blend with the mix of light and shade,
I finished Dinosaur Samurai at lunch today. It was surprisingly good.
First off, as absurd as the title is, it does make sense in a way. See, the basic idea here is that this time machine has exploded and created all of these rifts in time — this is how the humans ended up in the dinosaur world. Earlier novels had mentioned that samurai had come into the dinosaur as well, so this novel takes very little time in getting our heroes, now united, to all visit the samurai world. Of course, once they’re there, the books has almost nothing to do with dinosaurs, but I think they had to keep with the naming scheme. I personally think they should have called it Dinosaurs and Samurai, but that’s just because of my musical taste.
So, the world they enter into isn’t actually feudal japan — it’s some weird alternate history America where the Japanese are making steps toward colonizing the continent, like 15th century America with the Europeans. Our heroes meet up with the Japanese colonizers and with their Native neighbors, get in trouble, escape, and then go back to the dinosaur time, managing to deactivate the portal between the two in the process.
This isn’t literature, but it was a fun book, and I think the addition of Miller as a coauthor really helped here. Miller is known for doing a lot of shared-universe stuff, which means he is good at looking at other peoples stories and picking out interesting details upon which to elaborate. Without his input, I think this series would have just spiraled into a bunch of boring bullshit. Not that I don’t think it will eventually — there are 4 more books to go and there really isn’t much more to be said about this situation. Maybe they’ll surprise me.
Now I’m reading Robert Heinlein’s The Puppet Master; I’ve read it before and it’s a super-great book.