coming out next year titled Meg: Hell's Aquarium. Sorry, but I haven't been able to talk myself into reading the sequels, so I doubt I will have reviews anytime soon, if ever.

• A movie based on the novel has been in "development hell" for ages. The creator of the movie news web site, Chud.com, is seeking to produce the film and has been touting it for quite some time. And according to this movie blog, Alten has had a pretty rough turn of events as a result of the movie not getting made. Still, when it does get produced, one must wonder: Will it be the cinematic masterpiece that was Shark Attack 3: Megalodon?

• The author's web site is www.stevealten.com

Reviews

• Richard Ellis
• Paul Varbedian

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Paleo by Yvonne Navarro (2000)

Paperback cover blurb

PREHISTORIC HYSTERIA

Buffy Summers and her gang know that Sunnydale is a haven for outsiders, whether of the supernatural or strictly adolescent variety. Shy transfer student Kevin Sanderson is no exception. But Kevin instantly finds a mentor in Daniel, a paleontologist and fellow dino-phile at the Sunnydale Museum of Natural History. When Buffy starts hearing rumors of alligators in the sewers, she has to wonder about Kevin and Daniel's hobbies.

Meanwhile, the Slayerettes are having extracurricular excitement of their own. Alysa, a hotshot talent agent, wants to represent the Dingoes, and she's offering the Scooby Gang fame and fortune. If she's legit, it could be Oz's big break. But Buffy's too busy to run a background check -- Daniel and Kevin have reanimated an ancient creature with a new agenda...an agenda that begins and ends with the destruction of the Slayer....

* Cover image and blurb from the author's web site.

My thoughts

There are many strange ideas in the world of paleo-fiction, from hollow worlds to prehistoric space arks. But even by those standards, a book about vampires and demon-possessed dinosaurs is a little far-fetched.

Paleo is set during the third season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, when the Mayor and Faith the evil vampire slayer were the main enemies. Neither makes an appearance in this novel. The book opens with paleontologist-in-training Daniel Addison coming across a 60-year-old journal of a long-dead scientist who discovered a spell that can reanimate fossils. Daniel and a dinosaur-loving high school student, Kevin Sanderson, try out the spell on a fossilized dinosaur egg. It works, but there is something odd about the dinosaur and its glowing eyes.

Meanwhile, Buffy finds the vampire-slaying business surprisingly slow, with all the vampires having gone into hiding because they sense that something really bad is coming to town. Things quickly pick up when Buffy and her gang come across a trio of juvenile T. rexes set loose on Sunnydale. At the same time, Willow's boyfriend Oz meets a talent agent who may give his band the lucky break it needs to make it big, but he is having doubts about the agent's true intentions.

Paleo reads like a filler episode of the TV series: The stakes are not too high, and nothing really relates to the larger story arc of the third season. The plot is straightforward with no twists and the book suffers from predictability as a result, but all-in-all it's a decent effort. Navarro has put more research into the novel than some writers of mainstream fiction about dinosaurs, and from a technical standpoint, it's better written than those works.

The author never delves too deeply into the psychology of Buffy and the main characters -- a shortcoming of all tie-in fiction where the universe is defined by writers of the TV series -- and some of the dialogue reads very much like a baby boomer author's attempt to emulate the hip speech of teenagers. The dinosaurs themselves also are curiously underused, with only a few popping up. Still, there is more than enough action to keep fans of the TV series happy. I can't recommend Paleo to anyone who was never into the show, but for those who were, there are worse ways to spend your time.

The novel is currently available as a digital download on the publisher's web site, which is the version reviewed here.

Trivia

• In a rant on her web site against the user reviews on Amazon.com, the author gives a glimpse of how tie-in fiction is cranked out. Basically an author submits a proposal, waits for the thumbs up from the publisher, and then has eight weeks to turn out a novel.

• The author has written several novels set in the "Buffyverse", most dealing with Buffy's sidekick Willow.

Reviews

• MyShelf.com

Take a "Journey to Chandara" this October

I'm late with this, but I noticed that illustrator James Gurney has another Dinotopia book coming out in October. It is titled Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara and is based on the travels of the real-life Marco Polo, with the hero of Gurney's novels, Arthur Dennison, traveling to a mysterious Eastern realm in Dinotopia.

The Dinotopia novels are children's books but the artwork is so astounding that many adults also consider themselves fans. Gurney has produced three books so far, making Journey to Chandara his fourth. There also was a TV miniseries and a short-lived show based on the Dinotopia books, but the less said about those efforts, the better.

If you have stumbled across those shows, let me assure you that the books are much better. Dinotopia is a lost world where humans and dinosaurs live side-by-side in harmony. The dinosaurs are as smart as humans, so don't expect realistic behavior on their part. The anatomical detail, however, is amazing, and Gurney has an impressive imagination that he is able to capture on canvas.

I'm thinking about having a Dinotopia week in the near future, perhaps close to when the new book will be released. You may have noticed I recently had a streak of reviews about games and novels set in hollow worlds populated by dinosaurs and prehistoric animals. One will find many common themes throughout paleo-fiction.

Anyway, the official web site for Dinotopia is www.dinotopia.com

* The cover image is from the publisher's web site.

Tooth & Claw by Jared A. Sorensen (2003)

Usually roleplaying games let you play as humans fighting dinosaurs. Tooth & Claw is the only one I know that lets people play as dinosaurs.

Tooth & Claw is nothing fancy. It's simply a set of rules for creating dinosaur characters and roleplaying them. There are no illustrations and it lacks flashy page design, having been cranked out on a word processor. The author writes that originally the game was to be published by a game company in 2001, but that never happened. The version he ultimately released was written in a single night so he could enter it into a gaming competition, where it won third place.

It's not a bad effort if you're looking for a rules-lite RPG. Tooth & Claw leaves it up to players to decide how realistic they want to make the game. If they want their dinosaurs to talk, no problem. If they want their dinosaurs to communicate only through grunts and body language, no problem. The rules themselves just give some basics for building dinosaurs with tail spikes, or horns, or enlarged toe claws, or pointy teeth. You could use the rules to build a Triceratops, or make up something completely new and not in the fossil record.

The game uses a dice-pool system in which players role a certain number of six-sided dice and try to get as many in sequence as possible, starting with 1. So, for example, say you role four dice and get 1, 2, 4, 5. You have two successes because 1 and 2 are in sequence. The 4 and 5 don't count because you must start with 1. The more successes you have, the more likely you are to accomplish a task or win a challenge. Positive traits let you role larger numbers of dice or let you start sequences with higher numbers than 1.

Most players will probably welcome the simplicity. Hard-core gamers who thrive on statistic complexity and ultra-realism will hate it. Tooth & Claw is a nice, easy game if you have a few dinosaur nuts at your house and you're looking for something other to do than play Monopoly. Plus it's only a $3 download at RPGnow, so it's hardly going to bankrupt you if you don't like it.

Trivia

• The author, on his web site, says he would like to one day revisit Tooth & Claw and get it published as a roleplaying game for kids.

Reviews

• None