Coelophysis bauri

Artist: Gary Staab
Medium: Acrylic on Masonite
Date:1997
Dimensions: 16-1/2" W x 10-3/4" H

Jurassic Jungle

Jurassic Jungle is a Massively Multi player Online Role Playing game where YOU are in control of your destiny. The unique world of Jurassic Jungle is ever-changing Rise to the top of your foes with PVP. Defend your Excavation from raiders, devote your career to a life of strength and power, or join in the ranks of the few that balance the economy of the universe YOU decide.

Dinosaur Summer by Greg Bear (1998)

Hardback cover blurb

It’s the year 1947, and nobody’s interested in dinosaurs anymore. Less than fifty years after Professor Challenger’s famed journey to the Lost World, America’s last dinosaur circus is closing down… but the adventure of a lifetime is about to begin. In a dramatic change of pace, multiple Hugo and Nebula award-winning science fiction master Greg Bear, author of Moving Mars, Anvil of Stars and Queen of Angels, presents a lavishly illustrated thriller that is certain to become a new classic of adventure beyond time…

DINOSAUR SUMMER

Peter Belzoni is dreading summer in Manhattan. Then his father, photojournalist Anthony Belzoni, offers the youth a job, and a byline in National Geographic… and a trip to South America. For Lothar Gluck Circus, once the world’s foremost dinosaur attraction, has gone bankrupt. Left behind is a menagerie of avisaurs, centrosaurs, and ankylosaurs, as well as one predatory raptor named Dagger. And now two filmmakers and the circus trainer plan to return the giants to the wild – with Peter and his dad chronicling the odyssey for Geographic. The task seems impossible. Many have died trying to bring beasts out of the Lost World, the plateau of El Grande in Venezuela, but nobody has ever attempted to transport nearly a dozen full-grown, multi-ton prehistoric creatures across continents, down rivers, through jungles, and up a mountain that has been isolated for 70,000,000 years…

The trek will strain the technologies of trains, cargo ships, barges, trucks… en route lurk robbers and hostile, trigger-happy soldiers… and each miles toward freedom excites Dagger toward an unstoppable, primal killing frenzy. When the unthinkable threatens to strand Peter and the rest of the crew in an uncharted realm, four modern Americans will face all the unknown dangers, mysteries, and terrors of El Grande…

My thoughts

Peter Belzoni gets to live out every boy’s dream: He will accompany his father on an adventure to a remote plateau in Venezuela where dinosaurs still roam. It’s a hell of a way to spend summer break.

It turns out that the Lost World discovered by one Professor Challenger is real. But in the 30 or so years since the discovery, things haven’t gone well. The Lost World was exploited for profit, and many of its animals were captured for zoos and circuses. While the public was at first captivated by the live dinosaurs, it soon lost interest as the fad came and went. King Kong, shot with real dinosaurs, was a box-office flop, and the last dinosaur circus is closing down. The owner of the circus, Lothar Gluck, wants to return his dinosaurs to the Lost World, now a protected sanctuary. Peter and his father will accompany the expedition, but after a bad turn of events, they’ll find themselves stranded in the Lost World, where things far more deadly than dinosaurs roam.

Dinosaur Summer is an unofficial sequel to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World from Greg Bear, a writer better known for hard sci-fi. It’s a fun read that’s really meant for younger audiences. The illustrations by Tony DiTerlizzi, while excellent, reinforce that fact. The book is a tribute to the filmmakers that Bear grew up with – stop-motion pioneers Ray Harryhousen and Willis O’Brien, and King Kong creators Merian Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack. In fact, all four have major roles in the novel.

A couple critics have complained that Dinosaur Summer was Bear’s overt attempt to write a novel that would be turned into a movie. And yes, it’s true the book was published while Jurassic Park was still all the rage (although, contrary to the cover blurb, the book doesn’t feature a “raptor,” but rather an allosaurus descendant referred to as a “venator”). I think this novel was a labor of love for Bear, an attempt by the author to recapture part of his childhood. It’s light, breezy entertainment and should be accepted as such.

Trivia

• Unlike in Doyle’s original novel, there are no ape men or Ice Age mammals roaming Bear’s lost world. However, there are several new creatures not known in the fossil record. Bear imagines a lost world where evolution doesn't stand still, so while there are dinosaurs that have changed very little in 65 million years, there are also animals that have evolved no where else, most noticeably the book’s villain, the Stratoraptor,

• The author's web site is http://www.gregbear.com.

