Illustrated by Yoan Vezenkov
142 pages
Published 2021
Read February 1
Rating: 2 out of 5
As I've observed numerous times, the landscape of dinosaur fiction is bleak. Only a handful of good examples of dinosaur fiction have ever been written (or put on TV or in theaters, for that matter).
Nothing about the outline of Banjo and Swift is objectionable. It's self-published Raptor Red fan-fiction set in the Late Cretaceous of Australia, little different from the Raptor Red fan-fiction I wrote (but never published) when I was 16. Banjo and Swift, two young Australovenator males, grow up together, then part ways after one of them finds a mate. Swift, the displaced male, ekes out a living in a coastal environment, then wins a mate of his own. Then big brother Banjo comes with his family, somehow drawn across hundreds of kilometers, and just happens to stumble upon Swift's new hunting territory. Rather than a happy reunion, we're treated to a fight between brothers. Life finds a way. Le Du intersperses his narrative with snippets of the science he draws from, which was a nice touch.
I'm a bit of a prose snob, though, and Le Du's writing just didn't do it for me. It's clunky and never pulled me into the narrative, minimal as it was. His Cretaceous ecosystems rarely feel fleshed out; sticking to a sparse fossil record, Le Du populates his forests and coasts with a bare handful of species. I think in general we present-day people tend not to conceptualize how much life there was before farms and industry destroyed the natural world, and that paucity of imagination often crops up in Deep Time narratives despite our best intentions.
I can't bring myself to trash Banjo and Swift, especially when the self-published dino fic alternatives are so much worse. (D.W. Vogel's Horizon Alpha books, anyone?) But I also can't find much to recommend it, unless -- like me -- you have an insatiable itch for new paleontology fiction. At least Yoan Vezenkov's artwork is nice.
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