Dinosaurs: Stories by Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov and Many Others, edited by Martin H. Greenberg
295 pages
Published 1996
Read from September 30 to October 7
Rating: ★★ out of 5
I've wanted to read this book for nearly two decades, ever since I saw it in libraries and bookstores during the mid-'90s dinosaur boom. I was desperate for dinosaur fiction then, any dinosaur fiction, and this book was always tantalizingly out of my reach -- I saw it in a used bookstore, once, but didn't have the nerve to ask my father to begrudge three bucks for a book, and I never saw it again, through ensuing years of checking the shelves any chance I could. From the moment I set eyes on it after picking it up from my library's circulation desk, however, I knew I was in trouble. I mean, look at this fucking cover. It's an eyeball. With lens flare. A human eyeball. What does that have to do with dinosaurs? At all? I mean, I guess if you squinted it might resemble the jaw muscle of a theropod or something, but that's hardly clear. If you could only afford the stock art route, why not get the rights to something with a reptilian eyeball, or something with a scaly texture, or some ferns or something -- anything that isn't a human eyeball? That level of not giving a crap deflated my expectations, then ran over them in a truck.
"The Fog Horn" by Ray Bradbury (1951). I guess it was more important to get a story with Bradbury's byline than to make sure it was a good story. This is forgettable postwar pulp, a momentary encounter between a a lighthouse and a vaguely defined sort of plesiosaur-sauropod thing drawn by its foghorn. Bradbury's attempt to belabor pathos from the scene just makes it more awkward and embarrassing. Hard to believe this came from the same period when Bradbury produced "The Million-Year Picnic" and "All Summer in a Day."
"Day of the Hunters" by Isaac Asimov (1950). Ham-fisted ecological cautionary tale featuring an early appearance of the intelligent dinosaur civilization cliche (perhaps not yet a cliche at this point). The "strange inventor drowning his sorrows in liquor decides to tell his tale to the regulars" format is, as it always has been, a huge yawn.
"Dino Trend" by Pat Cadigan (1994). Pointless '90s silliness about fashionable nanotech and body modifications.
"Time's Arrow" by Arthur C. Clarke (1950). As soon as it was clear that top secret physics experiments were ongoing near a dinosaur trackway site, it was obvious how this was going to end. Heck, I even used a similar plot point -- excavators discover a human bone in Cretaceous strata -- in one of my early story attempts, around age 16, and felt pleased by my originality. An okay pulp story, probably would have made more of an impact around its time of publication than it does now.
"Chameleon" by Kristine Kathryn Rusch (1993). Middling, inoffensive urban fantasy, unremarkable except for the interesting idea that museum dinosaurs are receptacles for the unspoken fears, determination, and self-assertion of children, an imaginary costume to don when a kid needs to feel big. I liked that. Which, sad to say, kind of makes this my favorite story in the book so far.
"Shadow of a Change" by Michelle M. Sagara (1993). The problem with dinosaurs in fiction, aside from small clever touches like the museum receptacles in "Chameleon," is that there are only a few things writers know how to do with them, and every last one of those scenarios has been sucked dry. There's your time traveling tourists, hunters, and scientists; there's your ancient aliens and intelligent dinosaurs; there's your lost worlds and cloning experiments and theme parks and dinosaur circuses; there's the way dinos sometimes get tossed into an unrelated story as a background esthetic element; there's the perennial link between dinosaurs and the Old West and all the cliches about cowboys and Indians. And of course there are your "ordinary person turns into a dinosaur" stories. Ray Bradbury penned "Besides a Dinosaur, Whatta Ya Wanna Be When You Grow Up?", for example, and there was the eminently forgettable "Dino Trends" in this very book. Michael Swanwick (naturally) outdid everyone with "Riding the Giganotosaur," rendering further attempts at the subject superfluous. (Imitating Swanwick, and trying to impress a furry I was into at the time, I produced a string of my own efforts around the turn of the millennium, with results no one, thankfully, ever need see.) If you try to forget all that, "Change" isn't bad, a slight rebellion-against-the-workaday-life piece -- I could see it, say, as filler in the late Subterranean magazine. Unlike many '90s stories, it doesn't feel embarrassingly dated. But it isn't all that noteworthy, either, especially in light of all the other stories that stomped and roared down this path, before and since.