• The illustrator, Tony DiTerlizzi, is a well-known children's book illustrator. His web site includes several examples of his work, but nothing from Dinosaur Summer, unfortunately..

• Dinosaur Summer won the first Endeavor Award, a science fiction award for writers from the Pacific Northwest.

Bones of the Earth by Michael Swanwick (2002)

Hardback cover blurb

Paleontologist Richard Leyster has achieved professional nirvana: a position with the Smithsonian Museum plus a groundbreaking dinosaur fossil site he can research, publish on, and learn from for years to come. There is nothing that could lure him away – until a disturbingly secretive stranger named Griffin enters Leyster's office with an ice cooler and a job offer. In the cooler is the head of a freshly killed Stegosaurus.

Griffin has been entrusted with an extraordinary gift, an impossible technology on loan to humanity from unknown beings for an undisclosed purpose. Time travel has become a reality millions of years before it rationally could be. With it, Richard Leyster and his colleagues can make their most cherished fantasy come true. They can study the dinosaurs up close, in their own time and milieu.

Now, suddenly, individual lives can turn back on themselves. People can meet, shake hands, and converse with their younger versions at various crossroads in time. One wrong word, a single misguided act, could be disastrous to the project and to the world. But Griffin must make sure everything that is supposed to happen does happen – no matter who is destined to be hurt... or die.

And then there's Dr. Gertrude Salley – passionate, fearless, and brutally ambitious – a genius rebel in the tight community of "bone men" and women. Alternately both Leyster's and Griffin's chief rival, trusted colleague, despised nemesis, and inscrutable lover at various junctures throughout time, Salley is relentlessly driven to screw with the working mechanisms of natural law, audaciously trespassing in forbidden areas, pushing paradox to the edge no matter what the consequences may be. And, when they concern the largest, most savage creatures that ever lived, the consequences may be terrifying indeed.

My thoughts

Few dinosaur novels came out with as much promotion as Bones of the Earth received when it was released in 2002 (the Jurassic Park novels being an obvious exception). Michael Swanwick already had won the Hugo award in 2000 for his short story, “Scherzo with Tyrannosaur,” which was something of early incarnation of “Bones of the Earth.” The publisher, Eos (a division of HarperCollins), heavily advertised the book though its web site, even allowing web users to e-mail a series of dinosaur-themed short stories to friends and family.

Bones of the Earth lived up to the hype. It’s easily one of the best dinosaur novels ever written. The story focuses on three protagonists: paleontologist Richard Leyster; his occasional lover Gertrude Salley, a woman who doesn’t like playing by the rules; and Griffin, Gertrude’s occasional lover and the man in charge of enforcing the rules. A mysterious race of beings has given humanity the gift of time travel, but there are complications. It turns out changing the past isn't so hard. Griffin’s job is to ensure that history stays history or the gift will be taken away. That’s not so easy, especially when creationist terrorists are determined to prove themselves right at all costs, and when Gertrude has plans of her own.

To give away more would be spoiling the fun of the novel. Bones of the Earth takes a little time to get going. It’s not until about halfway through the book that a story starts to materialize. But it’s a wonderful story, filled with believable characters and intriguing speculation about dinosaur ecology. The prose is a little lazy – sometimes the book reads more like a movie script than a novel. Yet that’s the only shortcoming I can come up with about this excellent work.

Trivia

• The cover art for "Scherzo with Tyrannosaur" (Asimov's Science Fiction, 1999) features the author with his wife.

• A novel excerpt is available at the author's web site: http://www.michaelswanwick.com.

Raptor Red by Robert T. Bakker (1995)

Hardback cover blurb

A pair of fierce but beautiful eyes looks out from the dull green undergrowth. The eyes follow every movement in the great herd of plant-eating dinosaurs that mills around the open meadows, moving back and forth with the rapid scanning of a hunter who is thinking about everything she sees. She is an intelligent killer…

So begins one of the most extraordinary novels you will ever read. The time is 120 million years ago, the place is the plains of prehistoric Utah, and the eyes belong to one of the most unforgettable heroines you will ever meet. Her name is Raptor Red, and she is a female Utahraptor dinosaur.

Raptor Red’s tale begins with tragedy. She and her mate are stalking prey, a giant astrodon feeding in a nearby meadow. They approach silently and attack with deadly force. But at the moment of triumph, something goes terribly wrong and Raptor Red’s mate is killed. It is the beginning of a yearlong odyssey of survival, a thrilling story told by leading paleontologist Robert T. Bakker. Now, in Raptor Red, he dramatizes his revolutionary theories in a one-of-a-kind tale.

