Like to Aurora in the dawn;
I finished Dinosaur World a few nights ago. My sleep schedule has been FUBAR, so I haven’t had a chance to write about it until now.
The book was pretty good — better than I would have thought. It’s actually a sequel of sorts to Bradbury’s A Sound of Thunder, which is a clever and much-parodied story about a group of people taken to going on time safaris, trips where they go back to the prehistoric and kill dinosaurs that would have died anyways. They have to be very careful about not changing anything, lest they muck up the future. One of them steps on a butterfly, and when they all get back to the present, nothing is as they remember. Cue eerie music.
The author here has taken some liberties — he imagines that the two main characters of the short story have actually become mortal enemies over this incident, and have been chasing one another through time ever since, tearing great rift in time itself, and causing things to go wrong all over the place and all over time. 3 youths, Aaron, Jenny and Peter, get caught up in the time rifts and end up in an alternate prehistory, full of sentient dinosaurs. Most of the setup of this novel was, I expect, simply to get these 5 people into this world, as the rest of the books in the series (there are 7 in total) seem to be about sentient dinosaurs. However, the writing and characterizations are good, the plot is interesting, and Leigh seems to know where he’s going with things, so I’m hopeful that the rest of the book will be OK. This one certainly wasn’t bad.
I’m now reading Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man. It’s real good.