"Strata" by Edward Bryant (1980). I like the idea of geological ghosts left over from the Cretaceous period, but this story does nothing with it. I'm kind of amazed at the number of '80s cliches this packs in: the down on his luck man coming home after the death of his Hollywood dreams, the Japanese man who is a cutthroat business wiz, the woman journalist out to bust the evil energy conglomerate, even a passing mention of Ghost Dances and magical natives. There are hints of a better story here, but they're buried like zircons in a Precambrian quartzite, reworked from something long gone.
"Green Brother" by Howard Waldrop (1982). Waldrop earned considerable benefits of the doubt with his story "God's Hooks!", still one of my favorite examples of purely audacious fantasy. The only other story of his I've read was "The Ugly Chickens," which was clever but only an average sci-fi story, in my opinion. All the same I remain optimistic whenever I see a Waldrop story, entirely on the strength of "God's Hooks!" This story, alas, was disappointing, a generic magic Indian story bringing nothing new to the standard "dinosaurs in the Old West" cliche. Perhaps the slight anachronistic tone to the dialogue was fresh at the time.
"Wildcat" by Poul Anderson (1978). Anderson, by contrast, has never impressed me. I enjoyed "Delenda Est" when I was a kid, but even back then I found the rest of Guardians of Time rather disappointing. Anything I've read of his as an adult has reminded me of the earnest, unoriginal stories that comprise the slush pile of any genre magazine, bland tales of Vikings and pastoral heroes firmly in the post-Tolkien mode. "Wildcat," unsurprisingly, is bog-standard blue collar pulp, pitting an no-nonsense man's man against a prissy stereotype of a career bureaucrat, who turns out to be not such a bad egg after all. Anderson's character beats have all the subtlety and finesse of a boy's adventure from the 1930s. The bright-eyed new recruit talks about his girl back home, sings cheerful songs, and gets squished by a dinosaur! Our square-jawed hero hits the bottle and lashes out against the corruption of the future and the futility of the past! Even Anderson's depiction of the Jurassic feels recycled from an earlier pulp era, a fog-bound world of swamps and dull-witted behemoths more suited to black and white serials than to the early years of the warmblooded revolution. It is an okay pulp story, if I'm being generous, but by 1978 sci-fi was capable of so much more.
"Just Like Old Times" by Robert J. Sawyer (1993). Transferring the consciousness of a human observer into a gigantic theropod -- Michael Swanwick did it best in "Riding the Giganotosaur" in 1999. This being the early '90s, however, the transferred consciousness is of course going to be that of a serial killer. The innate silliness and datedness of the premise sinks this story.
"The Last Thunder Horse West of the Mississippi" by S. N. Dyer (1988). The Bone Wars between Edward Cope and O. C. Marsh are a perennial favorite source of dinosaur fiction. There's at least one terrible novel floating around out there with the title Bone Wars, which features robotic dinosaurs and ends in some silly business with a UFO or something. (I read a lot of shitty dinosaur novels as a teen. I am not proud of this.) This story is shallow but entertaining fun, a pulpy romp unhindered by any attempt to feign deep thoughts.
"Hatching Season" by Harry Turtledove (1985). Ah crap, a Turtledove story. There's no way this could be good. And yet... somehow... I don't hate this? It's as banal a "time traveling researcher must survive the Cretaceous" story as could be expected, yet it scratches, just a little bit, that dino adventure itch this whole book has only frustrated up to this point. Like Kraft mac and cheese, it's comforting junk.
"A Gun for Dinosaur" by L. Sprague de Camp (1956). Classic dinosaur hunt story, sturdy and enjoyable mid-century pulp adventure. I've read it before, so I don't have much to say about it now; it's not as if pulp adventures lend themselves to deep subtextual readings or anything, anyway.
"Our Lady of the Sauropods" by Robert Silverberg (1980). What tickled me most about this little story was the line, "After that unfortunate San Diego event with the tyrannosaur it became politically unfeasible to keep [dinosaurs] anywhere on earth" -- a full seventeen years before The Lost World: Jurassic Park. The dinosaurs maintained in an artificial Lagrangian point satellite were reconstructed from fossil DNA, while we're on the subject. And that's just the scene-setting for a tale about telepathic dinosaurs drawing a marooned researcher into metapsychic communion in order to instigate a dinosaurian conquest of the human world -- as clever a development as any I've seen in an "intelligent dinosaur" story.
And there we go. Three new stories I more or less liked -- "Our Lady of the Sauropods," "Hatching Season," "Chameleon" -- plus one story I already knew I liked, "A Gun for Dinosaur." And the rest... eh.
Not worth eighteen years of waiting.
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