Raptor Red strikes out on her own, and before long she has rejoined her sister’s clan. Together they will hunt and devour iguanodons, brave a monstrous storm and the ensuing flash flood, migrate toward the western ocean to escape powerful predators, and eventually move north to a snowy mountain region in a desperate attempt to escape the threat of the deadly acrocanthosaurs.

At the same time, Raptor Red must obey nature’s command to find a new mate. But when a bold and graceful young male presents himself, she is stymied by her conflicting loyalties to her sister’s brood and her own powerful impulses to mate and produce chicks of her own. On a snowy mountaintop in the frozen north, Raptor Red’s search for a new home and a new mate will culminate in a thrilling climax.

Painting a rich and colorful picture of her lush, exotic prehistoric world, the novel is convincingly told from within Raptor Red’s mind, revealing the powerful instincts and Darwinian forces that shape her remarkable consciousness. Her story is filled with a unique cast of characters that includes a white pterodactyl, a giant prehistoric crocodile, a small furry aegialodon, hulking astrodons, and an incredible range of other exotic creatures.

Raptor Red is a completely unique and utterly compelling story of a year in the life of a dinosaur – and is sure to be one of the most talked-about books of the year.

My thoughts

The above cover blurb pretty much gives away the entire plot of the book, so there really isn’t any need to summarize it again. Raptor Red is told from the point of view of a female Utahraptor as she struggles to survive in her early Cretaceous world. Bakker, a famous paleontologist, is aiming for realism so this isn’t Watership Down with talking dinosaurs instead of rabbits. His animals behave more or less like the real thing, although Raptor Red herself comes across as a bit too smart and emotional at times.

One result of Bakker’s approach is that Raptor Red’s story is pretty simple as far as novels go. There are no plot twists or any attempts at grand themes. It’s simply a tale about an animal living in her environment. The exotic nature of the setting keeps the novel from becoming trite after the first few chapters, and Bakker’s quirky sense of humor comes across in several passages.

More than anything, Raptor Red serves as a vehicle for Bakker to give science lessons in a user-friendly format. The paleontologist is well-known for championing the idea of active, warm-blooded dinosaurs. It probably should come as no surprise then that the very first illustration in the novel features Raptor Red on a snowy mountainside, a place you wouldn’t find cold-blooded reptiles. Many of Bakker’s more radical theories are far from universally accepted, but other than in a few places, he doesn’t really delve into them.

Chances are you will still find Raptor Red in the science fiction section of your local bookstore, the paperback sporting a holographic cover. The book has had a remarkable shelf life for a work of paleofiction. It’s worth picking up a copy if you’re a fan of dinosaurs.

Trivia

• There seemed to be a time, not long ago, when every TV dinosaur documentary had to feature at least one interview with Bakker. He is instantly recognizable with his beat-up cowboy hat and his long hair and beard. He also served as the inspiration for the character of Dr. Robert Burke in the movie The Lost World: Jurassic Park. Burke meets a rather nasty end in the jaws of a T. rex in the film.

• The Utahraptor was co-discovered by paleontologist James Kirkland, who has also authored a work of dinosaur fiction. He co-wrote the Star Trek novel First Frontier with Diane Carey.

Return to Eden by Harry Harrison (1988)

Note: This is the final book of the West of Eden trilogy, starting with West of Eden. Spoilers ahead if you haven’t read the first book, reviewed below.

Paperback cover blurb

In West of Eden and Winter in Eden, master novelist Harry Harrison broke new ground with his most ambitious project to date. He brought to vivid life the world as it might have been, where dinosaurs survived, where their intelligent descendants, the Yilane, challenged humans for mastery of the Earth, and where the human Kerrick, a young hunter of the Tanu tribe, grew among the dinosaurs and rose to become their most feared enemy. Working in collaboration with an international team of scientific experts, Harrison created a believable, richly detailed world rivaling Frank Herbert’s Dune and Jean Auels’s The Clan of the Cave Bear in the majesty of its scope and conception.

Now, in Return to Eden, Harrison brings the epic trilogy to a stunning conclusion. After Kerrick rescues his people from the warlike Yilane, they find a safe haven on an island and there begin to rebuild their shattered lives. But with fierce predators stalking the forests, how long can these unarmed human outcasts hope to survive? The small band of humans have no choice but to confront their fate head on. And, of course, Kerrick cannot forget Viante, his implacable Yilane enemy. She’s been cast out from her kind, under sentence of death, but how long will her banishment last? For her strange attraction to Kerrick has turned into a hatred even more powerful than her instincts – an obsession that compels her to hunt down Kerrick and kill him.

