2023 read #74: Dinosaur Planet by Anne McCaffrey.*

Dinosaur Planet by Anne McCaffrey*

202 pages

Published 1978

Read from June 30 to July 2

Rating: 1 out of 5

* Denotes a reread.

I must have read this in, like, uhhh, 2005 or something. I remember nothing about it beyond general dissatisfaction. The dinosaur purist in me sniffed that the dinosaurs were no good; the space opera enthusiast in me found nothing interesting in the planet. So what did that leave? It was enough to keep me from rereading it until now.

Having matured as a reader, I can now report that Dinosaur Planet’s characters, story, politics, and prose are garbage, as well. It reads like a juvenile spaceships-and-jetpacks pulper from before sci-fi’s New Wave, but sapped of any of the fun that might suggest. The writing level is barely above middle-grade, albeit encumbered with acronyms and technobabble. Throw in a lightsaber or some Klingons and you’d be forgiven for thinking this was a tie-in for some mass market IP.

An expedition is sent to survey and exploit an “unexplored” planet on behalf of a rapacious galactic federation, eager to strip-mine new worlds for heavy minerals. Our central heroes are the expedition’s co-leaders: Kai, a blank slate aside from his effortless masculine competence and natural leadership, and Varian, a xenobiologist whose main characteristics are liking animals and being Kai’s attractive young girlfriend. (Oh, and she also states, “Energy is a lot more important than wildlife,” in case you worried the animal-lover might object to the federation’s rapaciousness.) Our antagonists are the expedition’s muscle, big “heavy-worlders” who crave meat, love violence, and whose names, at least, are coded as subcontinental Indian. The stimulation of animal protein and the hunt drive them to fornicate and “revert” to “uncivilized” behaviors, and eventually to mutiny. One of them outright sneers to the co-leaders, “Where would we have fit in your plantation?” It’s distasteful, to put it mildly.

In addition to the dense racist subtext, I think tedium is this book’s final straw. Like, you wouldn’t think a book about galactic explorers finding a planet full of dinosaurs would focus predominantly on ore prospecting and a mutiny with racist undercurrents, yet here we are. We don’t have a proper ground-level dinosaur encounter in the entire book. Not one. No one figures out that these animals are from Earth’s prehistoric past until 75% of the way through. The whole while, Varian and Kai studiously ignore all the signs of the brewing heavy-worlder mutiny, which doesn’t build tension so much as it builds frustration with the narrative. And underpinning everything, of course, is the racism.

It’s a fucking mess. The whole book is a fucking mess. No wonder I never bothered to read the sequel, even though the story here gets chopped off halfway through.