Dinosaur Beach by Keith Laumer
151 pages
Published 1971
Read from April 26 to April 27
Rating: 1.5 out of 5
In my review of The Evolution of Claire, I talked about my tweenage / teenage project of reading every dinosaur book I could get my hands on. Thinking about all those books motivated me to obtain and read The Dechronization of Sam Magruder. It also inspired a vague urge to track down and read all the dinosaur books that I missed as a youth.
This yellowing pulp paperback has been on my shelf for a while. I have no idea when I bought it or how long I've held onto it, unread. I love the aesthetic of pulp paperbacks, namely the delightfully cheesy art on their covers, but I've learned through experience that the stories within them are poorly written, ridiculously plotted, and filled to the brim with the laughable machismo of 20th century culture. Whenever someone, say for example a libertarian man-child who inherited wealth from an Apartheid-era emerald fortune, says they wish science-fiction could be "about" the science-fiction again, this is exactly the sort of book they mean: an absolute trash read without a single recognizable emotion behind it.
The first disappointment: Dinosaur Beach barely involves dinosaurs. Like, at all. I'd never classify it as a dinosaur book.
I kind of expected as much, based on the description on the back cover. At first I thought it would be something akin to Poul Anderson's Time Patrol series, with our broad-chested hero leaping from the Jurassic to ancient Sumeria or something to track down a rogue timesweeper. It begins almost promisingly, with that classic mechanical over-description of small details that back in those days was considered fine spec-fic prose. It was at least readable.
But then there are more disappointments: A villainous time-robot is gay-coded for absolutely no reason at all, our hero's narration dripping with sardonic disdain -- because it's the 1970s, baby! And then our man gets stuck in the Mesozoic with a woman and their only way out is to fuck each other, because what midcentury pulp book is complete without a quick visit to the author's grody wank-bank?
Instead of a fun time-caper, the rest of this slim book gets lost up its own ass with technobabble worthy of Star Trek: Voyager, the technobabbly-est of all Star Treks. The last 30 pages are a hilarious, Dragonball-esque escalation of time-factions. It turns out our manly man isn't an operative from the Fourth Era of timesweeping, as he initially says. Nor is he from the Fifth or Sixth. Our hero turns out to be a machine sent back from a cosmic computer overmind representing the Eighth era of timesweeping, as if that means a single goddamn thing. (So that whole "We must fuck to escape the Jurassic!" bit becomes a whole lot grodier and assault-ier in retrospect.)
If anything, I'm being far too generous with this book's rating. It was mildly entertaining, but the cover art is better by far than the story we got. I'd much rather read about the buxom babe with the laser rifle and her shared glance of longing with the theropod in the background. Oh well.
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