259 pages
Published 1993
Read from September 7 to September 8
Rating: 1.5 out of 5
This is a sequence of stories narrated by Reginald Rivers, time-traveling big game hunter and guide, a character best known from “A Gun for Dinosaur.” The series was revived at the start of the ’90s thanks to the anthology / coffee table book combo The Ultimate Dinosaur, a strange beast that I’ll be reviewing soon.
Rivers begins with a poem de Camp published in 1968, “Faunas.” It’s possibly a sonnet, definitely rhyming, and about what you’d expect from 1960s sci-fi poetry. I can’t tell if it’s meant as epigraph or part of this collection, but I’ll treat it as part of the collection.
“A Gun for Dinosaur” (1956, revised version published 1993). One of the classic dinosaur safari tales, which I read and reviewed a geological era ago in the Martin H. Greenberg Dinosaurs anthology. Because it’s been almost a decade since I last read it, I went ahead and read it afresh. It’s fine, I guess? All the casual sexism and low-key racism you’d expect from a midcentury de Camp joint. There are more thorough descriptions of guns than of the Cretaceous fauna. But it’s crisply written and goes down with minimal fuss. That's de Camp's main selling-point as an aithor: his baseline is reliably readable and (usually) mildly entertaining.
“The Cayuse” (1993). Almost four decades after writing the original Reginald Rivers tale, de Camp comes back with somehow even more casual racism and sexism, which immediately soured me on this one. The “Cayuse” of the title is a new off-road vehicle (appropriating the name of the people) that Rivers’ new client, an automobile magnate, insists they bring with them into the Cretaceous, resulting in predictable mishaps. Aside from that, and a Parasaurolophus phallus, this story is more of the same, even returning to the same time period as “A Gun for Dinosaur.” Kind of blurs together with the first one. Shrug?
“Crocamander Quest” (1992). I first read this story about three decades ago, in the previously mentioned Ultimate Dinosaur book. On one hand, I always had a soft spot for this story because it’s one of the few time-tourist narratives that takes us before the classic “Age of Dinosaurs”: Reggie and Chandra Aiyar bring their charges to the Triassic, when early dinos were just one burgeoning group of archosaurs among many. On the other hand, this is the tale of their firm’s first and only time safari with a “mixed” company of women and men, which reads just about as badly as you might guess.
“Miocene Romance” (1993). To follow up on that note, here we have a young woman who’s an “animal rights fanatic” stowing away to be a nuisance on a hunt. She ends up seducing the son of the Texas oil magnate bankrolling the trip. I’d had high hopes for this one — how often do you ever read a Cenozoic time safari? — but it was my least favorite so far. So many lecherous comments, so much oozy misogyny, and at one point the n-word gets tossed into the mix. Blech all around.
“The Synthetic Barbarian” (1992). That last piece disgruntled me, and this one — in which Rivers takes two well-heeled ignoramuses to trophy-hunt in the Oligocene — does nothing to improve the vibe. Both clients are quietly racist, and one wants to live his “Viking barbarian” fantasies by bow-hunting brontothere. De Camp adds a pinch of homophobia, because why wouldn’t he?
“The Satanic Illusion” (1992). A smug pair of fundamentalists pay Rivers to hop them through time to help them “disprove” evolution; as is the way of fundies, they refuse to see what’s in front of them and continue to insist on their particular interpretation of Genesis. This story is a slight improvement, in that I’m mad at the characters and not at de Camp. Still, I’d rather just read fun time adventures with neither fundies nor musty weird 20th century bigotry. Is that too much to ask here?
“The Big Splash” (1992). A coterie of scientists hires our guides to take them to the end of the Cretaceous to settle the extinction debate once and for all. This could have been a step up for this book — the terminal Cretaceous extinction is rote material for fiction, but at least it’s straightforward enough to discourage de Camp’s casual bigotry — but of course we can’t have nice things. (The time safari’s head camp boss, a Black man named — wait for it — Beauregard Black, refuses to accompany them on this mission, and de Camp burdens him with an especially Twainian dialect. Ugh.) I’m just speeding through these at this point to get to the end and be done.
“The Mislaid Mastodon” (1993). An indigenous non-profit wants to repopulate modern times with Pleistocene megafauna, and hires Rivers to help capture a mastodon. De Camp gives us the usual ’90s white author treatment of an indigenous character, naming him Norman Blackelk and repeatedly emphasizing the color of his skin at every opportunity. Inevitably, Blackelk gets talked into performing a “ghost dance” in a last-ditch effort to bring a suitable mastodon close to the time chamber. Otherwise this is another unremarkable tale in a book of quite repetitive stories.
“The Honeymoon Dragon” (1993). Oh, hey, with that title, wanna bet which ethnicity de Camp broadly pantomimes in this story? I expected Japanese, but de Camp keeps us on our toes by introducing an indigenous Australian scientist. (If you wondered if Dr. Algernon Mulgaru would bring along a hand-whittled boomerang, he does, because what else would a white author have him do?) This time Rivers and his wife Brenda are the tourists, popping into the Australian Pleistocene via the time chamber newly opened down under. I appreciate some good Diprotodon and Megalania action, but like all too many stories in this collection, the narration barely gives us any immersion in Deep Time.
And that’s that. Overall, disappointing but not especially surprising. Somehow the story published in the 1950s was one of the least casually bigoted entries of the lot.
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