My thoughts

Return to Eden is the “threequel” that can be easily skipped without any worries that you have left the story arc started in West of Eden incomplete. Most of the plot threads are resolved in the second book of the series, Winter in Eden. The result is the characters in Return to Eden have nothing to do, and the book lacks any real plot, instead reading like a grossly bloated epilogue of the first two novels. Kerrick, having made the world safe for humanity, now focuses on raising his family and finding a home for his tribe. The Daughters of Life slowly build their peaceful society in the Amazon. And Viante, now an outcast, plots her revenge. These separate storylines are drawn out over a tedious 400 pages, coming together in the end in a whopping anticlimax.

By now the alternate world of the Yilane has lost its charm, and the lack of any real story makes this book a difficult one to read through to the end. The science, which was dated when West of Eden was first published six years previously, was even more dated when Return to Eden hit bookstores. And Harrison seems to have lost interest in the setting he created. The novel feels like it was written mainly to fulfill a contractual obligation to the publisher to turn out a trilogy. Unless you have a burning desire to learn about the ultimate fates of many of the characters to the first two books, there is no reason to pick up Return to Eden.

Trivia

• The entire trilogy was recently republished, although I’ve never had any trouble finding the original books in used bookstores.

• The author’s web site is www.harryharrison.com

Return in Eden has a short Wikipedia entry.

Winter in Eden by Harry Harrison (1986)

Note: This is the second book of the West of Eden trilogy, starting with West of Eden. Spoilers ahead if you haven’t read the first book, reviewed below.

Paperback cover blurb

TWO BOLD CULTURES STRUGGLE FOR SURVIVAL…

WINTER IN EDEN

Harry Harrison, an acknowledged master of imaginative fiction, broke new ground in West of Eden. He brought to vivid life the world as it might have been, where dinosaurs survived, where their intelligent descendants challenged humans for mastery of Earth, where a young hunter named Kerrick grew among the dinosaurs and rose to become their most feared enemy.

Now, the awesome saga continues in Winter in Eden… A new ice age threatens Earth. Facing extinction, the dinosaurs must employ their mastery of biology to swiftly reconquer human territory. Desperately, Kerrick launches an arduous quest to rally a final defense for humankind. With his beloved wife and young son, he heads north to the land of whale hunters, east into the enemy’s stronghold, and south to a fateful reckoning with destiny.

Not since Dune has there been a work of such majestic scope and conception – a monumental epic of passion, courage and triumph.

My thoughts

Winter in Eden starts almost immediately after the events of the first book, with the humans celebrating their victory in driving the Yilane from their shores. Kerrick, however, is troubled with the knowledge that it will be a short-lived celebration. The Yilane will return in full force, and despite their initial success, the Stone Age humans still are no match for the technologically superior reptiles. So Kerrick takes off on a journey to the Yialne homeland, hoping to find some way of single-handedly turning back their invasion.

Meanwhile, the Yilane Vinate is plotting her revenge against Kerrick, and hopes to lead the invasion force that will reclaim the lost territories. And while all this is happening, a group of peace-loving Yilane flee to the Amazon basin, where they seek to found a society radically different from that of the rest of their xenophobic species. Once there, they make a surprising discovery.

Winter in Eden is an entertaining sequel that nonetheless suffers from some of the “been there, done that” syndrome that plagues most sequels. This time, however, the story lets the reader to explore a larger portion of the world Harrison created, allowing the exotic setting to remain fresh. The story itself isn’t as well-paced as the one in the first book, so even though Winter in Eden is 100 pages shorter, it feels like a longer read. And the author had to once again rely on a dues ex machina ending to resolve the desperate situation he put his humans in. Many of the problems with the science in the first book remain in the sequel, although Harrison does introduce some interesting twists in evolution this time around.

Nitpicking aside, Winter in Eden remains a worthy follow-up to West of Eden. Most of the plot threads started in the first book are resolved in the sequel, so even if you never read the third book in the trilogy, you won’t be left feeling the story is incomplete.

Trivia

• The entire trilogy was recently republished, although I’ve never had any trouble finding the original books in used bookstores.

• The author’s web site is www.harryharrison.com

Winter in Eden has a short Wikipedia entry.