336 pages
Published 2002
Read from April 11 to April 12
Rating: 2.5 out of 5
* Denotes a reread.
When I was a teenager in the late 1990s, I saw Michael Swanwick as my professional nemesis.
See, I had sent out my first short story submissions to the likes of Asimov’s Science Fiction in 1998 or thereabouts; my earliest submissions were mostly dinosaur stories, featuring either time-traveling humans or “nature red in tooth and claw” pieces from a saurian perspective. All of them, justifiably, were rejected. But in 1999 Asimov’s published a cover story by one Michael Swanwick, “Scherzo with Tyrannosaur,” and I (with all my neophyte main character syndrome) was half convinced that Asimov’s had stolen my ideas, given them to Swanwick to polish, and published them to widespread acclaim.
After I had the chance to read “Scherzo with Tyrannosaur” (and particularly its follow-up, “Riding the Giganotosaur”), I was sensible enough to realize that nothing had been stolen or reworked from my amateurish teen fiction. Swanwick produced excellent stories, rich with imaginative twists and conceits. My stories were lukewarm fanfic. But for years afterward I both admired and resented Swanwick’s facility with the dinosaur short story. Swanwick’s short stories were pretty much the only reliably good dinosaur fic I’d ever read, right up until discovering Jennifer Lee Rossman’s wonderful time vortex stories in the last few years. Most other dino stories don’t come close (my own included, until maybe recently).
Bones of the Earth was built up from the basic outline of “Scherzo,” complete with one of its central characters. (And “Scherzo” itself shows up here, partially intact, as chapter six.) Bones was one of the first purchases I snapped up when I was 19 and newly had access to spending cash. I know that I read it in 2002, but I don’t recall much else about it, beyond a vague sense of disappointment.
Rereading it now, I don’t think it compares with Swanwick’s better novels, such as Stations of the Tide or The Iron Dragon’s Daughter. It doesn’t live up to the tidy little premise of “Scherzo,” despite copying that story’s conceit of a time travel bureaucrat who works with and resents his older self (and resents the cold-blooded way the older self preserves the timeline).
Much of it doesn't hold up as a dinosaur novel, either. Most of the book takes place in conference rooms and offices in the near future; dinosaurs and Deep Time add occasional flavor, at best. Even The Evolution of Claire featured almost as much dinosaur action by page count. A chunk of the plot revolves around fundamentalist Christian terrorists, which is painfully timely as we lurch through Swanwick’s then-near-future, but isn’t my first choice for the focus of a dinosaur novel. The overall vibe is bureaucratic technothriller without many thrills. Think Crichton but with better prose, slightly rounder characters, and less cinematic pizazz.
Also, it needs to be said: After all the lovely queer fiction I’ve been reading lately, Swanwick’s hetero boomer vibes were a bit off-putting and antiquated.
On the whole, this book is fine, a solid C or C+. Despite all my above quibbles, a scatter of occasional brilliant moments elevates Bones: possibly the best description of a tyrannosaur I've ever read; one of the better "castaways in time" sequences in fiction; the discovery of an Anthropocene geological horizon ("metamorphic macadam, a roadbed that had been squeezed and twisted by the millions-years-long collision of Africa into Europe") by a time-traveling geologist 50 million years into the future. I do think I liked it more this time around. Not quite level with Swanwick’s best, but amply enjoyable. If only there had been more creative brilliance and fewer conference room scenes.
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